TCM Schedule for Thursday, December 24 -- Bob's Christmas Eve Picks

Today's films feature all kinds of families, those related by blood and those related by circumstance. Tonight we get Robert Osborne's choice of Christmas pictures. Enjoy!


6:00am -- MGM Parade Show #15 (1955)
George Murphy hosts a special Christmas show featuring Judy Garland performing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in a clip from "Meet Me in St. Louis."
Cast: Judy Garland, Reginald Owen, Gene Lockhart
BW-26 mins, TV-G

Other highlights include clips from A Christmas Carol (1938), and Kismet (1955) ("Stranger in Paradise").


6:27am -- One Reel Wonders: Holiday Greetings 1941 With Lewis Stone (1941)
A Christmas greeting from Lewis Stone, sent specially to servicemen overseas and their families during the 1941 holiday season.
Cast: Lewis Stone
BW-2 mins

Lewis Stone had a lifetime contract with MGM and appears in the Guiness Book Of World Records as "Artist With The Longest Contract To One Studio." He signed with MGM in 1924 at the very start of MGM and remained with them as a contract player until his death in 1953. A total of 29 years.


6:30am -- Blossoms In The Dust (1941)
True-life story of Edna Gladney, who fought for orphans' rights in Texas.
Cast: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Felix Bressart, Marsha Hunt
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
C-99 mins, TV-G

Won an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Color -- Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary and Edwin B. Willis

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Greer Garson, Best Cinematography, Color -- Karl Freund and W. Howard Greene, and Best Picture

Gladney successfully lobbied the Texas legislature to take the word "illegitimate" off birth certificates and to ensure adopted children the same inheritance rights of other children.


8:15am -- 3 Godfathers (1948)
Three outlaws on the run risk their freedom and their lives to return a newborn to civilization.
Cast: John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, Harry Carey Jr., Ward Bond
Dir: John Ford
C-106 mins, TV-G

This is a remake of the silent film The Three Godfathers (1916), which starred Ford's long-time friend Harry Carey. When Carey died in 1947, Ford decided to remake the story in Technicolor and dedicate the film to his memory. Carey's son, Harry Carey Jr., plays one of the three, "The Abilene Kid".


10:15am -- The Great Rupert (1950)
A squirrel becomes the guardian angel for an impoverished family.
Cast: Jimmy Durante, Terry Moore, Tom Drake, Frank Orth
Dir: Irving Pichel
BW-88 mins, TV-G

The stop-motion animation used in creating the illusion of a dancing squirrel (Rupert) was so realistic that director George Pal received many inquiries as to where he got a squirrel that was trained to dance.


11:45am -- Bundle Of Joy (1956)
A shop girl is mistaken for the mother of a foundling.
Cast: Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, Adolphe Menjou, Tommy Noonan
Dir: Norman Taurog
C-98 mins, TV-PG

Remake of Austrian/Hungarian film Kliene Mutti (1935) and Bachelor Mother (1939) with Ginger Rogers and David Niven in the Reynolds and Fisher roles.


1:30pm -- All Mine to Give (1957)
Pioneer children fight to build a new family after their parents die.
Cast: Glynis Johns, Cameron Mitchell, Rex Thompson, Patty McCormack
Dir: Allen Reisner
C-102 mins, TV-G

Known in the UK as The Day They Gave Babies Away.


3:16pm -- One Reel Wonders: Mario Lanza Christmas Trailer (Avé Maria) (1951)
BW-3 mins

A minor uproar once resulted when Lanza went on an early '50s TV show and lip-synched to one of his hit songs rather than singing live. This was not done in the early days of TV.


3:30pm -- Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
A good-hearted gangster turns an old apple seller into a society matron so she can impress her daughter.
Cast: Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, Hope Lange, Arthur O'Connell
Dir: Frank Capra
C-137 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Peter Falk, Best Costume Design, Color -- Edith Head and Walter Plunkett, and Best Music, Original Song -- Jimmy Van Heusen (music) and Sammy Cahn (lyrics) for the song "Pocketful of Miracles"

The final film of actor Thomas Mitchell and director Frank Capra.


6:00pm -- Period Of Adjustment (1962)
A newlywed couple's honeymoon is disrupted by their friends' marital problems.
Cast: Tony Franciosa, Jane Fonda, Jim Hutton, Lois Nettleton
Dir: George Roy Hill
BW-112 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- George W. Davis, Edward C. Carfagno, Henry Grace and Richard Pefferle

The original Broadway production of "Period of Adjustment" by Tennessee Williams opened at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York on November 10, 1960 and ran for 132 performances.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: BOB'S CHRISTMAS EVE PICKS


8:00pm -- Remember the Night (1940)
An assistant D.A. takes a shoplifter home with him for Christmas.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson
Dir: Mitchell Leisen
BW-94 mins, TV-G

The first of four movies starring Stanwyck and MacMurray. The others were Double Indemnity (1944), The Moonlighter (1953), and There's Always Tomorrow (1956).


