TCM Schedule for Thursday, June 2, 2022 -- What's On Tonight: Prime Time Theme: Revisionist Westerns

[Staph]

In the daylight hours, TCM is featuring Millionaire Playboys. Then in prime time, it's the beginning of a month of Revisionist Westerns. First up -- Revisionist Classics. Tell us more, Donald!

SPOTLIGHT: REVISIONIST WESTERNS
By Donald Liebenson
May 12, 2022
Thursdays | 26 Movies

This month, TCM spotlights revisionist westerns.

The western, like jazz, is a uniquely American art form. It is practically as old as the movies themselves. Turn of the century audiences were reportedly gripped with as much excitement as terror at the now-iconic moving image of an outlaw firing his gun directly at the camera at the conclusion of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903).

The traditional western, broadly speaking, “tends to uphold the mythic view of American history and western expansionism,” according to Joseph McBride, co-author with Michael Wilmington of the 1974 critical study, John Ford, and author of the 2001 biography Searching for John Ford.

The ethos of the traditional western might best be summed up by the oft-quoted line near the end of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). James Stewart’s lawyer-turned-senator Rance Stoddard has just told a newspaper editor the true story behind the violent act that made his career (and gave this film its title). The editor tears up the story. “This is the west, sir,” he explains. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

This, itself, does has a revisionist bent, McBride said in an email to TCM. Ford’s penultimate western, he observed, “is explicitly about the fabrication of that myth and its hollowness, and it gives a feeling of terrible bleakness about Western ‘progress’ and ‘heroism.’”

The traditional western was in the legend-printing business. The good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black. Cowboy heroes had names like Roy, Gene and Buck, and they palled around with folksy sidekicks with names like Gabby and Smiley. Native-Americans were murderous, scalping savages. There was a “noble western tradition, rugged men who represent the heterosexual ideal,” as Jon Stewart deadpanned when he hosted the Academy Awards in 2008, the year in which Brokeback Mountain (2005) was up for Best Picture.

Revisionist westerns are in the legend-questioning, myth-busting business. As with jazz, a new generation of artists began to subvert the very foundations on which the genre was based. Traditional western conventions—the stuff of Saturday matinees at the local movie theater—were challenged: the good guys weren’t always so good, the bad guys often more likeable than their pursuers and civilization wasn’t always so civilized.

While the traditional western tended to demonize Native-Americans, revisionist westerns, particularly those made during the Vietnam War, used the genre to deal bluntly with the savagery of the ‘taming’ of the frontier. Many of these films, such as Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) valorized Native-Americans.

TCM’s month-long look at revisionist westerns begins on June 2 with one of the most entertaining examples of the subgenre, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Released in the early days of the New Hollywood, it starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the charming and charismatic “two-bit outlaws on the dodge.” Arguably the film’s most radical element is Burt Bacharach’s jaunty Oscar-winning score, which contains the breakout No. 1 hit, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Not exactly “Do Not Forsake Me” from High Noon (1952).

Director George Roy Hill had collaborated with Elmer Bernstein (who composed the iconic score for The Magnificent Seven, 1960) on his previous three films, but forButch, he went with the stylish and sophisticated hitmaker of such songs as “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The Look of Love.”

This was a western made for its rebellious times. “The picture was designed for a contemporary feel,” Hill noted in a documentary about the making of the film. “The characters are modern rather than traditional in approach and temperament, and [William Goldman’s] dialogue…has a very contemporary rhythm and sound to it, and we didn’t want a traditional Western score.”

Enjoy!


6:00 AM -- Bridal Suite (1939)
1h 10m | Comedy | TV-G
A playboy's fiancee sets out to reform her future husband and his flighty mother.
Director: William Thiele
Cast: Annabella, Robert Young, Walter Connolly




7:15 AM -- Please Believe Me (1950)
1h 27m | Romance | TV-PG
Three men pursue a shipboard romance with a woman they think is an heiress.
Director: Norman Taurog
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Robert Walker, Mark Stevens

M-G-M was so pleased with this film's script, it offered Val Lewton a larger budget to be able to replace Deborah Kerr with June Allyson, who was a bigger star at the time. Lewton insisted on keeping Kerr.


8:45 AM -- You For Me (1952)
1h 11m | Comedy | TV-G
A good-hearted nurse gets mixed up with a millionaire who could help her hospital.
Director: Don Weis
Cast: Peter Lawford, Jane Greer, Gig Young

This film was unsuccessful at the box office, resulting in a loss to MGM of $38,000 ($365,000 in 2019) according to studio records.


10:00 AM -- A Yank at Eton (1942)
1h 28m | Drama | TV-G
An American playboy is sent to a British boarding school to learn discipline.
Director: Norman Taurog
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Edmund Gwenn, Ian Hunter

Early in the movie, Little Lord Fauntleroy is brought up. Both Mickey Rooney and Freddie Bartholomew had starred in the 1936 movie version of the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel.


11:30 AM -- The Girl Downstairs (1938)
1h 17m | Romance | TV-G
A European playboy falls for his maid.
Director: Norman Taurog
Cast: Franciska Gaal, Franchot Tone, Walter Connolly

One of only three American films by Franciska Gaal and the only one she made at MGM. Here she reprises her role from the original Catherine the Last (1936) made by Universal in Austria.


