TCM Schedule for Thursday, June 10 -- TCM Prime Time Feature -- Simone Signoret

Happy birthday to Judy Garland, who was born 88 years ago today in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tonight we have an evening of the films of Simone Signoret. Enjoy!


4:00am -- The Long Ships (1964)
Viking seamen battle a Moorish prince for possession of a golden bell.
Cast: Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, Rosanna Schiaffino, Russ Tamblyn
Dir: Jack Cardiff
C-126 mins, TV-PG

Watch for one of the Vikings fighting the Moors on the beach -- he's wearing bright white underpants.


6:15am -- Listen, Darling (1938)
Two children try to find a new husband for their widowed mother.
Cast: Judy Garland, Freddie Bartholomew, Mary Astor, Walter Pidgeon
Dir: Edwin L. Marin
BW-75 mins, TV-G

Judy sings "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", "On the Bumpy Road to Love", and "Ten Pins in the Sky".


7:30am -- For Me And My Gal (1942)
An unscrupulous song-and-dance man uses his partner and his best friend to get ahead.
Cast: Judy Garland, George Murphy, Gene Kelly, Marta Eggerth
Dir: Busby Berkeley
BW-104 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Roger Edens and George Stoll

This was the first film in which Judy Garland had her name billed before the title, which showed her growing importance and stature at MGM.


9:15am -- Girl Crazy (1943)
A womanizing playboy finds true love when he's sent to a desert college.
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Gil Stratton, Robert E. Strickland
Dir: Norman Taurog
BW-99 mins, TV-G

Judy Garland's character's name, Ginger Gray, is a tribute to Ginger Rogers, who played the part on Broadway when the character was named Molly Gray. Ginger Rogers wrote that one night onstage in the play, her costar Allen Kearns accidentally said: "Ginger, I love you" instead of "Molly". The mistake got such a huge laugh from the audience that they decided to continue to do that in subsequent performances, pretending it was a mistake. (Source: "Ginger: My Story". New York: Harper-Collins, 1991)


11:00am -- Presenting Lily Mars (1943)
A small-town girl fights for her big chance on Broadway.
Cast: Judy Garland, Van Heflin, Fay Bainter, Richard Carlson
Dir: Norman Taurog
BW-104 mins, TV-PG

In the elaborate musical finale, Judy Garland is dancing with an uncredited Charles Walters, who would eventually become one of MGM's top directors and direct Judy herself in both "Easter Parade" and "Summer Stock."


12:45pm -- The Clock (1945)
A G.I. en route to Europe falls in love during a whirlwind two-day leave in New York City.
Cast: Judy Garland, Robert Walker, James Gleason, Keenan Wynn
Dir: Fred Zinnemann
BW-90 mins, TV-PG

This, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and A Child Is Waiting (1963) are Judy Garland's only non-singing movies.


2:17pm -- One Reel Wonders: We Must Have Music (1941)
BW-11 mins

A pair of songs deleted from two MGM musicals are featured in this short subject: a portion of "We Must Have Music" (music by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Gus Kahn), sung and danced by Judy Garland, and cut from Ziegfeld Girl (1941); and "America the Beautiful" (music by Samuel A. Ward, lyrics by Katherine Lee Bates), sung by Risë Stevens, and removed from The Chocolate Soldier (1941).


2:30pm -- The Pirate (1948)
An actor poses as a notorious pirate to court a romantic Caribbean girl.
Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Walter Slezak, Gladys Cooper
Dir: Vincente Minnelli
C-102 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Lennie Hayton

Gene Kelly fought to get The Nicholas Brothers (Fayard Nicholas and Harold Nicholas) included in the movie. When one dance sequence was being rehearsed, Harold Nicholas was just going through the motions, and Gene Kelly accused him of not knowing the routine - so Nicholas danced the whole routine, alone, full-out and flawlessly. Kelly was speechless.


4:15pm -- Summer Stock (1950)
A farmer gets sucked into show business when a theatrical troupe invades her farm.
Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Gloria De Haven
Dir: Charles Walters
C-109 mins, TV-G

Judy Garland is said to have been at the height of her drug addiction throughout filming, resulting in her weight changes, mood-swings, and unexplained illnesses. One one particular day of fiming, Garland was said to be "not in a fit state to work" so Gene Kelly feigned a fall so that she would be able to take the day off. She was supposed to make one more MGM musical, Royal Wedding (1951) with Fred Astaire, but was fired from that production, making this her MGM swansong.


6:15pm -- I Could Go On Singing (1963)
An American singing star in London tries to reclaim the son she gave up for adoption.
Cast: Judy Garland, Dirk Bogarde, Jack Klugman, Aline MacMahon
Dir: Ronald Neame
C-99 mins, TV-G

Judy Garland's final film.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: SIMONE SIGNORET


8:00pm -- Diabolique (1955)
A cruel man's wife and lover plot to kill him.
Cast: Paul Meurisse, Vera Clouzot, Simone Signoret, Charles Vanei
Dir: Henri-Georges Clouzot
BW-116 mins, TV-14

The film is based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's novel "Celle qui n'était plus" (She Who Was No More). Alfred Hitchcock also attempted to buy the rights to this novel; Boileau and Narcejac subsequently wrote "D'Entre les Morts" (From Among the Dead) especially for Hitchcock, who filmed it as Vertigo (1958).


