TCM Schedule for Thursday, August 29, 2019 -- Summer Under the Stars: Paul Lukas

[Staph]

Today's star is Paul Lukas. From her TCM biography:

Star of the Hungarian stage who appeared in a number of Max Reinhardt productions before arriving in the US in 1927 and establishing himself as one of Hollywood's favorite suave European types. For a time in the early 1930s the dapper, mustachioed Lukas was a romantic lead of films including "Strictly Dishonorable" (1931), "Little Women" (1933), "By Candlelight" (1933), and "The Fountain" (1934). He did, however, have more than a touch of the roue about him, which manifested itself in "Affairs of a Gentleman" (1934) and in his splendid supporting performance as one of the heroine's illicit romances in William Wyler's "Dodsworth" (1936).

Alfred Hitchcock's delightful suspenser "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) found Lukas playing an outright, though still sneaky, villain, and he played a number of unsympathetic roles in wartime films, memorably as Hedy Lamarr's dangerous husband in "Experiment Perilous" (1944). The most notably exception to Lukas's roles during this period was his fine Oscar-winning lead performance (recreating his stage role) as a heroic resistance fighter in the well-intentioned but stodgy "Watch on the Rhine" (1943). During his later years Lukas played a number of gentler roles, keeping busy in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1954, as Prof. Aronnax) and "Tender Is the Night" (1962), but the gentlemanly if sometimes deceptive Continental suavity which was always his trademark never left him.

Enjoy!

(Sorry once again for the delay. I just got out of the hospital last evening and was just too tired to post anything.)



6:00 AM -- STRICTLY DISHONORABLE (1931)
An Italian opera star falls for a southern belle who's already engaged.
Dir: John M. Stahl
Cast: Paul Lukas, Sidney Fox, Lewis Stone
BW-91 mins,

Universal paid $125,000 for the rights to the play, the highest amount for a literary property ever paid at the time (tied with RKO's purchase of the rights to Cimarron (1931)).


8:00 AM -- DOWNSTAIRS (1932)
An evil chauffeur seduces and blackmails his way through high society.
Dir: Monta Bell
Cast: John Gilbert, Paul Lukas, Virginia Bruce
BW-78 mins, CC,

John Gilbert did everything he could get away with in this film to subvert his "great lover" image from silent films. He trims his nose hairs and wipes his hands on his pants. He belches loudly in mid-sentence. He allows the cook to wipe flour off his butt after he has sat on the counter. He's also a liar and a blackmailer. He also steals a diamond clip and presents it as a gift.


9:30 AM -- I FOUND STELLA PARISH (1935)
An actress stops at nothing to protect her daughter from her shady past.
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
Cast: Kay Francis, Ian Hunter, Paul Lukas
BW-85 mins, CC,

There was a widely held belief that young man in a wig and period costume appearing in a scene with Kay Francis in "I Found Stella Parish" was a young Errol Flynn. As reported by Rudy Behlmer in the March 1970 issue of "Films in Review" the writer and his collaborators, Clifford McCarthy and Tony Thomas concluded that the Flynn lookalike is actually Ralph Bushman (a.k.a. Francis X. Bushman Jr.)


11:00 AM -- THE CASINO MURDER CASE (1935)
Society sleuth Philo Vance takes on a series of murders at an aging dowager's mansion.
Dir: Edwin L. Marin
Cast: Paul Lukas, Alison Skipworth, Donald Cook
BW-82 mins, CC,

Ninth film in the "Philo Vance" series that began with The Canary Murder Case (1929). The novels by S.S. Van Dine were extremely popular and studios bade for the film rights to each one, making the author very wealthy at the time.


12:30 PM -- CAPTAIN FURY (1939)
An Irish convict escapes an Australian prison to organize a revolution.
Dir: Hal Roach
Cast: Brian Aherne, Victor McLaglen, Paul Lukas
BW-92 mins, CC,

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Art Direction -- Charles D. Hall

"Captain Fury" was Marvin Hatley's last film as music director of the Hal Roach Studios (1930-1939). While recording the soundtrack he noticed copying errors in the score for one cue and asked an assistant to fix them before they continued with the session. Frank Ross, a new associate producer on the Roach lot, calculated the cost of 65 musicians waiting 15 minutes while being paid $10 an hour, and promptly reported Hatley's "inefficiency" to the executive board. The composer's contract was terminated soon afterwards. Ironically, Roach had to hire several people to fulfill all of Hatley's former duties. At the insistence of Stan Laurel, Hatley returned to write scores for "A Chump at Oxford" (1940) and "Saps at Sea" (1940), the final Laurel & Hardy features produced by Roach.