1:00 PM -- Millionaire Playboy (1940)
1h 4m | Comedy | TV-G
A young millionaire gets hiccups whenever he kisses a pretty woman.
Director: Leslie Goodwins
Cast: Joe Penner, Linda Hayes, Russ Brown

Mr. Zany's offer of $5,000 to cure Joe would equate to over $90,000 in 2018.


2:15 PM -- You Can't Beat Love (1937)
1h 2m | Comedy | TV-G
An eccentric playboy tries politics only to get mixed up with the mayor's daughter.
Director: Christy Cabanne
Cast: Preston Foster, Joan Fontaine, Herbert Mundin

Based on the story Quintuplets To You, by Olga Moore.


3:30 PM -- Fifth Avenue Girl (1939)
1h 23m | Comedy | TV-G
To annoy his family, a millionaire hires an out-of-work girl to pose as a gold digger.
Director: Gregory La Cava
Cast: Ginger Rogers, Walter Connolly, Verree Teasdale

The original ending of the movie just had Mary Grey leaving the Borden House, walking down Fifth Avenue, but the sneak preview audience complained at what it considered an unhappy ending. So the ending was changed to its current form, which essentially made it more palatable.


5:00 PM -- Brief Moment (1933)
1h 11m | Romance | TV-G
A nightclub singer tries to rehabilitate a wealthy playboy.
Director: David Burton
Cast: Carole Lombard, Gene Raymond, Donald Cook

In an early bit of dialogue, Gene Raymond's character listens to his parents say he shouldn't marry a blues singer, and he replies, "Whom should I marry - Schumann-Heink?," referring to a famous opera singer who had just retired in 1932. Ironically, when Raymond himself married in 1937 his bride was an opera singer as well as a movie star: Jeanette MacDonald.


6:15 PM -- Just This Once (1952)
1h 30m | Comedy | TV-G
A playboy hands control of his dwindling fortune to a pretty girl.
Director: Don Weis
Cast: Janet Leigh, Peter Lawford, Lewis Stone

This film was turned into a graphic novel, Eastern Color's Movie Love #14, published April 1952.



WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: PRIMETIME THEME -- REVISIONIST WESTERNS



8:00 PM -- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
1h 50m | Western | TV-14
Two free-spirited bank robbers flee railroad detectives and head for Bolivia.
Director: George Roy Hill
Cast: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross

Winner of Oscars for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Material Not Previously Published or Produced -- William Goldman, Best Cinematography -- Conrad L. Hall, Best Music, Original Song -- Burt Bacharach (music) and Hal David (lyrics) for the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", and Best Music, Original Score for a Motion Picture (not a Musical) -- Burt Bacharach

Nominee for Oscars for Best Director -- George Roy Hill, Best Sound -- Bill Edmondson and David Dockendorf, and Best Picture

William Goldman first came across the story of Butch Cassidy in the late 1950s and researched it on and off for eight years before sitting down to write the screenplay. He later recalled, "The whole reason I wrote the thing, there is that famous line that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, who was one of my heroes: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' When I read about Cassidy and Longabaugh and the super posse coming after them, that's phenomenal material. They ran to South America and lived there for eight years, and that was what thrilled me: they had a second act. They were more legendary in South America than they had been in the old West. It's a great story. Those two guys and that pretty girl going down to South America and all that stuff. It just seems to me it's a wonderful piece of material." Goldman said he wrote the story as an original screenplay because he did not want to do the research to make it authentic as a novel.


10:00 PM -- McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
2h 1m | Western | TV-MA
An itinerant gambler and a madame become business partners in this off-beat western.
Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Julie Christie

The principal actors interweave their roles with more than 50 extras assigned by Robert Altman to wander around the huge backwoods set near Vancouver for a few days, and then told them to decide the kind of person they would like to be to fit into the town - a barber, a lumberman, a bartender, a housewife, etc. - and go pick out the kind of wardrobe they think their character would wear, and to be that character for the next three months of filming.


12:15 AM -- Bad Company (1972)
1h 33m | Western | TV-MA
Civil War draft dodgers head West to build new lives as outlaws.
Director: Robert Benton
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Barry Brown, Jim Davis

The classic rock band Bad Company named itself after this film. When Paul Rodgers (ex-Free) formed a band with Mick Ralphs (ex Mott the Hoople) in 1973, the first public warm up gigs were in Germany. Just prior to the gig they saw the film. When asked what the band was called, they remembered the poster, and adopted the name.


2:00 AM -- Doc (1971)
1h 35m | Western | TV-PG
Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday deal with personal problems while preparing for the gunfight at the OK Corral.
Director: Frank Perry
Cast: Stacy Keach, Faye Dunaway, Harris Yulin

When Keach tells Yulin, "I wanna leave something behind, Wyatt," he's doing it as a clenched-teeth impression of Kirk Douglas, who played Doc in "Gunfight at the OK Corral."


3:45 AM -- They Came To Rob Las Vegas (1969)
2h 9m | Crime | TV-PG
A casino blackjack dealer plots to hijack and rob an armored car.
Director: Antonio Isasi Isasmendi
Cast: Gary Lockwood, Elke Sommer, Lee J. Cobb

The Las Vegas, Nevada desert scenes were actually shot in the Almerian desert of Spain.