TCM seems a little schizophrenic by starting the week with some light-hearted criminal caper films (two with Terry-Thomas, plus Lucille Ball and Red Skelton’s turns as brush salesmen getting embroiled in murder plots) but ending it with some heavyweight crime mellers (Brute Force, A Place in the Sun, Fourteen Hours, A Kiss Before Dying). Still, we do have Jewel Robbery (with William Powell, suave as usual) and Larceny, Inc. (an amiable farce with Edward G.) on Thursday. All in all, an uneven but entertaining schedule.
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March 16th—Monday
7:15 AM—Your Past is Showing (1957)
Bumbling blackmail subjects join forces to do in their tormentor.
Cast: Peter Sellers, Peggy Mount, Shirley Eaton, Terry-Thomas
Dir: Mario Zampi
BW-92 mins, TV-PG
"It was obvious that [Peter Sellers’] acerbic performance as TV personality Sonny MacGregor was the work of a supremely gifted actor. Your Past is Showing‘s minimal plot revolves around a ‘scandal sheet editor’ (Dennis Price) who tells an assortment of famous people that he’ll suppress damaging stories about them if they pay him a few thousand pounds. Sellers’ Sonny is a vicious, two-faced swine, but that’s par for the course in this picture. These people actually deserve to be blackmailed."
[Source: Paul Tatara on TCM Movie Database]
8:45 AM—Too Many Crooks (1958)
When her husband refuses to ransom her, a kidnapped wife takes over the gang.
Cast: George Cole, Terry-Thomas, Brenda De Banzie, Bernard Bresslaw
Dir: Mario Zampi
BW-85 mins, TV-PG
"Ooh, you told the Inspector some whoppers just now, didn’t you sir? Here, s’posing he wanted to meet your missus. You’d have a bit of a job finding the bits, wouldn’t you sir?"
"The narrative opens with a hilariously botched smash-and-grab burglary that introduces the audience to a singularly inept cadre of hoodlums … Too Many Crooks is well-served by the players, with Terry-Thomas in a lead tailored to his talents, exquisitely smarmy when he holds the upper hand, hilarious in his meltdowns as his world collapses around him."
[Source: Jay S. Steinberg on TCM Movie Database]
6:00 PM—The Big Mouth (1967)
A meek bank auditor stands in for a look-alike gangster to uncover a stolen treasure.
Cast: Jerry Lewis, Harold J. Stone, Susan Bay, Buddy Lester
Dir: Jerry Lewis
C-107 mins, TV-G
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March 17th—Tuesday
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March 18th—Wednesday
4:30 PM—The Fuller Brush Girl (1950)
A daffy door-to-door saleswoman blunders into a murder investigation.
Cast: Lucille Ball, Eddie Albert, Carl Benton Reid, Gale Robbins
Dir: Lloyd Bacon
BW-84 mins, TV-G
"The amiable [Eddie] Albert proved a good match for [Lucille] Ball, who performed a series of comic routines tailor-made for her dizzy charms, including a slapstick turn as a switchboard operator and a comic striptease when she’s chased into a burlesque house and has to pretend to be one of the performers."
[Source: Frank Miller on TCM Movie Database]
6:00 PM—The Fuller Brush Man (1948)
A bumbling salesman gets mixed up in murder.
Cast: Red Skelton, Janet Blair, Don McGuire, Hillary Brooke
Dir: S. Sylvan Simon
BW-92 mins, TV-PG
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March 19th—Thursday
9:45 AM—Thirteen Women (1932)
A mysterious woman is involved with the twelve boarding school roommates who treated her like an outsider.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Ricardo Cortez, Jill Esmond, Myrna Loy
Dir: George Archainbaud
BW-60 mins, TV-PG
"Constructed as a suspense thriller, Thirteen Women opens with trapeze artist June Raskob (Mary Duncan) receiving a prediction from Swami Yogodachi (C. Henry Gordon) that her sister May (Harriet Hagman) will die. June’s fears are realized when May falls to her death in their circus act, setting a pattern of unlucky horoscopes for a group of fellow sorority sisters who attended the exclusive St. Albans Seminary."
[Source: Jeff Stafford on TCM Move Database]
11:00 AM—Jewel Robbery (1932)
A jewel thief falls for a tycoon’s wife in Vienna.
Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright
Dir: William Dieterle
BW-68 mins, TV-G
"The public loved to watch these rich people cavort on the screen, deriving great pleasure from their fantasy worlds of wealth and privilege. And [William] Powell had a wry sense of humor and an easy-going yet debonair charm that made him instantly likable in his upper crust roles. In Jewel Robbery, he is perfectly cast as a suave jewel thief operating in Vienna where he masquerades as a fine arts connoisseur."
[Source: Joseph D’Onofrio on TCM Movie Database]
12:15 PM—Pursuit (1935)
The reward in a kidnapping case attracts a variety of desperate characters.
Cast: Chester Morris, Sally Eilers, Scotty Beckett, Henry Travers
Dir: Edwin L. Marin
BW-61 mins, TV-G
1:30 PM—Kind Lady (1935)
A con artist and his criminal colleagues move in on a trusting old lady.
Cast: Aline MacMahon, Basil Rathbone, Mary Carlisle, Frank Albertson
Dir: George B. Seitz
BW-76 mins, TV-G
3:00 PM—Night Must Fall
(1937)
A charming young man worms his way into a wealthy woman’s household, then reveals a deadly secret.
Cast: Merle Tottenham, Kathleen Harrison, Dame May Whitty, Rosalind Russell
Dir: Richard Thorpe
BW-116 mins, TV-PG
"[Robert] Montgomery had seen Welsh-born writer and actor Emlyn Williams’ play, Night Must Fall (1936) in New York, starring Williams himself as the psychopathic killer who carries his latest victim’s head in a hatbox."
[Source: Margarita Landazuri on TCM Movie Database]
5:00 PM—London by Night (1937)
A blackmailer holds the key to several murders.
Cast: George Murphy, Rita Johnson, Virginia Field, Leo G. Carroll
Dir: William Thiele
BW-69 mins, TV-PG
6:15 PM—Larceny, Inc. (1942)
An ex-convict and his gang try to use a luggage store to front a bank robbery, but business keeps getting in the way.
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, Broderick Crawford, Jack Carson
Dir: Lloyd Bacon
BW-95 mins, TV-PG
"Adapted from the Laura and S. J. Perelman Broadway farce The Night Before Christmas, the story casts [Edward G.] Robinson as ‘Pressure’ Maxwell, a convict days away from his release from Sing Sing, who has vowed to go straight. His fairly dense fellow parolee Jug Martin (Broderick Crawford) is ready to go straight as well, and the two make plans to open a dog track. Determined to make a go of it, they pass on the invitation of fellow inmate Leo Dexter (Anthony Quinn) to lay the groundwork for a bank job that he’s anxious to pull upon release. Once back in the real world, however, the two ex-cons receive a shock …"
[Source: Jay S. Steinberg on TCM Movie Database]
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March 20th—Friday
8:00 AM—Number Seventeen (1932)
A detective sets out to recover a necklace lifted by jewel thieves.
Cast: Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, Donald Calthrop, John Stuart
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
BW-61 mins, TV-PG
"Ben Tramp (Leon M. Lion) is a Cockney hobo who keeps his pockets stuffed with food, but is unprepared for the circumstance he finds at an abandoned old house, the Number 17 of the film’s title. There, Ben discovers a man’s corpse, the first in a string of mounting mysteries. As the plot of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Number Seventeen (1932) unspools, more people appear and more complications ensue."
[Source: Felicia Feaster on TCM Movie Database]
8:00 PM—The Long Night (1947)
A veteran tries to free his former love from a sadistic lover.
Cast: Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes, Vincent Price, Ann Dvorak
Dir: Anatole Litvak
BW-97 mins
"A rarely-seen gem of the postwar American cinema, Anatole Litvak’s The Long Night (1947) is equal parts film noir, classical Hollywood romance, and European art film … it stars Henry Fonda as Joe Adams, a World War II veteran who appears to have committed murder in the top floor of the boarding house where he lives. After the police surround the place and fire a volley of bullets through his window, Joe reflects on the events leading up to the killing, and the narrative unfolds in a series of flashbacks."
[Source: Bret Wood on TCM Movie Database]
10:00 PM—Fourteen Hours (1951)
A policeman tries to talk a desperate young man off the ledge of a New York skyscraper.
