TCM Schedule for Saturday, May 4, 2019 -- The Essentials: Starring Ernest Borgnine

[Staph]

In the daylight hours, TCM has the usual Saturday matinee lineup of films and shorts. In primetime, The Essentials is back! (or should that be The Essentials are back?) Take it away, Roger!

THE ESSENTIALS - SATURDAYS IN MAY

TCM is thrilled to welcome back The Essentials to our lineup, in which a TCM host sits with special guests who have chosen films to be added to our list of "must-sees" for movie lovers. Each Saturday in primetime, this weekly showcase will once again highlight some of the finest movies ever made.

This year's special host for "The Essentials" is the trailblazing producer, director and screenwriter Ava DuVernay, who will join primetime host Ben Mankiewicz to discuss the films she has chosen. DuVernay, who is based in Los Angeles, is a winner of Emmy, BAFTA and Peabody awards.

For her 2012 film Middle of Nowhere, DuVernay earned a Sundance Film Festival award for Directing, and for her 2014 feature Selma, she became the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, as well as the first black female director to be nominated for a Golden Globe. Her 2016 film 13th won an Oscar nomination as Best Documentary Feature.

DuVernay's 2018 fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time, released through Disney, made her the highest-grossing black woman director in American box-office history. She has been active in television for a decade and served as producer and writer on the popular series Queen Sugar. Her miniseries When They See Us is released worldwide on Netflix this month. Here are her choices for "The Essentials":

Marty (1955) is Delbert Mann's highly praised big-screen version of Paddy Chayefsky's touching teleplay about an ordinary Italian-American butcher who lives in the Bronx with his mother. His life gets changed when he meets another lonely soul, a high school teacher named Clara (Betsy Blair). Academy Awards went to the film for Best Picture, to director Mann and screenwriter Chayefsky and to Ernest Borgnine for his sensitive performance as Marty. Also nominated were supporting players Blair and Joe Mantell (as Marty's pal Angie), the film's art direction/set decoration and the black-and-white photography of Joseph LaShelle.

Ashes and Embers (1982), directed by Haile Gerima, is a rarely-seen drama about a troubled black veteran of the Vietnam War (John Anderson) who faces new challenges as he tries to reconnect to urban life. Gerima won a prize for his film at the 1983 Berlin International Film Festival. DuVernay's Array Releasing company acquired the film in 2015 and arranged for a full restoration and its first-ever theatrical release.

Cabin in the Sky (1943) is director Vincente Minnelli's film version of the 1940 all-black Broadway musical about a gambler who comes close to death after being shot and finds agents of the Lord and the Devil struggling for his soul. Eddie "Rochester" Anderson is the gambler, Little Joe; Ethel Waters is his faithful wife, Petunia; and Lena Horne (in her only leading role in an MGM musical) is the temptress Georgia Brown. "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe" was nominated for Best Original Song.

Pather Panchali (1955) is an Indian Bengali-language film that marked the debut of writer-director Satyajit Ray. It is the opening film in the "Apu trilogy" and depicts the early life of the central character Apu (Subir Banerjee), his older sister Durga (Uma Dasgupta) and the hardships their family endures in the village where they live. The film took almost three years to make and is considered a turning point in Indian cinema, becoming one of the first from its country to attract major international attention. It is the winner of numerous national and international awards.

by Roger Fristoe

Enjoy!


6:00 AM -- THE HAUNTING (1963)
A team of psychic investigators moves into a haunted house that destroys all who live there.
Dir: Robert Wise
Cast: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson
BW-112 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

Claire Bloom was intrigued to the play the role of a woman who was attracted to another woman. She said she got along with everyone on the set, except for Julie Harris, who tried everything to avoid her and not talk to her. At the end of the shoot, Harris went over to Bloom's house with a present and explained that the reason she had kept to herself was to stay in character, because Harris' role in the film was that of an outsider that none of the others understand or will listen to. Bloom was happy to hear the real reason behind Harris' behavior, since Bloom stated that she really liked Harris and could not understand what she herself had done wrong to be treated like that by her co-star.


