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TCM Schedule for Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022 -- What's On Tonight: Star of the Month Humphrey Bogart
In the daylight hours of both Wednesday and Thursday, TCM is celebrating National Silent Movie Day! Tell us all about it, Sean! (But quietly and with lots of gestures and bold facial expressions!)NATIONAL SILENT MOVIE DAY
By Sean Axmaker
August 26, 2022
September 28 & 29 | 18 Movies
"We didn't need dialogue. We had faces." – Norma Desmond, Sunset Blvd. (1950)
To the casual viewers, silent movies may seem old fashioned or corny at first glance. And yes, some are, but this reputation developed in part because of neglect. For decades, schools and museums and early home video showed scratchy, poorly preserved prints at wrong projection speeds that made everything look sped up and absurd.
Nothing could be farther from the experiences of moviegoers. In the 1920s, at the peak of Hollywood's Golden Age of filmmaking, movie theaters were dream palaces that showcased the high level of craft at the studios and the richly visual approach to storytelling. At the height of the silent movie era, the cinema delivered glamor, spectacle and comedy with high style.
Thanks to the efforts of film archivists and preservationists and new digital tools available to film restoration, contemporary audiences are getting a chance to experience the glamor and splendor that original audiences saw when they went out to the movies in the 1920s. And as the old adage goes, silent films were never silent. Music accompanied the movies, whether it was a full orchestra playing a score composed for its debut or a solo piano improvising along. The past few decades has seen a renewed interest in silent movie music, from the revival of vintage compositions to brand new scores by contemporary composers paying tribute to the art, and this music helps bring the images alive.
There is a universe of films, genres, moods, sensibilities and styles to be discovered in the thirty-plus years of cinema before the introduction of sound changed the way films were made and experienced, and the 24 hours of programming selected to celebrate National Silent Movie Day embraces a whole world of moviemaking. The line-up encompasses features and short films, comedy and drama, documentary and fiction, live action and animation. There are films from America and Europe, lavish studio productions and scrappy independent films, revered masterpieces of world cinema and newly rediscovered and restored films.
The program opens with a romantic swashbuckler headlined by one of the most celebrated actors of the 1920s. John Barrymore stars as hard-drinking poet, pickpocket and "Vagabond King" François Villon in The Beloved Rogue (1927), a costume spectacle that sends the famed Shakespearean stage dramatist leaping across the roofs of 15th century Paris (recreated on magnificent sets by William Cameron Menzies) and wooing the lovely ward of the King between flagons of wine. This lavish production is the kind of film that made Hollywood's reputation around the world and would be lost, at least for a few years, when sound recording changed the way movies were made.
In her day, Marion Davies was one of the top box-office stars in Hollywood, but her legacy was often overshadowed by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who plucked her from the chorus of the Ziegfeld Follies and made her a big screen leading lady. In fact she was a fine actress with a bright screen presence and a talent for screen comedy, as she shows in Beverly of Graustark (1926), a costume picture that has Davies playing a maiden who impersonates a prince. The film, which features a finale shot in two-strip Technicolor (a sequence that was restored in 2019), was produced for MGM, which became Hollywood's most glamorous studio under the direction of Irving Thalberg, the studio's young head of production. You can learn more about both MGM and its "boy wonder" in the documentary Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood (2005).
According to a study by the Library of Congress from 2013, 75% of the films made before the sound era are presumed lost. That statistic is slowly being chipped away. Along with strides made in preservation and restoration over the decades, films long thought lost are discovered every year, thanks in part to increased communication and collaboration between film archives around the world. Two recent rediscoveries are showcased in this tribute. Ramona (1928), a romantic tragedy that dramatizes the prejudice against and hardships of Native Americans in early Twentieth Century America, stars Mexican-born Dolores Del Rio in the title role. The film was presumed lost for decades until export print was discovered in Europe. After more than eighty years, the film was screened for audiences in 2014 in a restoration created through the collaboration between the Czechoslovak National Film Archive and the Library of Congress.
