TCM Schedule for Thursday, February 4 -- 31 Days of Oscar

Here are the actor connections from film to film for today's schedule:

• Ivan F. Simpson (The Green Goddess -- Captain Blood)
  
• Errol Flynn (Captain Blood -- Desparate Journey)
  
• Arthur Kennedy (Desparate Journey -- Air Force)
  
• John Garfield (Air Force -- Pride of the Marines)
  
• Eleanor Parker (Pride of the Marines -- Above and Beyond)
  
• Robert Taylor (Above and Beyond -- Flight Command)
  
• Ray Milland (Flight Command -- Kitty)
  
• Patric Knowles (Kitty -- The Adventures of Robin Hood)
  
• Basil Rathbone (The Adventures of Robin Hood -- Romeo and Juliet)
  
• Edna May Oliver (Romeo and Juliet -- Little Women)
  

Enjoy!


6:00am -- The Green Goddess (1930)
A fanatical Indian potentate holds British settlers hostage.
Cast: George Arliss, H. B. Warner, Alice Joyce, Ralph Forbes
Dir: Alfred Green
C-73 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- George Arliss

Filmed in 1929 and completed before Disraeli (1929), but was held out of release until later at the request of George Arliss because he felt the other film was a better vehicle for his talkie debut.


7:15am -- Captain Blood (1935)
After being unjustly sentenced to prison, a doctor escapes and becomes a notorious pirate.
Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone
Dir: Michael Curtiz
BW-119 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Director -- Michael Curtiz (This was a write-in candidate, who came in second on the final ballots. It was not an official nomination.), Best Music, Score -- Leo F. Forbstein (head of department) and Score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (This was a write-in candidate, who came in third on the final ballots. It was not an official nomination.), Best Sound, Recording -- Nathan Levinson (sound director), Best Writing, Screenplay -- Casey Robinson (This was a write-in candidate, who came in third on the final ballots. It was not an official nomination.), and Best Picture

Robert Donat was cast in the title role, but didn't turn up at the start of shooting. Warner Brothers scrambled to find a replacement, asking Brian Aherne to take the role, but he refused. Warners decided to take a gamble on an unknown Australian named Errol Flynn.


9:15am -- Desperate Journey (1942)
American pilots stranded in Germany during World War II fight their way to freedom.
Cast: Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Coleman, Raymond Massey
Dir: Raoul Walsh
BW-108 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects -- Byron Haskin (photographic) and Nathan Levinson (sound)

Watch for John Banner (Sgt. Schultz from the television series Hogan's Heroes in a bit part as a conductor on an empty troop train.


11:15am -- Air Force (1943)
A bomber crew sees World War II action over the Pacific.
Cast: John Ridgely, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, Charles Drake
Dir: Howard Hawks
BW-125 mins, TV-G

Won an Oscar for Best Film Editing -- George Amy

Nominated for Oscars for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- James Wong Howe, Elmer Dyer and Charles A. Marshall, Best Effects, Special Effects -- Hans F. Koenekamp (photographic), Rex Wimpy (photographic) and Nathan Levinson (sound), and Best Writing, Original Screenplay -- Dudley Nichols

An uncredited William Faulkner wrote the emotional death bed scene for the Mary Ann's pilot.


1:30pm -- Pride Of The Marines (1945)
A blinded Marine tries to adjust to civilian life.
Cast: John Garfield, Eleanor Parker, Dane Clark, John Ridgely
Dir: Delmer Daves
BW-120 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Screenplay -- Albert Maltz

This film is about the Battle of Guadacanal. Guadalcanal is situated in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, north-east of Australia. Its local name is Isatabu and contains the country's capital, Honiara. The island is humid and mostly made up of jungle with a surface area of 2,510 square miles or 6,500-km². Guadacanal was named after Pedro de Ortega's home town Guadacanal in Andalusia, Spain. de Ortega worked under Álvaro de Mendaña who charted the island in 1568.


3:30pm -- Above And Beyond (1952)
The pilot who helped drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima struggles with the demands of the dangerous mission.
Cast: Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker, James Whitmore, Larry Keating
Dir: Norman Panama
BW-122 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture -- Hugo Friedhofer, and Best Writing, Motion Picture Story -- Beirne Lay Jr.

The sequences showing the bombing of Hiroshima were lifted from another MGM film, The Beginning or the End (1947), which was about the development and use of the first atomic bombs.