9:45pm -- Christmas In July (1940)
An unemployed dreamer thinks he's won a big radio contest.
Cast: Dick Powell, Ellen Drew, Raymond Walburn, Alexander Carr
Dir: Preston Sturges
BW-67 mins, TV-G

This film was based on a play called "A Cup of Coffee" which Preston Sturges wrote in the summer of 1931. The play also features a character named Jimmy MacDonald who works for a coffee company and enters a contest for a rival company with the slogan "If you can't sleep at night it isn't the coffee, it's the bunk." Much of the play's plot and supporting characters were changed for the film, but the dialogue between Jimmy and his girlfriend about his slogan is repeated almost verbatim. "A Cup of Coffee" was never produced in Sturges' lifetime, but it was eventually staged by the New York theater company Soho Rep in a production that opened in March of 1988, fifty-seven years after the play was written and twenty-nine years after Sturges' death.


10:57pm -- One Reel Wonders: Loews Christmas Greeting (Hardy Family) (1939)
Andy Hardy and the rest of the Hardy family wake up Christmas morning to gifts and give a holiday greeting to viewers.
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Fay Holden, Lewis Stone, Cecilia Parker
BW-3 mins

Featuring the family from the Andy Hardy film series.


11:00pm -- Chicken Every Sunday (1948)
A woman takes in boarders to support her husband's harebrained financial schemes.
Cast: Dan Dailey, Celeste Holm, Colleen Townsend, Alan Young
Dir: George Seaton
BW-94 mins

When Dan Dailey signed on at MGM, the studio initially casted him as a Nazi in The Mortal Storm (1940). The studio realized their mistake and cast him in musical films thereafter. Then, after serving in World War II, Dailey later returned to acting to make more musicals.


12:38am -- One Reel Wonders: Star In The Night (1945)
A retelling of the Christmas story in the American Southwest.
Cast: J. Carrol Naish, Rosina Galli, Anthony Caruso
Dir: Don Siegel
BW-22 mins

Won an Oscar for Best Short Subject, Two-reel -- Gordon Hollingshead

Don Siegel's first directorial job, he went on to direct The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), Dirty Harry (1971), and Escape from Alcatraz (1979).


1:00am -- Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)
Young love and childish fears highlight a year in the life of a turn-of-the-century family.
Cast: Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer
Dir: Vincente Minnelli
C-113 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Cinematography, Color -- George J. Folsey, Best Music, Original Song -- Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin for the song "The Trolley Song", Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- George Stoll, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe

Director Vincente Minnelli worked hard to make the movie as accurate to the times as possible. Not only did its novelist, Sally Benson, give explicit directions as to the decor of her home down to the last detail, but the movie's costume designer took inspiration for many of the movies costumes right out of the Sears & Roebuck catalog from the time period.


3:00am -- In The Good Old Summertime (1949)
In this musical remake of The Shop Around the Corner, feuding co-workers in a small music shop do not realize they are secret romantic pen pals.
Cast: Judy Garland, Van Johnson, S. Z. "Cuddles" Sakall, Spring Byington
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
C-103 mins, TV-PG

Buster Keaton was working as a gag writer at MGM when this movie was made. The filmmakers approached him to devise a way for a violin to get broken that would be both comic and plausible. Keaton came up with an appropriate fall, and the filmmakers then realized he was the only one who would be able to execute it properly, so they cast him in the film. Keaton also devised the sequence in which Van Johnson inadvertently wrecks Judy Garland's hat, and coached Johnson intensively in how to perform the scene. This was the first MGM film Keaton appeared in since being fired from the studio in 1933.

A heartwarming Christmas-time movie which skillfully blends touching drama with zany comedy, Remember the Night (1940) is a good example of the studio system functioning like a well-oiled machine. It has a witty, incisive screenplay by the great Preston Sturges, stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in their first film together and is produced and directed by Mitchell Leisen, who had just made the masterful romantic comedy Midnight (1939). It even works in three songs: "Easy Living," "Back Home in Indiana," and "The End of a Perfect Day."

