The September Schedule for TCM

[JackFavell]

Oooh, thanks for mentioning the LaCavas! (It sounds like a type of percussion instrument doesn't it?) I am a big fan of his. Bed of Roses is a favorite.


Also noticed a day of Edward Dmytryk on Tuesday the 4th.

[moira finnie]

As part of the Lauren Bacall Star of the Month, TCM is showing the Graham Greene adaptation, Confidential Agent (1945) tonight. Bacall loathed the film (and her work in it was not her best), but while it is verry slow at times, I like it because of Charles Boyer's weary Spanish agent and his chemistry with 16-year-old Wanda Hendrix, who steals every scene as a Dickensian waif who is the maid of all work in the seedy hotel where Boyer stays. I'm not sure if it was Boyer, the role, or simply dumb luck, but Hendrix is very endearing in a way that she never repeated in her relatively brief career. As a secret agent, Boyer's character seems awfully naive at times, revealing his intentions to some very shady characters, led by the heartless Katina Paxinou, who plays the chatelaine of the residential hotel in London.

Here are the other opportunities to see Lauren Bacall in a better light (all times shown are ET). She's very good in Young Man With a Horn as the discontented wife of Kirk Douglas. It was never going to happen, but isn't it too bad that Bacall never had another chance to play a true villainess (except maybe in Harper, though she wasn't on-screen long enough) to sink her teeth into a good, meaty character?:

8:00 PM
Private Screenings: Lauren Bacall (2005)

9:00 PM
Confidential Agent (1945)

11:15 PM
Young Man With a Horn (1950)

1:15 AM
Bright Leaf (1950)

3:15 AM
Private Screenings: Lauren Bacall (2005)

[JackFavell]

I can't wait for Confidential Agent!

I have to admit, I LOVE watching Kirk get crazy over Lauren Bacall in Young Man with a Horn... I love her character, everything about her, the coldness. Maybe it's me, but I just enjoy the fact that Bacall is the only woman in a Douglas movie NOT to fall for him... except for maybe Stanwyck and that was early on. I like the whole idea of it, and yes, I wish she had had a chance to play a real baddie. She could have been so great! I also love seeing Juano Hernandez in YMWaH under act Kirk off the screen, and Doris Day show him what a musician really is. In fact, the supporting cast is awesome, including Jerome Cowan (yay!) and Hoagy Carmichael (double yay!). These are the reasons I watch the film, I can't bear Kirk himself in it, he's at his loudest and most self centered.

I also would like to see Bright Leaf again, I thought it was not bad some years ago when I last saw it.

Tomorrow at 6 AM ET you can see June Allyson play a teenage psychopathic killer! Well, not quite, but The Secret Heart keeps you guessing about what June is going to do all the way through the picture... Thanks to Moira for cluing me in on this dark psychological film. Later in the Claudette Colbert-fest are It Happened One Night, Cleopatra again -maybe I can NOT fall asleep this time... and Palm Beach Story.

I don't know about anyone else, but I am having a GREAT time watching the Sennett films so far. Tomorrow night, Thursday, at 8 PM ET, another batch of pie throwing hits the screen.

[Sue Sue Applegate]

I agree with you ladies 100%! Bacall definitely had a couple of villanesses in her bag of tricks that were not part of her larger body of work. Can you see her in Double Indemnity? I think she could have pulled off the Madge Rapf role in
Dark Passage if she hadn't been the ingenue/love interest.

[charliechaplinfan]

I'll have to watch Confidential Agent along with you, Lauren Bacall slated it in her biography and it made me avoid it for years but I've discovered that many a maligned movie I've ended up liking. Boyer and Bacall, what's not to like.

[JackFavell]

I watched part of it, and found it murky and uncomfortable, things happen without much reason and there is an unpleasantness about it that is hard to describe. However, I thought the acting was very good with Boyer outstanding. You were right about Wanda Hendrix Moira.

[CineMaven]

THE LOOK.

She certainly had it didn't she? And even in the "Private Screenings" program, I thought she still had "IT!" Her voice, that outfit, and even her little doggie. What a gal! I think she was flirting a little with our Robert O, too. ( And who wouldn't. ) It's a treasure to have her recorded and it'd be even better if TCM could get her to appear at their film festival next year. One thing she said that gave me pause; she didn't want to appear in something called "STALLION ROAD." Oh, if she'd only read Moira's review. She could see what she missed: http://moirasthread.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... -1947.html.

I agree with you ladies 100%! Bacall definitely had a couple of villanesses in her bag of tricks that were not part of her larger body of work. Can you see her in Double Indemnity? I think she could have pulled off the Madge Rapf role in Dark Passage if she hadn't been the ingenue/love interest.

I LOVE Agnes Moorhead in that role, but I agree with you, Sue by Two, I think Bacall would have been a delicious lethal lady. The way she could toss back a pack of matches:


What might have been...

She could toss back a leading man's heart. Of course it'd be worse for the wear...but I doubt if he'd mind. She had all the prerequisites of a lethal lady. And then she'd give him the look and he'd be frozen. She's Medusa.

I have to admit, I LOVE watching Kirk get crazy over Lauren Bacall in Young Man with a Horn...I love her character, everything about her, the coldness. Maybe it's me, but I just enjoy the fact that Bacall is the only woman in a Douglas movie NOT to fall for him... except for maybe Stanwyck and that was early on...