10:00pm -- Room at the Top (1959)
A young accountant claws his way to the top in the boardroom and the bedroom.
Cast: Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears, Donald Wolfit
Dir: Jack Clayton
BW-117 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Simone Signoret, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Neil Paterson

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Laurence Harvey, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Hermione Baddeley, Best Director -- Jack Clayton, and Best Picture

Initially no British cinema chains wanted to touch the film as the British Board of Film Classification had given it an X certificate, then usually synonymous with exploitation fare. Eventually the ABC chain took a chance and picked it up for distribution, scoring a huge critical and commercial hit in the process.


12:00am -- Term Of Trial (1962)
A schoolgirl obsessed with her teacher accuses him of molesting her.
Cast: Laurence Olivier, Simone Signoret, Sarah Miles, Hugh Griffith
Dir: Peter Glenville
BW-113 mins, TV-PG

54-year-old Laurence Olivier had an affair with the 19-year-old Sarah Miles during filming.


2:15am -- The Deadly Affair (1966)
A secret agent investigates the tangled affairs surrounding a government official's suicide.
Cast: James Mason, Simone Signoret, Maximilian Schell, Harriet Andersson
Dir: Sidney Lumet.
C-107 mins, TV-14

This is the only film in which siblings Corin Redgrave and Lynn Redgrave both appear.


4:15am -- La Ronde (1950)
A series of inter-related affairs link lovers from all levels of society.
Cast: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Fernand Gravey, Jean-Louis Barrault
Dir: Max Ophüls
BW-93 mins, TV-14

Nominated for Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- Jean d'Eaubonne, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- Jacques Natanson and Max Ophüls

In the spring and summer of 1960, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand were neighbors in a three-apartment bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller across the hall and Howard Hughes upstairs. Monroe told her dresser, who wrote a biography, that Miller liked to talk to Signoret because she was so intelligent, and that after Signoret went back to France to make a film and Miller went to New York to work on a play, Monroe and Montand did indeed have the affair that was speculated about in the press.

Simone Signoret was an Earth Mother of an actress, a specialist in playing jaded women of the world who retain a certain vulnerability and can be at once maternal and seductive. The outstanding example of this type of Signoret character was Alice Aisgil, the Frenchwoman whose love affair with a young Englishman leads to tragic results in Room at the Top (1959). The performance brought Signoret numerous Best Actress honors including the American and British Academy Awards and the Cannes Film Festival Award. She was the first woman to win a Best Actress Oscar for a non-American film.

Born Henriette Charlotte Simone Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1921, she grew up in Paris. To veil the Jewish heritage of her French-born father, she took her mother's maiden name of Signoret when she began working in films in the early 1940s in Nazi-occupied France. After making her film debut in an uncredited bit in Boléro (1942), she found regular work in movies, often cast because of her earthy sensuality as a prostitute. Her most memorable role of that type came in Max Ophuls' La Ronde (1950), as a beautiful woman of the night whose encounter with a soldier begins a roundelay of romantic entanglements.

Among Signoret's French films, the one most often seen in the U.S. is Diabolique (1955), Henri-Georges Clouzot's horrific thriller in which she plays a mistress who plots with her lover's wife (Véra Clouzot) to murder the man in their lives. She acted in many other highly regarded French films of the 1950s including Casque d'or (1952), Thérèse Raquin (1953) and Les Sorcières de Salem (1957), adapted from Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.

Signoret acted opposite Laurence Olivier in the U.K. production Term of Trial (1962); he plays a schoolteacher forced to defend himself from a love-struck teen-ager (Sarah Miles) and Signoret is his scornful wife. Signoret made a rare appearance in an American film in Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools (1965) as a drug-addicted countess ministered to by compassionate, troubled ship doctor Oskar Werner; both were Oscar-nominated. In the spy story The Deadly Affair (1966), based on a John le Carré novel and filmed in England, Signoret plays a concentration camp survivor.

Heralded as one of France's great film stars, Signoret continued to win acclaim as she ripened into her more mature years. She played the world-weary retired prostitute Madame Rosa in the Oscar-winning La vie devant soi (1977), and a spinster who unwittingly enters a romantic correspondence with her paralyzed brother in I Sent a Letter to My Love (1980). Her final feature film was Guy de Maupassant (1982), in which she plays the title character's mother.

Signoret was married from 1944 to 1949 to filmmaker Yves Allégret, with whom she had a daughter, actress Catherine Allégret; and from 1950 until her death to celebrated actor/entertainer Yves Montand. She published a memoir, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be, in 1978, and also was the author of a novel, Adieu Volodya, published in 1985, the year of her death.

by Roger Fristoe


Films in bold are featured on TCM on June 10, 2010