5:45pm -- Flight Command (1940)
A cocky cadet tries to prove himself during flight training.
Cast: Robert Taylor, Ruth Hussey, Walter Pidgeon, Paul Kelly
Dir: Frank Borzage
BW-116 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects -- A. Arnold Gillespie (photographic) and Douglas Shearer (sound)

The squadron is based at Naval Air Station North Island, which still exists today in San Diego, CA.


What's On Tonight: 31 DAYS OF OSCAR: Prime Time Lineup


8:00pm -- The Uninvited (1944)
A brother and sister buy a house with a ghostly secret.
Cast: Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Cornelia Otis Skinner
Dir: Lewis Allen
BW-99 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Charles Lang

The beautiful song "Stella By Starlight" was written specifically for this movie and is featured several times. In the movie Roderick Fitzgerald "writes" it for Stella Meredith.


10:00pm -- Kitty (1946)
A penniless British lord passes a street urchin off as a lady to sell her to a rich husband.
Cast: Paulette Goddard, Ray Milland, Patric Knowles, Reginald Owen
Dir: Mitchell Leisen
BW-103 mins

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White -- Hans Dreier, Walter H. Tyler, Sam Comer and Ray Moyer

Lux Radio Theater broadcast a 60 minute radio adaptation of the movie on February 24, 1947 with Paulette Goddard reprising her film role.


12:00am -- The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
The bandit king of Sherwood Forest leads his Merry Men in a battle against the corrupt Prince John.
Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains
Dir: Michael Curtiz
C-102 mins, TV-G

Won Oscars for Best Art Direction -- Carl Jules Weyl, Best Film Editing -- Ralph Dawson, and Best Music, Original Score -- Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture

The sound of Robin's arrow is the favorite sound of Skywalker Sound's Ben Burtt. He has used that sound in almost all the Star Wars films.


2:00am -- Romeo And Juliet (1936)
Shakespeare's classic tale of young lovers from feuding families.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, John Barrymore, Edna May Oliver
Dir: George Cukor
BW-125 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Basil Rathbone, Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Norma Shearer, Best Art Direction -- Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope and Edwin B. Willis, and Best Picture

Contains the only on-screen sword fight that expert swordsman Basil Rathbone won in his entire career.

On April 1, 1946, The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote: "A certain young lady named Amber -- or, at least, her cinematic sponsors in Hollywood -- must be awfully burned at Paramount's Kitty for beating her to the screen."

Crowther was referring to the heroine of Forever Amber, a scandalous and extremely popular novel that was still in the works as a movie from Twentieth Century Fox. Kitty (1945), released by Paramount, was a similar story with a similar tone, and not by accident; Paramount had originally owned the rights to Forever Amber but lost them to Fox. An adaptation of the novel Kitty, by Rosamond Marshall, seemed like a good substitute.

Even though Forever Amber takes place in the seventeenth century and Kitty is set in the eighteenth, the two characters, Crowther aptly noted, "are sisters under their coiffures," with both using sex and cunning to make their way up from nothing to the top tiers of London society. Kitty (Paulette Goddard) is a cockney girl who is discovered and painted by artist Thomas Gainsborough (Cecil Kellaway). She marries a man (Dennis Hoey) for his money, then after his death marries a duke (Reginald Owen), before finally winding up with the lord she's loved all along (Ray Milland).

Kitty showcases Paulette Goddard at the peak of her beauty and ability. To transform in the film from street urchin to refined duchess required Goddard, a native Long Islander, to master two distinct British accents. She worked intensely with a dialogue coach, Phyllis Loughton, but that wasn't all. Director Mitchell Leisen, a stickler for authenticity, had Ida Lupino's cockney mother Connie Emerald move in with Goddard so that the actress could have someone to converse with in cockney literally all day long, every day. Once shooting began, Leisen ordered other actors to speak to Goddard only in cockney even when the cameras weren't rolling. (Leisen did so as well.)

When it came time for Goddard to speak in the more posh accent, "we moved Connie Emerald out and Constance Collier in," Leisen later recalled. Collier has a role in the film herself, with her character teaching Goddard proper diction and etiquette, Pygmalion-style. Leisen figured having Collier do this off-screen as well would be a good idea.