HA!!!! The sadism in your review made me laugh out loud. You reallllly don't like Kirk. ( ) I want to know why boys pick bad girls. It's obvious Bacall's character was confused...with a hint ( ! ) of self-loathing about her. Do men want someone who doesn't want them, do they want someone who thinks they're better than them? Bacall did turn him in and out like a pretzel. Sweet torture. I doubt she'd even be happy with the woman she wound up with, who sort of had the ol' 40's Bacall look. A mirror image.

Tomorrow at 6 AM ET you can see June Allyson play a teenage psychopathic killer!

Yay!! Psychopathic...

Well, not quite...

BAH!! You've dashed my hopes against the rocks!

...but The Secret Heart keeps you guessing about what June is going to do all the way through the picture... Thanks to Moira for cluing me in on this dark psychological film.

When Colbert faints ( at the news of her suicidal alcoholic husband ) the thought passed through my mind that she fainted because the director films her on the right side of her face. I wondered when Colbert, and Pidgeon and Thompson would realize that June was in love with Walter P.? It took them long enough to figure that out. I was hoping she'd jump off the cliff. But no such M-G-M luck. Cured...a happy ending ( bah! ) Allyson did look good and believable, and she does gives it another pathological shot when she does "The Shrike."

Saw Patricia Medina in the background there. She'll get her turn soon. She's stunning.

[JackFavell]

Was Medina pregnant during filming? she was always behind a chair, or in loose pajamas.

you make me laugh, fainting because the director caught her wrong side-- you naughty Maven!

I STILL haven't seen THE SHRIKE yet... I've been waitin for years to catch this movie, just to see Allyson as a horrific shrew.

[moira finnie]

Was Medina pregnant during filming? she was always behind a chair, or in loose pajamas.

I read an interview with Patricia Medina once in which she recalled that she escaped from a long term studio contract by doing what came naturally--gaining a few pounds on her already voluptuous figure. Maybe that is why she was behind the sofa, etc. [I don't think that she had any children].

I agree about the murkiness of Confidential Agent, and kind of wish that Fritz Lang had tackled this movie since he did such a good job on Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear (1944). Unfortunately, Herman Shumlin, a director and producer whose theatrical career was the stuff of legends got the job, (Shumlin's incredible list of theatrical credits can be seen here. The Broadway plays he guided include Inherit the Wind, The Children's Hour, The Corn Is Green, The Male Animal, and Watch on the Rhine, which he also made into a movie). Unfortunately, the demands of movie-making didn't mesh too well with his dramatic skills and the talky and lugubrious Confidential Agent was his last movie as a director.

[JackFavell]

I would have LOVED to see Lang and Boyer team up again, Moira, especially for something like this where the milieu is the whole movie. Lang could have pulled it off beautifully, perhaps even found meaning for the setting.

[Vecchiolarry]

Hi,

I watched "Confidential Agent" last night, since I had nothing else to do.
I curled up with my hot chocolate - and - I liked it!!!!

SPOILERS:
Boyer is a very inept undercover courier and that's the whole premise of the picture - he's a failure.
So different from all the other spy films, where the hero outsmarts everyone and invisibly escapes all the bullets and all the villains.

I didn't understand Lauren Bacall though, who kept saying that she didn't like 'melodrama' and then purposely put herself in the middle of it all....
I just surmised that she really loved Boyer - and what's not to love about dear Charles, confused though he was throughout......

Loved Katina Paxinou. Every time she appeared the dramatic music played in the background. She is Medea, Medusa and Clytemnestra all rolled into one.
When she pushes poor Wanda out the window, her face in closeup is terrifying.
I love a good unapologetic villainess - she could have played Mrs. Danvers and Madge Rapf and screamed her way into Hell with the best of them!!!!!!!

The first time I saw her in a movie, she shoots her own son, Vittorio Gasman, with a rifle, in "The Miracle".... Loved her ever since!!!!
I've never seen her in her Oscar role - that's to be anticipated, I guess...

I enjoyed at the end when she drinks poison and pontificates about the "FOOLS" taking over the world... And, that's happened, hasn't it. Look who's running the Earth now - FOOLS!!!!!!!!!!

Larry

[JackFavell]

Hahahaha! Larry, you are a riot! I found that scene with Katina and Wanda sooooo frightening! Oh my gosh, she was a rat, wasn't she? I like her much better than Blanche Yurka, who could chew the scenery till there was nothing left.

[moira finnie]

If you are Katina Paxinou fans, catch her sometime in the British movie, Uncle Silas (1947). As Jean Simmons' evil governess, she put the Goth in the Victorian Gothic story. In Confidential Agent I thought that Paxinou's character, understandably after all the devastation of the Spanish Civil War on her family, had lost all her beliefs and hopes in the outcome of the war, leading her to become a complete mercenary. However, a stronger director might have kept her tendency to go a wee bit (!) over the top in check. I really liked her in some of her roles, but this one was too weird for me.


Reginald Tate and Jean Simmons with Katina Paxinou cackling away in Uncle Silas.


What an incredibly expressive face!

Thanks for the heads-up about High Barbaree, kingrat.