8:00 AM -- MGM CARTOONS: THE CALICO DRAGON (1935)
A little girl reads a story about a dragon; as she falls asleep, her doll rides off on his calico horse through a calico land to do battle with a three-headed singing calico dragon.
Dir: Hugh Harman
BW-8 mins, CC,

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Short Subject, Cartoons -- Rudolf Ising and Hugh Harman

The little girl's dreamland seems to be full of underwear: as the calico knight sets off on his quest, birds are seen nesting in the cups of a brassiere; the "bridge" across the stream is a corset; and the "castle" in which the Calico Dragon lives is a "union suit."

8:10 AM -- DANCING ON THE CEILING (1937)
A young man follows a pretty girl into her office, which turns out to be a musical dentist office.
Dir: Murray Roth
Cast: Mary Jo Mathews, William Irving, Colin Kenny
BW-9 mins,

Included as an extra on the 'Double Wedding' DVD, disc 3 of the 'TCM Spotlight: Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection'.


8:21 AM -- BIG BLUE GOOSE (1956)
In this short film, naturalist Van Campen Heilner travels to the Louisiana bayou country.
Dir: Van Campen Heilner
Cast: Harry Wismer, Pervis Hebert, Raquel Romero Heilner
BW-8 mins,


8:30 AM -- SUNDOWN TRAIL (1931)
A ranch foreman and an Eastern lady inherit a ranch.
Dir: Robert F. Hill
Cast: Tom Keene, Marion Shilling, Nick Stuart
BW-53 mins,

Based on a story by Robert F. Hill.


9:30 AM -- FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE: STARK TREACHERY (1940)
Episode eleven of the Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe serial.
Dir: Ford Beebe, Ray Taylor
Cast: Buster Crabbe, Carol Hughes, Charles Middleton
BW-21 mins, CC,

In the final chapter before his demise, Ming is looking to escape. In the endings of most serial episodes the hero is is the one trying to escape (then thought to be killed - until the next week). This might suggest another sequel or fourth Flash Gordon serial. However, after 7 December 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, just 3 years after Orson Welles' infamous 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast simulating an attack from from outer space, the production of "space travel" films were put on hold.


10:00 AM -- POPEYE: LOST AND FOUNDRY (1937)
Popeye is working in the Useless Manufacturing Company on his lunch break when Olive stops by and Swee'Pea crawls into the factory.
Dir: Dave Fleischer, Seymour Kneitel (uncredited)
Cast: Jack Mercer, Mae Questel
BW-7 mins, CC,

Parts of this toon appear in Doing Impossikible Stunts (1940).


10:09 AM -- THE FALCON'S BROTHER (1942)
A gentlemanly detective calls on his brother to help him stop the Nazis from assassinating a key diplomat.
Dir: Stanley Logan
Cast: George Sanders, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph
BW-63 mins, CC,

Tom Conway (Tom Laurence) was the real life elder brother of George Sanders (Gay Laurence). This film was Sanders' final appearance as "The Falcon," a role of which he had grown tired. Sanders passed the baton to Conway, who played the role in nine subsequent films until 1946.


11:30 AM -- ONCE OVER LIGHTLY (1938)
This short film spoofs college musicals, a genre popular during the 1930s.
Dir: Will Jason
Cast: Johnny Downs, Joe Caits, Billy Gilbert
BW-19 mins,


12:00 PM -- DODGE CITY (1939)
A soldier of fortune takes on the corrupt boss of a Western town.
Dir: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, Ann Sheridan
C-104 mins, CC,

Warner Bros. chartered a special 16-car train that transported at least 36 reporters to Dodge City, KS, for the film's premiere. Along the way an unscheduled stop was made in Pasadena so that Olivia de Havilland could leave the train and report for work on Gone with the Wind (1939). The studio also sent a Technicolor crew to film the premiere, which was attended by Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and over 70,000 visitors that had come to the city to celebrate the premiere.