More recently, The First Degree (1923), a dramatic, dynamic murder mystery from Edward Sedgwick, was considered a lost film when an unmarked print was found in a basement in Peoria, Illinois and donated to Chicago Film Archives. When the archivists identified the print as a lost film, the elements were preserved and film restored and shown at the Chicago Film Archives nearly 100 years after it first screened for American audiences. It makes its broadcast debut on TCM.
Olive Thomas, another former Ziegfeld Follies beauty, was known as "the baby vamp" for her roles as a seductive young thing and for playing Hollywood's first big-screen flapper. Out Yonder (1919) presents Thomas in a different kind of role, playing a lighthouse keeper's daughter who saves the life of a vacationing society matron and falls in love with her son. Thomas was on a path to movie superstardom before her death at the age of 25 from an accidental poisoning. This feature was preserved by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and digitally restored by a silent film enthusiast who raised funds through Kickstarter. It makes its broadcast debut in this series.
If Hollywood was the home of glamor and spectacle and the highest levels of craftsmanship in the 1920s, Europe became known for expressionist adventurism and artistic ambition. A mix of folk tale, tragedy and redemptive melodrama, The Phantom Carriage (1921) is one of the masterpieces of Swedish cinema. Filmmaker Victor Sjöström sculpts haunting images in light and shadow and directs his actors to intimated and nuanced performances. Those qualities impressed the heads of the American film studios, who had a habit of luring talented filmmakers and actors to Hollywood, Sjöström among them. He embraces the possibilities inherent in silent cinema in He Who Gets Slapped (1924), a circus melodrama starring Lon Chaney as a clown who channels his greatest trauma into an absurdist, nightmarish comedy of horrors played out in the center ring to the delight of roaring crowds. Norma Shearer and John Gilbert costar in the film's romantic subplot but they can't compete with Chaney's gift for psychological expressionism or with Sjöström's imagery and visual imagination.
Hollywood was, like most of America, a highly segregated industry and its films rarely featured people of color. But films produced for black audiences, featuring African-American performers and stories and often directed by black directors, were made outside of the Hollywood studios on limited budgets. Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926), the first screen adaptation of the popular temperance novel and play featuring a black cast, stars Charles Gilpin as a husband and father whose life is ruined by drink. Gilpin created the role of Brutus Jones in the original stage production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" and was considered by many as the preeminent African-American actor of the 1920s, yet this is the only feature to showcase his work.
Robert Flaherty has been proclaimed the godfather of documentary filmmaking and Nanook of the North (1922) the first great nonfiction film, even if it is not a true documentary by contemporary standards. Flaherty had every intention of documenting traditional life among the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle but the culture he wanted to show no longer existed. So he undertook the mission of recreating the lost Eskimo culture in scenes staged on location in collaboration with Nanook and his friends and family and filmed with a mix of formal beauty and documentary immediacy. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1989, the first year of the ongoing project, and it screens in honor of its centenary.
Also celebrating its 100th birthday is a very different type of nonfiction filmmaking. Swedish director Benjamin Christensen mixes documentary, horror and fantasy in the visually inventive and thoughtful Haxan (1922), an exploration of mysticism and witchcraft through the ages. One of the most beautiful and visually sophisticated films of its era, it is both playful in its fantasy recreations and harrowing in its exploration of the persecution, sadism and cycle of death created by the hysteria of the age and the hypocrisy of witchfinders who wield their power as a form of oppression and control. Christensen himself plays the Devil with a lascivious, tongue-wagging glee.