Sturges's story revolves around an Assistant District Attorney (MacMurray) falling in love with the shoplifter he is prosecuting (Stanwyck). Feeling sorry that she will have to spend Christmas in jail awaiting trial, he bails her out and takes her to her childhood home in Indiana. But when he sees how cold and unwelcoming Stanwyck's mother is, he takes her to his own mother's home, also in Indiana, where Stanwyck is bowled over by the love and affection she encounters. Hanging over both their heads is the realization that they still have to return to the city to resolve the trial. Will MacMurray purposefully blow the case? Will she let him?

Sturges himself summarized his script this way: "Love reformed her and corrupted him." The finished movie, he said, "had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmerz and just enough schmutz to make it box office."

Sturges's wife at the time, Louise, later recalled the period when her husband was writing this picture: "His work habits were brutal. He worked so hard at night that it was time to stop only when Gillette turned a gentle shade of green from hunger and exhaustion and started to fall off the chair. Preston could do this for days at a time, for although he was extremely lazy, he was also extremely ambitious and he knew that eventually he'd have to turn something out."

Directing a Sturges script for the second time (after Easy Living, 1937) was Mitchell Leisen, who trimmed many scenes throughout the screenplay before shooting and deleted a few more after shooting. This was something which generally irritated Sturges, and was the very reason he was determined to direct his own work - which he indeed began doing shortly after this production. That said, Sturges personally bought 16mm prints of just two of the films he wrote but didn't direct - Remember the Night and Easy Living - so one can assume that perhaps he respected Leisen's edits a bit more than he did other directors'.

Leisen was certainly talented and intelligent enough not to make the trims haphazardly. Leisen biographer David Chierichetti has written that Leisen adapted the script to the personas and abilities of his two stars: "Tailoring the script to fit the personalities of MacMurray and Stanwyck drastically changed Sturges's original concept of the characters. Reading the script, one gets the impression that it is the attorney who dominated the story. Sturges gave him many lengthy and clever speeches which made him assume almost heroic stature. Leisen felt that this was a bit theatrical, and the wordiness of the dialogue demanded a certain articulate quality on the part of the actor that MacMurray simply didn't have. Cutting MacMurray's lines down to the minimum, Leisen played up the feeling of gentle strength MacMurray could project so well. It was a far cry from Sturges's dashing hero."

Leisen brought Remember the Night in 8 days ahead of schedule and $50,000 under budget. He attributed this not to his script pruning but to Barbara Stanwyck's professionalism. " was the greatest," he said. "She never blew one line through the whole picture. She set that kind of pace and everybody worked harder, trying to outdo her."

He continued, "Barbara had a bad back, and when we were shooting the barn dance sequence, the corset she had to wear under the old-fashioned dress was very painful for her. I'd say, 'Look, you've got two hours until your next scene, why don't you just take it off and relax?' and she'd say, 'Oh, no, you might need me,' and she sat on the set the whole time. She was always right at my elbow when I needed her. We never once had to wait for her to finish with the hairdresser or the make-up man."

Sturges hung out on the set and got to know Stanwyck. The actress later joked, "As long as you didn't open your mouth, but let him do the talking, everything was fine." The wheels were already turning in Sturges about working with Stanwyck again. She would recall: "One day he said to me, 'Someday I'm going to write a real screwball comedy for you.' Remember the Night was a delightful comedy, swell for me and Fred MacMurray, but hardly a screwball, and I replied that nobody would ever think of writing anything like that for me - a murderess, sure. But he said, 'You just wait.'" A year later Sturges was directing Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941), his first truly great writing-directing effort and one of the best movies on both their resumes.

Remember the Night opened in early January, 1940, and was well-received. Frank Nugent declared in The New York Times, "It is a memorable film, in title and in quality, blessed with an honest script, good direction and sound performances...a drama stated in the simplest human terms of comedy and sentiment, tenderness and generosity... warm, pleasant and unusually entertaining."

Stanwyck and MacMurray would team up on-screen three more times, for Double Indemnity (1944), The Moonlighter (1953) and There's Always Tomorrow (1956).

Producer: Mitchell Leisen, Albert Lewis
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Screenplay: Preston Sturges
Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
Film Editing: Doane Harrison
Art Direction: Roland Anderson, Hans Dreier
Music: Frederick Hollander
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Lee Leander), Fred MacMurray (John Sargent), Beulah Bondi (Mrs. Sargent), Elizabeth Patterson (Aunt Emma), Willard Robertson (Francis X. O’Leary), Sterling Holloway (Willie).
BW-94m.

by Jeremy Arnold

Sources:

David Chierichetti, Hollywood Director

Axel Madsen, Stanwyck