2:00 PM -- FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
A group of space troopers investigates the destruction of a colony on a remote planet.
Dir: Fred McLeod Wilcox
Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen
C-98 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects -- A. Arnold Gillespie, Irving G. Ries and Wesley C. Miller

This film marked one of the first times a science-fiction project had received a large budget. The genre had rarely been taken seriously by studio executives, and sci-fi films generally received the most meager of budgets. The critical success of this film convinced many in the film industry that well-funded science-fiction projects could be successful. Film historian Ben Mankiewicz has claimed that this film's success made future big-budget science-fiction films possible.


3:45 PM -- THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY (1959)
A hired gun falls for a Texas Ranger's wife.
Dir: Robert Parrish
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Julie London, Gary Merrill
C-98 mins, CC,

Both Henry Fonda and Gregory Peck were first approached to star, but turned down the role. When Robert Mitchum came on board, he also served as producer.


5:30 PM -- THE TRAIN (1964)
French resistance fighters try to stop the Nazis from taking a trainload of art treasures to Germany.
Dir: John Frankenheimer
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau
BW-133 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen -- Franklin Coen and Frank Davis

Burt Lancaster took a day off during shooting to play golf when the shooting was about half completed. On the links, he stepped in a hole and re-aggravated an old knee injury. In order to compensate for the injury, John Frankenheimer had Lancaster's character shot in the leg, thus enabling him to limp through the rest of the shooting.



TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: THE ESSENTIALS: STARRING ERNEST BORGNINE



8:00 PM -- MARTY (1955)
A lonely butcher finds love despite the opposition of his friends and family.
Dir: Delbert Mann
Cast: Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair, Esther Minciotti
BW-90 mins, CC,

Winner of Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Ernest Borgnine, Best Director -- Delbert Mann, Best Writing, Screenplay -- Paddy Chayefsky, and Best Picture

Nominee for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Joe Mantell, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Betsy Blair, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Joseph LaShelle, and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- Ted Haworth, Walter M. Simonds and Robert Priestley

Delbert Mann had no idea who to cast in the lead role, so asked his friend Robert Aldrich. Aldrich immediately suggested Ernest Borgnine. Mann was skeptical, as Borgnine was only known for playing heavies, but Aldrich convinced him. Borgnine regularly says that he owes his career to Robert Aldrich.


10:00 PM -- THE CATERED AFFAIR (1956)
A working-class mother fights to give her daughter a big wedding whether the girl wants it or not.
Dir: Richard Brooks
Cast: Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Debbie Reynolds
BW-94 mins, CC,

Craggy-faced Ernest Borgnine was 39 when this film came out, only 15 years older than his film daughter Debbie Reynolds, who was 24. His wife in the film, Bette Davis, was 48.


12:00 AM -- NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947)
An ambitious carnival worker attempts to scam his way out of the carnival in this brutal noir.
Dir: Edmund Goulding
Cast: Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray
BW-111 mins, CC,

According to Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation, charlatans and grifters in the new age/mystic con would use the phrase "Are you a friend of Stan Carlisle?" or a variation on it to confirm that the person they were talking to was in the same line of business. Stan Carlisle is Tyrone Power's character.


2:00 AM -- PETULIA (1968)
A married doctor falls for the young wife of an abusive rich man.
Dir: Richard Lester
Cast: Julie Christie, George C Scott, Richard Chamberlain
C-105 mins, CC,

Richard Lester had wanted Lee Marvin for the George C Scott part.


4:00 AM -- THE GYPSY MOTHS (1969)
A trio of barnstorming skydivers finds love and heartache at one small-town stop.
Dir: John Frankenheimer
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Gene Hackman
C-107 mins, CC,

Experienced, but amateur skydivers, most with several thousand jumps to their credit, were brought in from California to double for the actors. During one take, an unexpected gust of wind pulled the chute and caused one of the skydivers to be slammed into the ground, breaking his collarbone and dislocating his shoulder. Even though in great pain, he stayed in character and managed to get up and finish the scene. He was retained by Director John Frankenheimer as a consultant.