Long before Alfred Hitchcock became "the master of suspense," celebrated for such classics as Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960) he learned his craft as a title writer, art director and finally director in the silent film industry of England. Though it's not his first feature, Hitchcock preferred to think of The Lodger (1927), a masterful thriller inspired by the legacy of Jack the Ripper, as the first "Alfred Hitchcock movie." It is here that he first engages with themes he would further explore in his later masterpieces, and applies lessons he learned from German Expressionist cinema to create a heightened reality. Hitch plunges us into the atmosphere of terror in the opening shots, carries us through a studio-created London of eerily lonely streets engulfed in a perpetual nocturnal mist, and builds suspicion around the titular lodger (played by British cabaret superstar Ivor Novello), a mysterious, brooding figure who emerges from the London fog and takes a room in a middle-class home while a serial killer preys upon the neighborhood.
The first exposure for many silent film fans came from the comedy greats, in particular Charlie Chaplin, whose films were beloved around the globe. His short comedies were the most popular films of their time and the Little Tramp was known and loved around the world. Pay Day (1922), featuring Chaplin as a construction laborer who escapes his wife for a night of drinking, is the final two-reel short he made before devoting himself exclusively to features, and it showcases his innovative use of reverse motion photography as well as the distinctive physical slapstick and perfectly-timed visual gags that made him a superstar.
Consider it the short subject before the feature comedy: Grandma’s Boy (1922) featuring Harold Lloyd, the man silent film historian Kevin Brownlow called "the third genius" of American silent comedy. Lloyd specialized in playing both the urban wise guy and the all-American boy but he is much more vulnerable in the sweet, gentle comedy Grandma’s Boy, which he proclaimed decades later was his personal favorite. Completing the program are two shorts featuring Hal Roach's Rascals, the first incarnation of the kids comedy troupe later known as The Little Rascals or Our Gang: The Big Show (1923) and Dogs of War (1923). This series of innocent comedies has the distinction of boasting the rare racially integrated cast in American movies.
Finally, animation is represented with the documentary Before Mickey Mouse: A History of American Animation (1982), which features generous clips from the earliest animated films ever screened for audiences, and the anthology presentations Century of Animation Showcase: 1922 (2022), a snapshot of the state of animated filmmaking 100 years ago.
It's a magnificent introduction to a world of bygone cinema.
By Sean Axmaker
August 26, 2022
September 28 & 29 | 18 Movies
"We didn't need dialogue. We had faces." – Norma Desmond, Sunset Blvd. (1950)
To the casual viewers, silent movies may seem old fashioned or corny at first glance. And yes, some are, but this reputation developed in part because of neglect. For decades, schools and museums and early home video showed scratchy, poorly preserved prints at wrong projection speeds that made everything look sped up and absurd.
Nothing could be farther from the experiences of moviegoers. In the 1920s, at the peak of Hollywood's Golden Age of filmmaking, movie theaters were dream palaces that showcased the high level of craft at the studios and the richly visual approach to storytelling. At the height of the silent movie era, the cinema delivered glamor, spectacle and comedy with high style.
Thanks to the efforts of film archivists and preservationists and new digital tools available to film restoration, contemporary audiences are getting a chance to experience the glamor and splendor that original audiences saw when they went out to the movies in the 1920s. And as the old adage goes, silent films were never silent. Music accompanied the movies, whether it was a full orchestra playing a score composed for its debut or a solo piano improvising along. The past few decades has seen a renewed interest in silent movie music, from the revival of vintage compositions to brand new scores by contemporary composers paying tribute to the art, and this music helps bring the images alive.
There is a universe of films, genres, moods, sensibilities and styles to be discovered in the thirty-plus years of cinema before the introduction of sound changed the way films were made and experienced, and the 24 hours of programming selected to celebrate National Silent Movie Day embraces a whole world of moviemaking. The line-up encompasses features and short films, comedy and drama, documentary and fiction, live action and animation. There are films from America and Europe, lavish studio productions and scrappy independent films, revered masterpieces of world cinema and newly rediscovered and restored films.
