Classic Movies on TV

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

A Movie Cornucopia

Let’s begin with a quiz. What do the following folks have in common: David Brinkly, Arlo Guthrie, Fred Gwynne, Earl Hamner, Jr., Jean Kerr, Jake LaMotta, and Carl Orff? Hint: It’s something that they also have in common with me. You can find the answer at the end of this article, but you aren’t going to look ahead, are you?

Since I’ve been writing these reviews, I’ve twice had people say to me that they are glad that I’m the one who has to go to the movies every week. There is a general perception that the megaplexes in which we watch movies today are singularly unpleasant movie-malls, unlike the great movie palaces of yore, such as the truly fabulous Fox Theatre in Atlanta or the terrific Tampa Theatre in some city or other. Another comment I’ve heard a couple of times is that, "I don’t care anything about new movies. I like the old movies that I see on tv."

As we’ve become the most entertained people in history, no aspect of entertainment has changed more than the viewing of movies. When I was a kid, nearby Albany had perhaps three or four screens, and late at night, you might catch on tv a movie that was hardly worth the loss of sleep. Now, multiplexes of ten to twenty screens are commonplace, whole cable channels are dedicated to movies, and videotape and DVD make it possible to own copies of movies which we once would not have had a chance of seeing if we hadn’t lived in New York or Los Angeles.

One of the pioneer all-movie cable channels is AMC, American Movie Classics, truly a movie cornucopia. With movies twenty-four hours a day, ranging across American movie history into the sixties, it is a channel that sooner or later will have something for everyone. A couple of friends tell me that they watch movies only on AMC.

So, to give myself a break from the Friday night traffic jam, I’m sharing with you my overview of AMC’s programming for the month of March. I don’t have any secret contacts at AMC. I just checked their website, website. One of the most interesting aspects of this site is the "Dressing Rooms," which range from fanciful descriptions of what a star’s dressing room might have looked like to anecdotes about the star, from Charley Chaplain to Barbra Streisand. Another interesting aspect is that a week into March, the site proclaims John Wayne as the "February" star of the month. Since of the forty-four John Wayne films to be broadcast in March, fifteen are on AMC, he is indeed the star of the month, even if the month is wrong. But, can a month with fifteen John Wayne films be wrong?

AMC is reserving Wednesday evenings at 8:00 (Eastern) for John Wayne films and is filling the slots with an intriguing assortment. Pittsburgh (on the 10^th and other days) is an interesting failure. How can anyone make a boring film when John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich are the stars? If you are John Wayne (larger than life) or Marlene Dietrich (more glamorous than life), both consummate performers with a smart earthiness or a down-to-earth intelligence, why would any director do much of anything except turn a camera on you and tell you to be yourself? But this heavy-handed bit of capitalist propaganda fails to take advantage of the chemistry of or between these two archetypal stars. (But keep an eye out for their other joint projects, The Spoilers and The Seven Sinners.)

On St. Patrick’s Day, John Wayne is teamed with Donna Reed for Trouble Along the Way, a tale full of humor, action, and sentimentality, three fiefdoms of which Duke was duke. On the 31^st, the month ends with The Fighting Kentuckian, with Wayne in a typical white hat role in a dark horse time of American history. Also on the 17^th, but on TBS and TNT (and on TCM on the 23^rd), you can catch my favorite John Wayne film, The Quiet Man, directed by John Ford, who inspired some of Wayne’s greatest performances, most notably in Stagecoach, which is not just a John Wayne movie but is a great American film (right up there with Citizen Kane) that stars John Wayne. The Quiet Man teams Wayne with Maureen O’Hara, who stood up to him in the later McLintock! matching the humor and insight that endear Wayne to me.

On the 24^th (and, with AMC’s odd programming, on three other days), you can catch a film that is a "John Wayne movie" all the way, North to Alaska, starring, oh, by the way, Stewart Granger. The great television comic Ernie Kovacs appears in one of his few big-screen roles, along with two one-named performers, Capucine (who can be seen twice this month on Turner Classic Movies, in The Pink Panther and Walk on the Wild Side" and Fabian, who plays an inept young man who tries to impress Angel (Capucine) by finishing off two bottles of champagne, and then, "trying to feel his wine and anything else he could get his hands on." North to Alaska is one of those movies that you accept on its own merits, right down to three splendid brawls, the final of which involves a seal, a herd of goats, a mule, a Salvation Army band, and mud that, even though California stood in for Alaska, must have been miserable to get down and dirty in.

This month, AMC is also featuring a weekend series with great leading men, but that’s too easy for them. In any month, they could point out an assortment of movies featuring great leading men. On the 13^th, for instance, Twelve Angry Men presents Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, and E. G. Marshall, followed by Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall, as well as Doris Day, not a leading man, of course.

AMC has such a wealth of offerings every month that it is fun to spot one’s own special series. March brings us two Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor collaborations, for instance, Cleopatra and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As usual, there is a good representation of a genre for which I am a real sucker, the musical. An incomplete listing of AMC’s musical offerings this month includes Gypsy, Flower Drum Song, The King and I (with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner, as well as the talkie Anna and the King of Siam, with Irene Dunn and Rex Harrison), Darling Lili, Finian’s Rainbow (on St. Pat’s Day, natch!), and last but never least, My Fair Lady. You can catch David and Bathsheba, as well as a documentary, Between Heaven and Hell: Hollywood Looks at the Bible.

There is an ongoing Sunday series on great romances (Lombard and Gable, Kelly and her prince, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn). Awkwardly, there is a realtime online chat about Winchester 73 while that film is being shown, involving AMC regular Nick Clooney with Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Scorsese. (By the way, Scorsese will have a much less cozy assignment at the Academy Awards ceremony, when he and Robert DiNiro will present the Academy’s controversial Lifetime Achievement Award to the controversial Elia Kazan).

So, remotes in hand, gentlemen, and ladies, start your television sets! I’ve mentioned before that I like to improvise World Wide Web addresses. I found that http://www.amc.com is the site for Applied Microsystems, a fine company, but not what a film buff needs. AMC is at http://www.amctv.com. You can check Turner Classic Movies at http://www.tcm.turner.com. Three very valuable websites for movie buffs, which I have used for this article, are—

http://www.tv-now.com/stars/starmain/htm – tv schedules for an actor’s films;

http://www.imdb.com – the Internet Movie Data Base;

http://www.eonline.com – great resource for biographies and filmographies.

Now, what you have all been waiting for. The envelope please… and drum roll… The folks in the first paragraph, together with your humble rover and rambler, share the 10^th of July as their birthday, a tidbit you can find in the Internet Movie Data Base. So, whenever your birthday is, however you watch movies, keep your feet dry, and your heart full of thoughts so noble that Duke would approve and Dietrich would sing.