Gloria Grahame -Star of the Month, November

[ElCid]

Gloria Grahame will be featured on TCM on Tuesdays in November. TCM Now Playing has a rather poor opinion of Macao, which will be shown. Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Gloria Grahame, William Bendix are in it. I have always enjoyed it and have a DVD of it. Not a great movie, but entertaining.
Some other good movies of hers are also featured this month.

[jamesjazzguitar]

Gloria Graham will be featured on TCM on Tuesdays in November. TCM Now Playing has a rather poor opinion of Macao, which will be shown. Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Gloria Graham, William Bendix are in it. I have always enjoyed it and have a DVD of it. Not a great movie, but entertaining.
Some other good movies of hers are also featured this month.

I'm interested in what TCM Now Playing had to say about Macao. Yea, Graham is underutilized since the focus is on Russell, but still some Graham is better than no Graham. The director duties by Sternberg were messed up during production but that didn't impact the end product much. This from Wiki:

Sternberg's habit of handling actors "as mere details of décor" elicited strenuous objections from stars Jane Russell and Gloria Grahame such that "the shooting of Macao has become a minor legend." John Baxter reports that "fights on the set" were not uncommon, and were manifested in the "strained" performances of the cast.[6]

During the final stages of filming, director Nicholas Ray was enlisted to perform retakes on a critical fistfight scene between Robert Mitchum and Brad Dexter, because Sternberg's handling was deemed unsatisfactory by producer Alex Gottlieb.

[speedracer5]

I love Gloria Grahame. I think she won her Oscar for the wrong film. She should have won for "The Big Heat," not "The Bad and the Beautiful." She's really great in "In a Lonely Place." I love her in "The Glass Wall" where she doesn't play her typical bad girl femme fatale-type part. I like her in "Human Desire" and feel sorry for her being married to a windbag like Broderick Crawford. I also like her in "Naked Alibi." Gloria looks gorgeous in that film. She also makes a good pairing with Sterling Hayden. I love "Odds Against Tomorrow," though Gloria's part isn't particularly important to the overall plot. She's more there to show how much of a sleaze Robert Ryan's character is.

I'm excited about Gloria Grahame's Star of the Month, thank you, TCM!

[cmovieviewer]

Here is the TCM article on the Gloria Grahame programming this month that I believe ElCid is referring to:

https://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/021848

[laffite]

I love Gloria Grahame. I think she won her Oscar for the wrong film. She should have won for "The Big Heat," not "The Bad and the Beautiful." She's really great in "In a Lonely Place." I love her in "The Glass Wall" where she doesn't play her typical bad girl femme fatale-type part. I like her in "Human Desire" and feel sorry for her being married to a windbag like Broderick Crawford. I also like her in "Naked Alibi." Gloria looks gorgeous in that film. She also makes a good pairing with Sterling Hayden. I love "Odds Against Tomorrow," though Gloria's part isn't particularly important to the overall plot. She's more there to show how much of a sleaze Robert Ryan's character is.

I'm excited about Gloria Grahame's Star of the Month, thank you, TCM!

Thanks for spelling her name correctly.

[jamesjazzguitar]

Here is the TCM article on the Gloria Grahame programming this month that I believe ElCid is referring to:

https://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/021848

Thanks for posting this. I just found out Gloria was married to one of my favorite bit-part actors, Stanley Clements.

As for Marco; I didn't find anything negative related to the final cut of the film. The article just mentions the mess up production by Sternberg and how Ray took over and reshot certain films (but not largely re-shot as indicated).

Anyhow, for those that haven't seen Marco, I recommend it. Mitchum and Russell have great chemistry in this one, and Brad Dexter makes a good villain.

[I Love Melvin]

Gloria was only fourth billed but she got this great pulp-novel-type portrait on the poster for Vincente Minnelli's garish fever dream about the doings at a psychiatric institute. I'd never seen it until TCM started to program it every once in a while and now I never miss it. There's drama with the staff, there's drama with the patients, there's drama at home. Gloria plays the neglected wife of the new head of the institute, Richard Widmark, whose radical ideas put him at odds with other staffers and with the trustees and which take up all his "me" time at home. So Gloria "finds things to do", shall we say, one of which is preempting the planning of new drapes by the inmates by ordering designer drapes more to her personal taste, causing an uproar that precipitates a tempest in a teapot that is not to be believed. To me, Gloria has always seemed to be in her own little bubble of heightened reality, which I mean as a compliment, so she's right at home in this scenario awash with overblown themes. And she looks like a million bucks, even on Widmark's relatively meager salary. I may get blowback for this, but it's a movie you can't possibly take seriously; you just have to strap in and take the giddy thrill ride, and to me Gloria's the star attraction, even in a stew this dense with name actors.

[ElCid]

Here is the TCM article on the Gloria Grahame programming this month that I believe ElCid is referring to:

https://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/021848

Thanks for posting this. I just found out Gloria was married to one of my favorite bit-part actors, Stanley Clements.

As for Marco; I didn't find anything negative related to the final cut of the film. The article just mentions the mess up production by Sternberg and how Ray took over and reshot certain films (but not largely re-shot as indicated).

Anyhow, for those that haven't seen Marco, I recommend it. Mitchum and Russell have great chemistry in this one, and Brad Dexter makes a good villain.

The article also mentioned that Grahame, Mitchum and Russell did not really wish to be in it. Mitchum and Russell are in His Kind of Woman, which is another mystery/crime movie from the period. Not exactly the same, but does have a similar "aura" to it.

[Hibi]

Don't miss Gloria Grahame in NOT AS A STRANGER, to be shown tomorrow. If this were shown back to back with THE COBWEB, it would be a double dose of Bad Movies We Love heaven. This movie takes itself very seriously. You, however, probably will not. Get ready for some strange casting (who can we cast as a medical student? why, Frank Sinatra!) and some Min-ne-so-ta accents. And, of course, the famous stallion and mare scene which is so heavily symbolic of you-know-what.

And a blonde haired Olivia!

[Hibi]

Gloria was only fourth billed but she got this great pulp-novel-type portrait on the poster for Vincente Minnelli's garish fever dream about the doings at a psychiatric institute. I'd never seen it until TCM started to program it every once in a while and now I never miss it. There's drama with the staff, there's drama with the patients, there's drama at home. Gloria plays the neglected wife of the new head of the institute, Richard Widmark, whose radical ideas put him at odds with other staffers and with the trustees and which take up all his "me" time at home. So Gloria "finds things to do", shall we say, one of which is preempting the planning of new drapes by the inmates by ordering designer drapes more to her personal taste, causing an uproar that precipitates a tempest in a teapot that is not to be believed. To me, Gloria has always seemed to be in her own little bubble of heightened reality, which I mean as a compliment, so she's right at home in this scenario awash with overblown themes. And she looks like a million bucks, even on Widmark's relatively meager salary. I may get blowback for this, but it's a movie you can't possibly take seriously; you just have to strap in and take the giddy thrill ride, and to me Gloria's the star attraction, even in a stew this dense with name actors.

Poor Lillian Gish! Just about her characters whole reason for being in this story is fretting about those damn drapes!!!

[jamesjazzguitar]

She's lucky it wasn't curtains for her career!

Doesn't that poster picture look more like Tina Louise than Gloria Graham?

[jimimac71]

I've been disappointed with November and ready for December.
Christmas in Connecticut can't come to soon.

[jamesjazzguitar]

I loved November programming so far. That is because I saw a few Grahame films I have never seen before.