TCM Schedule for Friday, March 5 -- Air Disasters

Happy birthday, Dean Stockwell! Today is his seventy-fourth birthday, and TCM is celebrating with a collection of his films during the day. Tonight's them is Air Disasters, and I think that it takes a certain flair to name Air Disasters as your theme and then to include Airplane! (1980) as one of the featured films. Good job, TCM! Enjoy!


5:30am -- The Terror (1963)
A lost soldier discovers a mysterious beauty haunting a half-deserted castle.
Cast: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, Sandra Knight, Richard Miller
Dir: Roger Corman
C-79 mins, TV-PG

Roger Corman shot the castle scenes with Boris Karloff so quickly that he didn't even bother to use slates to mark the beginnings of shots. Once he just had the actors walk downstairs one after another in succession, figuring he could later cut the single shot into separate shots that he could probably use somewhere.


7:00am -- MGM Parade Show #17 (1955)
Cyd Charisse and Ann Miller perform in a clip from "The Kissing Bandit"; George Murphy introduces a clip from "Diane."
Hosted by George Murphy.
BW-26 mins, TV-G

Diane is the story of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henry II of France. Lana Turner played Diane in her last film on her MGM contract.


7:30am -- The Romance Of Rosy Ridge (1947)
A farmer's daughter falls in love with a man who fought against her family in the Civil War.
Cast: Van Johnson, Thomas Mitchell, Janet Leigh, Marshall Thompson
Dir: Roy Rowland
BW-106 mins, TV-PG

This was Janet Leigh's first film, while Dean Stockwell, at age ten, had a half dozen films under his belt.


9:30am -- Song Of The Thin Man (1947)
Society sleuths Nick and Nora Charles investigate a murder in a jazz club.
Cast: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Keenan Wynn, Dean Stockwell
Dir: Edward Buzzell
BW-87 mins, TV-G

The last of the Powell/Loy Thin Man films. Dean Stockwell played Nick Charles Jr.


11:00am -- The Boy With Green Hair (1948)
An orphaned boy mystically acquires green hair and a mission to end war.
Cast: Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan, Barbara Hale, Dean Stockwell
Dir: Joseph Losey
C-82 mins, TV-G

Dean Stockwell's father, Harry, was an actor/singer whose greatest claim to fame was supplying the speaking and singing voice for Prince Charming in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).


12:30pm -- The Secret Garden (1949)
An orphaned girl changes the lives of those she encounters at a remote estate.
Cast: Margaret O'Brien, Herbert Marshall, Dean Stockwell, Gladys Cooper
Dir: Fred M. Wilcox
BW-92 mins, TV-G

There are several moments when Mary (Margaret O'Brien) refers to her servant in India. When watching the film, one hears the word "servant," but Mary's mouth is clearly forming the word "Aya" as in other versions of The Secret Garden.


2:15pm -- The Happy Years (1950)
Friends and family try to tame an unruly student at the turn of the century.
Cast: Dean Stockwell, Darryl Hickman, Scotty Beckett, Leon Ames
Dir: William A. Wellman
BW-110 mins, TV-G

Filmed (at least in part) on location at the The Lawrenceville School, where the real story takes place. MGM dug up the paved paths around the school to make it look like it did during the time of the story. Most of the school looks the same still today with only a few building added over the last century.


4:15pm -- Kim (1950)
Rudyard Kipling's classic tale of an orphaned boy who helps the British Army against Indian rebels.
Cast: Errol Flynn, Dean Stockwell, Paul Lukas, Robert Douglas
Dir: Victor Saville
C-113 mins, TV-PG

Originally bought as a property for Freddie Bartholomew in 1938. Production was so far under way (including Bartholomew posing with Indian elephants for newsreel cameras), that the project was eventually abandoned to save costs.


6:15pm -- Stars In My Crown (1950)
A parson uses six-guns and the Bible to bring peace to a Tennessee town.
Cast: Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, Dean Stockwell, Alan Hale
Dir: Jacques Tourneur
BW-89 mins, TV-G

The film’s title is based on the hymn "Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?" (originally titled "Will There Be Any Stars"); music by John R. Sweney, lyrics by Eliza E. Hewitt, circa 1897.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: AIR DISASTERS


8:00pm -- The Crowded Sky (1960)
Cast: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., John Kerr
Dir: Joseph Pevney
C-105 mins, TV-PG

In this film, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. plays a military jet pilot who crashes his plane into the commercial DC-6 piloted by Dana Andrews. About a decade and a half later, Andrews would return the favor as his character's private plane crashed into Zimbalist's commercial jet in Airport 1975 (1974).


10:00pm -- Airplane! (1980)
When a flight crew falls ill, the only man who can land the plane is afraid of flying.
Cast: Robert Hays, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Julie Hagerty
Dir: Jerry Zucker
C-88 mins, TV-MA

The film is mostly a parody of Zero Hour! (1957), a film that had a main character named Ted Stryker and such famous "not meant to be funny" lines like "We have to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner." The casting of professional basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a member of the flight crew was a reference to pro football player Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch's role as a pilot in Zero Hour! While Captain Oveur's suggestive (and therefore inappropriate) questions to Joey are a direct parody of similar scenes in "Zero Hour!", the fact that Peter Graves' portrayed a "father figure" to a troubled young boy also named Joey, in the '50s TV series "Fury", adds yet another level of satire.