The program opens with a romantic swashbuckler headlined by one of the most celebrated actors of the 1920s. John Barrymore stars as hard-drinking poet, pickpocket and "Vagabond King" François Villon in The Beloved Rogue (1927), a costume spectacle that sends the famed Shakespearean stage dramatist leaping across the roofs of 15th century Paris (recreated on magnificent sets by William Cameron Menzies) and wooing the lovely ward of the King between flagons of wine. This lavish production is the kind of film that made Hollywood's reputation around the world and would be lost, at least for a few years, when sound recording changed the way movies were made.
In her day, Marion Davies was one of the top box-office stars in Hollywood, but her legacy was often overshadowed by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who plucked her from the chorus of the Ziegfeld Follies and made her a big screen leading lady. In fact she was a fine actress with a bright screen presence and a talent for screen comedy, as she shows in Beverly of Graustark (1926), a costume picture that has Davies playing a maiden who impersonates a prince. The film, which features a finale shot in two-strip Technicolor (a sequence that was restored in 2019), was produced for MGM, which became Hollywood's most glamorous studio under the direction of Irving Thalberg, the studio's young head of production. You can learn more about both MGM and its "boy wonder" in the documentary Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood (2005).
According to a study by the Library of Congress from 2013, 75% of the films made before the sound era are presumed lost. That statistic is slowly being chipped away. Along with strides made in preservation and restoration over the decades, films long thought lost are discovered every year, thanks in part to increased communication and collaboration between film archives around the world. Two recent rediscoveries are showcased in this tribute. Ramona (1928), a romantic tragedy that dramatizes the prejudice against and hardships of Native Americans in early Twentieth Century America, stars Mexican-born Dolores Del Rio in the title role. The film was presumed lost for decades until export print was discovered in Europe. After more than eighty years, the film was screened for audiences in 2014 in a restoration created through the collaboration between the Czechoslovak National Film Archive and the Library of Congress.
More recently, The First Degree (1923), a dramatic, dynamic murder mystery from Edward Sedgwick, was considered a lost film when an unmarked print was found in a basement in Peoria, Illinois and donated to Chicago Film Archives. When the archivists identified the print as a lost film, the elements were preserved and film restored and shown at the Chicago Film Archives nearly 100 years after it first screened for American audiences. It makes its broadcast debut on TCM.
Olive Thomas, another former Ziegfeld Follies beauty, was known as "the baby vamp" for her roles as a seductive young thing and for playing Hollywood's first big-screen flapper. Out Yonder (1919) presents Thomas in a different kind of role, playing a lighthouse keeper's daughter who saves the life of a vacationing society matron and falls in love with her son. Thomas was on a path to movie superstardom before her death at the age of 25 from an accidental poisoning. This feature was preserved by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and digitally restored by a silent film enthusiast who raised funds through Kickstarter. It makes its broadcast debut in this series.
If Hollywood was the home of glamor and spectacle and the highest levels of craftsmanship in the 1920s, Europe became known for expressionist adventurism and artistic ambition. A mix of folk tale, tragedy and redemptive melodrama, The Phantom Carriage (1921) is one of the masterpieces of Swedish cinema. Filmmaker Victor Sjöström sculpts haunting images in light and shadow and directs his actors to intimated and nuanced performances. Those qualities impressed the heads of the American film studios, who had a habit of luring talented filmmakers and actors to Hollywood, Sjöström among them. He embraces the possibilities inherent in silent cinema in He Who Gets Slapped (1924), a circus melodrama starring Lon Chaney as a clown who channels his greatest trauma into an absurdist, nightmarish comedy of horrors played out in the center ring to the delight of roaring crowds. Norma Shearer and John Gilbert costar in the film's romantic subplot but they can't compete with Chaney's gift for psychological expressionism or with Sjöström's imagery and visual imagination.
Hollywood was, like most of America, a highly segregated industry and its films rarely featured people of color. But films produced for black audiences, featuring African-American performers and stories and often directed by black directors, were made outside of the Hollywood studios on limited budgets. Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926), the first screen adaptation of the popular temperance novel and play featuring a black cast, stars Charles Gilpin as a husband and father whose life is ruined by drink. Gilpin created the role of Brutus Jones in the original stage production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" and was considered by many as the preeminent African-American actor of the 1920s, yet this is the only feature to showcase his work.