2:30 PM -- CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1939)
An FBI agent risks his life to infiltrate Nazi sympathizers in the U.S.
Dir: Anatole Litvak
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Francis Lederer, George Sanders
BW-104 mins, CC,

According to the article "Hollywood Goes to War" by Colin Shindler in the film history tome "The Movie", "Warner Brothers, who had made the one explicitly anti-Nazi film of the [US] pre-war period (1939, Confessions of a Nazi Spy) were unofficially told by the [US] government not to make any more such pictures. In April 1940 the news filtered back to Hollywood that several Polish exhibitors who had shown "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" had been hanged in the foyers of their own cinemas."


4:30 PM -- UNCERTAIN GLORY (1944)
A French playboy gets serious when his country is threatened during World War II.
Dir: Raoul Walsh
Cast: Errol Flynn, Paul Lukas, Lucille Watson
BW-102 mins, CC,

Errol Flynn was criticized for playing heroes in World War II movies. Tony Thomas in his book 'Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was' states that Flynn had tried to enlist in every branch of any armed services he could but was rejected as unfit for service on the grounds of his health. Flynn had a heart condition, tuberculosis, malaria and a back problem. Flynn felt he could contribute to America's war effort by appearing in such films as Edge of Darkness (1943); Northern Pursuit (1943); Dive Bomber (1941), Objective, Burma! (1945), and Uncertain Glory (1944). Reportedly, Flynn was at his most professional and co-operative he ever was whilst working on Second World War movies. The studios apparently did not diffuse the criticism of Flynn's state-of-health as they wished to keep it quiet for fear of his box-office draw waning.


6:30 PM -- DEADLINE AT DAWN (1946)
An aspiring actress risks her life to clear a sailor charged with murder.
Dir: Harold Clurman
Cast: Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas, Bill Williams
BW-83 mins, CC,

The only film directed by legendary stage director Harold Clurman.



TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS: PAUL LUKAS



8:00 PM -- WATCH ON THE RHINE (1943)
Nazi agents pursue a German freedom-fighter and his family to Washington.
Dir: Herman Shumlin
Cast: Bette Davis, Paul Lukas, Geraldine Fitzgerald
BW-112 mins, CC,

Winner of an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Paul Lukas

Nominee for Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Lucile Watson, Best Writing, Screenplay -- Dashiell Hammett, and Best Picture

Producer Hal B. Wallis originally wanted Charles Boyer for the male lead before deciding that Boyer's French accent would prove counter-productive. Instead, he went with Paul Lukas who had originated the role on Broadway.


10:00 PM -- THE LADY VANISHES (1938)
A young woman on vacation triggers an international incident when she tries to track an elderly friend who has disappeared.
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas
BW-96 mins, CC,

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Sir Alfred Hitchcock revealed that this movie was inspired by a legend of an Englishwoman who went with her daughter to the Palace Hotel in Paris in the 1880s, at the time of the Great Exposition: "The woman was taken sick and they sent the girl across Paris to get some medicine in a horse-vehicle, so it took about four hours. When she came back she asked, 'How's my mother?' 'What mother?' 'My mother. She's here, she's in her room. Room 22.' They go up there. Different room, different wallpaper, everything. And the payoff of the whole story is, so the legend goes, that the woman had bubonic plague and they dared not let anybody know she died, otherwise all of Paris would have emptied." The urban legend, known as the Vanishing Hotel Room, also formed the basis of one segment of the German portmanteau movie Eerie Tales (1919), So Long at the Fair (1950) (in which the missing person was the young woman's brother as opposed to her mother) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) season one, episode five, "Into Thin Air", starring Hitchcock's daughter Patricia Hitchcock.


12:00 AM -- EXPERIMENT PERILOUS (1944)
A small-town doctor tries to help a beautiful woman with a deranged husband.
Dir: Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Brent, Paul Lukas
BW-91 mins, CC,

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White -- Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey, Darrell Silvera and Claude E. Carpenter

When Hunt is about to meet Nick (Paul Lukas) he encounters a row of aquariums. He comments to his companion, Clag, "Looks like something out of Jules Verne". In 1954, Paul Lukas would play Professor Aronnax in Disney's, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)."


2:00 AM -- THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1935)
Alexandre Dumas's classic swashbuckler about a young guardsman fighting for the queen's honor.
Dir: Rowland V. Lee
Cast: Walter Abel, Paul Lukas, Margot Grahame
BW-96 mins, CC,

Nigel De Brulier had already played Cardinal Richelieu in the 1921 film The Three Musketeers (1921) as well as the 1929 film The Iron Mask (1929). In addition, he also played Richelieu in the 1939 film The Man in the Iron Mask (1939).


4:00 AM -- LITTLE WOMEN (1933)
The four March sisters fight to keep their family together and find love while their father is off fighting the Civil War.
Dir: George Cukor
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Paul Lukas
BW-115 mins, CC,

Winner of an Oscar for Best Writing, Adaptation -- Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason

Nominee for Oscars for Best Director -- George Cukor, and Best Picture

Of all the many movie and TV adaptations of this source material, this one is widely believed to be the best, in large part due to Katharine Hepburn's spirited interpretation of the tomboyish Jo March.