Cast: Paul Douglas, Richard Basehart, Barbara Bel Geddes, Debra Paget
Dir: Henry Hathaway
BW-92 mins, TV-PG
"’I’m going out of the window,’ John William Warde is alleged to have said to his sister just before noon on a scorching, overcast day in July 1938 … and that’s exactly what he did. Stepping out of a window on the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Gotham in midtown Manhattan, Warde planted his feet on a narrow strip of ledge and remained there for the next fourteen hours. As crowds massed on the street below and psychiatrists, firemen, cops and priests flooded into the hotel to offer help, the delusional 26 year-old agreed to speak to one man: traffic cop Charles Glasco, who passed himself off as a bellboy."
[Source: Richard Harland Smith on TCM Movie Database]
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March 21st—Saturday
10:00 AM—Brute Force (1947)
Tough, disgruntled prisoners plan a daring, possibly bloody escape while on a drain pipe detail.
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, Yvonne De Carlo
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-98 mins, TV-14
"Part film noir and part Hollywood ‘message movie,’ Brute Force is filled with images of extreme, almost psychopathic violence. In the prison workshop, [Burt] Lancaster’s buddies take revenge on a stool pigeon, cornering him with lit blowtorches and pushing him into the giant press. An informer is strapped to the front of a railroad car as it hurtles towards manned machine guns. The prison captain tortures an inmate with a rubber hose while blaring Wagner from the record player."
[Source: Mark Frankel on TCM Movie Database]
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March 22nd—Sunday
6:00 AM—The Roaring Twenties (1939)
Three World War I Army buddies get mixed up with the mob in peacetime.
Cast: James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Gladys George
Dir: Raoul Walsh
BW-107 mins, TV-G
"Incorporating newsreel clips and popular music from the period, and a voiceover by an omniscient reporter who assures the audience that what they are about to see is based on true events, The Roaring Twenties has something of a pseudo-documentary feel."
[Source: Genevieve McGillicuddy on TCM Movie Database]
8:00 AM—Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
Childhood friends on opposite sides of the law fight over the future of a street gang.
Cast: James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan
Dir: Michael Curtiz
BW-97 mins, TV-G
"Cagney’s portrayal of tough guy gangster, Rocky Sullivan, is considered one of his finest performances, if not his best … but Cagney understood this character well and used his own street smarts to fill in character detail. After all, Cagney was raised on the Lower East Side of New York, and held a variety of low paying jobs, including that of a waiter and a poolroom attendant. He also used his former training as a dancer to develop Rocky Sullivan’s personality through distinctive choreographed movements and gestures. According to his autobiography, Cagney by Cagney, the actor revealed that ‘Rocky Sullivan, was in part modeled on a fella I used to see when I was a kid. He was a hophead and a pimp …’"
[Source: Joseph D’Onfrio on TCM Movie Database]
4:15 PM—Niagara (1952)
Honeymooners get mixed up with an obsessive husband and his cheating wife.
Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters, Casey Adams
Dir: Henry Hathaway
C-89 mins, TV-PG
8:00 PM—A Place in the Sun (1951)
An ambitious young man wins an heiress’s heart but has to cope with his former girlfriend’s pregnancy.
Cast: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, Anne Revere
Dir: George Stevens
BW-122 mins, TV-PG
"Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, was based on a real-life murder of a poor, pregnant factory girl by her social-climbing fiance. It had been filmed by Josef Von Sternberg in 1931, starring Sylvia Sidney, Phillips Holmes and Frances Dee. George Stevens’ 1951 version … focused more on the developing romance between the man and the rich girl, and changed the poor girl’s death to an accident, but maintained the psychological motivations and class distinctions of the novel."
[Source: John Miller & Margarita Landazuri on TCM Movie Database]
10:15 PM—A Kiss Before Dying (1956)
A college student tries to get rich quick by wooing two wealthy sisters.
Cast: Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Virginia Leith, Joanne Woodward
Dir: Gerd Oswald
C-95 mins, TV-PG
"… he [Robert Wagner] went a step further and played a cold-blooded psychopathic killer in A Kiss Before Dying. This is the one where he lures his pregnant girlfriend to a lonely rooftop under the guise of a quickie wedding ceremony and then he … Well, you get the idea. He’s just not a very nice boy."
[Source: Jeff Stafford on TCM Movie Database]
—Mike Gray