Robert Flaherty has been proclaimed the godfather of documentary filmmaking and Nanook of the North (1922) the first great nonfiction film, even if it is not a true documentary by contemporary standards. Flaherty had every intention of documenting traditional life among the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle but the culture he wanted to show no longer existed. So he undertook the mission of recreating the lost Eskimo culture in scenes staged on location in collaboration with Nanook and his friends and family and filmed with a mix of formal beauty and documentary immediacy. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1989, the first year of the ongoing project, and it screens in honor of its centenary.
Also celebrating its 100th birthday is a very different type of nonfiction filmmaking. Swedish director Benjamin Christensen mixes documentary, horror and fantasy in the visually inventive and thoughtful Haxan (1922), an exploration of mysticism and witchcraft through the ages. One of the most beautiful and visually sophisticated films of its era, it is both playful in its fantasy recreations and harrowing in its exploration of the persecution, sadism and cycle of death created by the hysteria of the age and the hypocrisy of witchfinders who wield their power as a form of oppression and control. Christensen himself plays the Devil with a lascivious, tongue-wagging glee.
Long before Alfred Hitchcock became "the master of suspense," celebrated for such classics as Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960) he learned his craft as a title writer, art director and finally director in the silent film industry of England. Though it's not his first feature, Hitchcock preferred to think of The Lodger (1927), a masterful thriller inspired by the legacy of Jack the Ripper, as the first "Alfred Hitchcock movie." It is here that he first engages with themes he would further explore in his later masterpieces, and applies lessons he learned from German Expressionist cinema to create a heightened reality. Hitch plunges us into the atmosphere of terror in the opening shots, carries us through a studio-created London of eerily lonely streets engulfed in a perpetual nocturnal mist, and builds suspicion around the titular lodger (played by British cabaret superstar Ivor Novello), a mysterious, brooding figure who emerges from the London fog and takes a room in a middle-class home while a serial killer preys upon the neighborhood.
The first exposure for many silent film fans came from the comedy greats, in particular Charlie Chaplin, whose films were beloved around the globe. His short comedies were the most popular films of their time and the Little Tramp was known and loved around the world. Pay Day (1922), featuring Chaplin as a construction laborer who escapes his wife for a night of drinking, is the final two-reel short he made before devoting himself exclusively to features, and it showcases his innovative use of reverse motion photography as well as the distinctive physical slapstick and perfectly-timed visual gags that made him a superstar.
Consider it the short subject before the feature comedy: Grandma’s Boy (1922) featuring Harold Lloyd, the man silent film historian Kevin Brownlow called "the third genius" of American silent comedy. Lloyd specialized in playing both the urban wise guy and the all-American boy but he is much more vulnerable in the sweet, gentle comedy Grandma’s Boy, which he proclaimed decades later was his personal favorite. Completing the program are two shorts featuring Hal Roach's Rascals, the first incarnation of the kids comedy troupe later known as The Little Rascals or Our Gang: The Big Show (1923) and Dogs of War (1923). This series of innocent comedies has the distinction of boasting the rare racially integrated cast in American movies.
Finally, animation is represented with the documentary Before Mickey Mouse: A History of American Animation (1982), which features generous clips from the earliest animated films ever screened for audiences, and the anthology presentations Century of Animation Showcase: 1922 (2022), a snapshot of the state of animated filmmaking 100 years ago.
It's a magnificent introduction to a world of bygone cinema.
Then in prime time, it's the last night of Star of the Month Humphrey Bogart, with the theme of King Gangster. Enjoy!
6:30 AM -- Nanook of the North (1922)
50m | Silent | TV-G
This depicts the harsh life of an Eskimo and his family.