11:45pm -- Zero Hour! (1957)
When a flight crew falls ill, the only man who can land the plane is afraid of flying.
Cast: Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Sterling Hayden, Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch
Dir: Hall Bartlett
BW-81 mins, TV-PG

To get inspiration for the ZAZ Kentucky Fried Theatre skits, the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams would leave a videotape running all night, recording late night television with the aim of spoofing the commercials. One night they recorded the film Zero Hour! (1957), which ultimately acted as the main inspiration for Airplane! (1980).


1:15am -- Crash Landing (1958)
The passengers and crew of a trans-Atlantic flight prepare for a crash landing at sea.
Cast: Gary Merrill, Nancy Davis, Roger Smith, Bek Nelson
Dir: Fred F. Sears
BW-77 mins

This was Nancy Davis (Reagan)'s final film.


2:45am -- Big Bad Mama (1974)
Bad luck forces a woman and her daughters into crime.
Cast: Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Susan Sennett
Dir: Steve Carver
C-84 mins, TV-MA

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead performed most of the guitar and banjo music in the movie.


4:15am -- Girls of the Road (1940)
The governor's daughter tries to win fair treatment for female vagrants by joining them on the road.
Cast: Ann Dvorak, Helen Mack, Lola Lane, Ann Doran
Dir: Nick Grinde
BW-60 mins, TV-PG

Though the "girls of the road" are supposed to be broke, sleeping outdoors and living on the thin edge of starvation, they all have perfectly permed hair and plucked eyebrows.


5:30am -- Gang Boy (1959)
A police officer tries to prevent a gang war by bringing the rival groups together over dinner.
Cast: Curley Riviera.
Dir: Arthur Swerdloff.
C-27 mins, TV-PG

Based on a true story of a truce between Anglo and Mexican gangs in Los Angeles, California in the early 1950s. The Anglo and Mexican gangs are played by the actual Anglo and Mexican gangs who reached the truce. The gangs had script supervision, went by their own actual names and nicknames, and chose who would play which role.

By the end of the 1940s swashbuckling action hero Errol Flynn had grown very tired of those types of roles and longed to prove himself as a "serious" actor. Years of hard living and heavy drinking had also taken its toll, and with his older, somewhat puffier and dissipated look, he wasn't quite as convincing as a dashing, sword-fighting figure. But he could still be counted on to add a certain amount of flamboyant gusto to a period adventure, so MGM cast him as the roguish horse trader Mahbub Ali in Kim (1950), an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's classic novel. And it was up to makeup artist William Tuttle to make Flynn "look" believable in his role.

However, the real star of Kim is child actor Dean Stockwell, later known for his adult roles in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and the television series Quantum Leap (1989 -1993). Stockwell plays the title role, a rebellious British orphan in 1880 India who disguises himself as a native and wanders through the marketplace seeking adventure. He is befriended by a holy lama on a spiritual quest and by a horse trader who is also a secret agent for the British. The three become involved in espionage, foreign intrigue, and an explosive political situation involving the encroachment of Czarist Russian troops into the Khyber Pass.

Stockwell adored Flynn, seeing the older actor as "the ultimate father figure for me." About 12 or 13 years old at the time of filming, the child star also looked up to Flynn as "a truly profound, non-superficial sex symbol," he later said. So notorious for his romantic escapades he gave birth to the popular expression "in like Flynn," the actor lived up to that image by asking the boy on their first meeting if he had had his first sexual encounter yet (in somewhat more graphic language) - in front of Stockwell's mother and on-set teacher. Soon after, he presented the boy with one of his trademark wing pins: three interlocking F's (for "Flynn's Flying F*ckers") that attached to lapels with a device shaped like male genitalia. An infamous practical joker, Flynn also bet the crew he could make the remarkably disciplined Stockwell laugh in the middle of a take. In the scene where Mahbub Ali is supposed to hand Kim a bowl of food for the dying lama, Flynn passed the boy a bowl of camel dung still steaming. Stockwell delivered his line - "Is this okay for the lama to eat?" - with a perfectly straight face, and Flynn lost $500. "I had a hell of a good time shooting that picture," Stockwell admitted.

Stockwell said Flynn was likely to show up on the set "a little blurry-eyed," but the after-effects of the actor's nighttime activities weren't the only challenge for make-up artist William Tuttle. Most of his magic went into convincingly transforming Flynn, Lucas, and Stockwell into, respectively, an Afghani, an Indian holy man, and a British child disguised as a local. Considerable magic also went into matching on-location shots of India with the bulk of the film's exteriors, shot in Lone Pine, California. The studio had attempted to adapt the story to the screen twice before, once with Freddie Bartholomew and Robert Taylor in 1938 and several years later with Mickey Rooney, Conrad Veidt, and Basil Rathbone, but World War II and the Indian struggle for independence from Great Britain repeatedly forced postponement. With liberation finally achieved in 1948, India gave full cooperation to the production. But although Flynn and Lukas both traveled there for location work, the child actor playing Kim never set foot on Indian soil.

Director: Victor Saville
Producer: Leon Gordon
Screenplay: Leon Gordon, Helen Deutsch, Richard Schayer, based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling
Cinematography: William V. Skall
Editing: George Boemler
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters
Original Music: Andre Previn
Cast: Errol Flynn (Mahbub Ali, the Red Beard), Dean Stockwell (Kim), Paul Lukas (Lama), Thomas Gomez (Emissary), Cecil Kellaway (Hurree Chunder).
C-113m. Closed captioning. Descriptive video.

by Rob Nixon