Of working with Goddard, voice coach Loughton later said: "She is one of the most intelligent women I've ever worked with, but she has never projected her intelligence on screen the way it projects when she is sitting talking in a living room. Her problem was to shift over from the pantomime techniques Chaplin taught her to the kind of dialogue comedy we did at Paramount."

Goddard had earlier been married to, and co-starred with, Charles Chaplin, but at the time of Kitty's production she had just gotten remarried, to Burgess Meredith. In fact, she was pregnant during shooting and suffered a miscarriage shortly afterward.

While Goddard shows off her skills well here, Kitty is even more of a showcase for Mitchell Leisen. The director of such classics as Easy Living (1937) and Midnight (1939) had started his career as an art director and costume designer, and his attention to décor remained his defining stylistic trait even as director. With Kitty, Leisen was able to indulge his obsession to an unusual degree. As biographer David Chierichetti later wrote: "With its opportunity for exact historical reproduction, it was precisely the kind of picture Leisen could do better than anybody else, and its mixture of mannered comedy and gutsy drama suited him perfectly, too. Many critics consider Kitty Leisen's best picture."

Leisen went to great lengths to ensure accuracy. For the sequences in which Gainsborough paints Kitty's portrait, Leisen recalled, "I spent two years researching Gainsborough and the way he painted. We determined that the picture took place in 1659, and there's nothing in the picture that was painted by him after that year. He painted by candlelight. Don't know why; he had his canvases laced on frames with leather thongs and he used a six-foot brush to paint. When it came to paint the faces, he relaced the canvas so that the face was right at the edge, and then he painted with very small brushes and very fine detail. These things are very interesting to me, and so we used them in the picture." When Leisen was unable to borrow real Gainsborough paintings to display in the film, he had high-quality copies made. He claimed to have rejected 13 copies of "Blue Boy" before he was satisfied.

Leisen also related how during the period setting for Kitty, wood-paneled rooms existed in their natural wood color. Soon afterward, a method for painting wood was perfected, and it became fashionable to paint the wood paneling over in white. Consequently, there remained in the 1940s extremely few real-life examples of unpainted, paneled rooms. Leisen, however, had personally bought one such room for his own art collection a few years earlier, from the Hearst estate, and he rented it to Paramount for use in Kitty. (Afterward, he donated it to the Huntington Museum in Pasadena.)

Beyond the amazingly accurate and exquisite sets, Leisen went to great pains to make the costumes, wigs, and even undergarments all faithful to the time period. When Ray Milland teaches Goddard how to hold her fan, it's based on actual literature of the time. Leisen's overall sense of historical accuracy was so great that he was lauded by British historical groups "who felt that Kitty was the most accurate film ever made about the Britain of an earlier day." The film was also nominated for an Oscar® for Best Black-and-White Art Direction, though it lost to Anna and the King of Siam (1946).

Kitty is sometimes referenced as being a 1945 film. In fact, while it had its premiere in 1945, it didn't open commercially until early 1946. It was a big hit and led to a new contract with a massive pay hike for Goddard: she went from $132,000 per year to $100,000 per picture.

Ray Milland, who co-starred with Goddard in four features (plus appearances together in two others), later said he "always liked working with Paulette. She was not a brilliant actress, she had no sense of timing and everything about her playing was mechanical and contrived, but nobody knew it better than she did, and she was completely honest about it. She is the most honest actress I ever knew."

Producer: Mitchell Leisen
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Screenplay: Karl Tunberg, Darrell Ware; Rosamond Marshall (novel "Kitty")
Cinematography: Daniel L. Fapp
Art Direction: Hans Dreier, Walter Tyler
Music: Victor Young
Film Editing: Alma Macrorie
Cast: Paulette Goddard (Kitty), Ray Milland (Sir Hugh Marcy), Patric Knowles (Brett, Earl of Carstairs), Reginald Owen (Duke of Malmunster), Cecil Kellaway (Thomas Gainsborough), Constance Collier (Lady Susan Dowitt), Dennis Hoey (Jonathan Selby), Sara Allgood (Old Meg), Eric Blore (Dobson), Gordon Richards (Sir Joshua Reynolds), Michael Dyne (Prince of Wales), Edward Norton (Earl of Campton).
BW-103m.

by Jeremy Arnold

Sources:
Julie Gilbert, Opposite Attraction: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard
David Chierichetti, Hollywood Director