Director: Robert Flaherty
Cast: Allakariallak, Alice Nevalinga, Cunayou
While today we think it is unethical to portray staged scenes as documentary footage, Flaherty at the time saw his project as documenting a dying way of life. Allakariallak, who played "Nanook," was really demonstrating how Inuk people had lived in the recent past. So while he had made the shift from harpoons to rifle-hunting in his lifetime, he was still able to demonstrate the older ways of life.
8:00 AM -- Häxan (1922)
1h 46m | Silent | TV-14
Scenes trace the history of witchcraft from the middle ages to the early 20th century.
Director: Benjamin Christensen
Cast: Benjamin Christensen, Maren Pedersen, Elizabeth Christensen
Maria, the weaver (one of the persecuted witches), was played by Maren Pedersen, who director Benjamin Christensen allegedly discovered while she was selling flowers on a street corner. Pedersen claimed that she was the first Red Cross nurse in Denmark. During the shoot, she reportedly turned to Christensen and said, "The Devil is real. I have seen him sitting at my bedside." Christensen was so struck by this confession of modern demonic activity (or at least the belief in modern demonic activity) that he incorporated this anecdote into the film itself.
9:45 AM -- Out Yonder (1919)
58m | Silent
A lightkeeper's daughter and a rich man's son have an ill-fated romance.
Director: Ralph Ince
Cast: Olive Thomas, Huntley Gordon, Mary Coverdale
Based on the play The Girl from Out Yonder by Pauline Phelps and Marion Short c.1906
11:00 AM -- The Phantom Carriage (1921)
1h 46m | Silent | TV-PG
In this silent film, fear of a terrible curse prompts a dying man to try atoning for his sins.
Director: Victor Seastrom
Cast: Victor Seastrom, Hilda Borgstrom, Tore Svennberg
Ingmar Bergman watched this film at least once every summer, either alone or in the company of younger people. He also stated that this film, to him, was once "the film of all films", and that it was a main influence on his own work.
1:00 PM -- The Lodger (1927)
1h 15m | Silent | TV-PG
A family running a boarding house suspects their new tenant is Jack the Ripper.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Ivor Novello, June Trip, Marie Ault
For the opening of this movie, Alfred Hitchcock wanted to show the Avenger's murder victim being dragged out of the Thames River at night with the Charing Cross Bridge in the background, but Scotland Yard refused his request to film at the bridge. Hitchcock repeated his request several times, until Scotland Yard notified him that they would "look the other way" if he could do the filming in one night. Hitchcock quickly sent his cameras and actors out to Charing Cross Bridge to film the scene, but when the rushes came back from the developers, the scene at the bridge was nowhere to be found. Hitchcock and his assistants searched through the prints, but could not find it. Finally, Hitchcock discovered that his cameraman had forgotten to put the lens on the camera before filming the night scene.
3:00 PM -- Pay Day (1922)
21m | Silent | TV-G
In this silent film, a bricklayer and his wife clash over his end-of-the-week partying.
Director: Charles Chaplin
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Phyllis Allen, Edna Purviance
This is Charles Chaplin's final short film.
3:30 PM -- Grandma's Boy (1922)
56m | Silent | TV-G
In this silent film, a young coward thinks a magical charm can make him a hero.
Director: Fred Newmeyer
Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Anna Townsend
Harold Lloyd's first feature-length film. With the exception of A Sailor-Made Man (1921) all of Lloyd's previous films were one- or two-reel shorts. This also was one of the most popular films of 1922.
4:30 PM -- The Big Show (1923)
20m | Silent
The gang creates its own makeshift county fair, highlighted by a "movie," which is really a clever stage performance.
Director: Robert F McGowan
Cast: Joe Cobb, Jackie Condon, Mickey Daniels
The story involves the Rascals performing in a make-believe movie theater where they imitate Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Uncle Tom and the security guard character played by Dick Gilbert. The Chaplin imitation includes a gag repeated from Shoulder Arms (1918) wherein The Little Tramp disguises himself as a tree. The Fairbanks imitation (courtesy of Mickey Daniels) specifically refers to The Three Musketeers (1921). The Lloyd imitation borrows from Grandma's Boy (1922).
5:00 PM -- Dogs of War! (1923)
24m | Silent
The gang wages war using old vegetables as munitions. Later, they ruin a movie in progress when they double-expose the film.
Director: Robert F McGowan
Cast: Hal Roach's Rascals, Joe Cobb, Jackie Condon
Filmed alongside Harold Lloyd's Why Worry? (1923), using the South American town set built for that film, and featuring Lloyd and Jobyna Ralston as themselves.
5:30 PM -- Before Mickey Mouse: A History of American Animation (1982)
58m | Documentary
A mélange of classic cartoons predating Mickey Mouse accompanied by the history of American animation leading up to his creation.
Director: Ronald Schwarz
6:45 PM -- Century of Animation Showcase: 1922 (2022)
1h 15m | Comedy
A documentary exploring a century of innovations in animation, starting in 1922. Featuring groundbreaking shows and industry commentary.
Director: No Director Available
Cast: No Cast Information Available.
WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: PRIMETIME THEME -- STAR OF THE MONTH HUMPHREY BOGART
8:00 PM -- They Drive by Night (1940)
1h 33m | Drama | TV-PG
Truck driving brothers are framed for murder by a lady psycho.
Director: Raoul Walsh
Cast: George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan
The wife of producer Mark Hellinger, Gladys Glad, a former showgirl for Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., was responsible for getting this film made. Hellinger had brought home a large stack of scripts that he was to read for filming consideration. He had leafed through the script and read the summary, but felt that "nobody would pay money to see a bunch of truck drivers". His wife read this script, liked it and pressured Hellinger to read it. Reluctantly, he did, the film eventually got made and became the sleeper hit of the year for Warners. It was made for an estimated $400,000 and grossed more than $4,000,000.
10:00 PM -- Conflict (1945)
1h 26m | Suspense/Mystery | TV-PG
A man murders his wife so he can be free to marry her sister.
Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith, Sydney Greenstreet
Humphrey Bogart initially refused the film until studio head Jack Warner threatened him with suspension. Production was delayed nearly six weeks until Bogart relented.
11:45 PM -- Kid Galahad (1937)
1h 41m | Adventure | TV-PG
A mob-connected trainer grooms a bellhop for the boxing ring.
Director: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart
Remade as The Wagons Roll at Night (1941) with Humphrey Bogart in a circus setting, and with Elvis Presley as Kid Galahad (1962).
1:45 AM -- Bullets or Ballots (1936)
1h 17m | Crime | TV-G
A cop goes undercover to crack an influential crime ring.
Director: William Keighley
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell, Barton Maclane
In the film, it is suggested that Joan Blondell's character got the idea of the numbers racket from her assistant, Nellie. In reality, the numbers racket was pioneered by black gambling racketeers in Harlem. The Nellie character was based on Stephanie "Madame Queen" St. Clair (Nellie scoffs at being called Madam Nellie). As in the film, the numbers racket was eventually taken over by Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano (the Humphrey Bogart and Barton MacLane characters, respectively).
3:15 AM -- The Great O'Malley (1937)
1h 11m | Drama | TV-G
A ruthless cop gets mixed up with a man who's only turned to crime to help his crippled daughter.
Director: William Dieterle
Cast: Pat O'Brien, Sybil Jason, Humphrey Bogart
The name of an Italian woman in an article read aloud is given as Signora Bacciagalupe. This is an Italian-American slang word meaning "moron."
4:30 AM -- Invisible Stripes (1940)
1h 22m | Adventure | TV-G
On his release from prison, a crook tries to stop his brother from following in his footsteps/
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Cast: George Raft, Jane Bryan, William Holden
At one point in this movie, George Raft meets Humphrey Bogart and Lee Patrick leaving a movie theater. The movie that's being shown, prominently advertised, is You Can't Get Away with Murder (1939) starring Bogart.
