TCM Schedule for Wednesday, March 5 -- HAPPY BIRTHDAY!: DEAN STOCKWELL

3:45am My Six Convicts (1952)
A prison psychologist tries to rehabilitate six hardcore criminals.
Cast: Millard Mitchell, Gilbert Roland, John Beal. Dir: Hugo Fregonese. BW-104 mins, TV-PG

5:30am Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Alaska Lifeboat (1956)
BW-21 mins

6:00am SOME OF THE BEST - 1944 (1944)
Features highlights of MGM's productions from 1924 through1943.
BW-50 mins, TV-G

7:00am Green Years, The (1946)
An orphaned Irish boy is taken in by his mother's Scottish relations.
Cast: Charles Coburn, Tom Drake, Dean Stockwell. Dir: Victor Saville. BW-125 mins, TV-PG

9:06am Short Film: From The Vaults: Presenting The Queen Of Taps Eleanor Power (2000)
BW-2 mins

9:15am Mighty Mcgurk, The (1946)
A punch-drunk prizefighter living on the Bowery takes in an orphaned boy.
Cast: Wallace Beery, Dean Stockwell, Edward Arnold. Dir: John Waters. BW-86 mins, TV-PG

10:45am Arnelo Affair, The (1947)
A neglected wife gets mixed up with an hypnotic charmer and murder.
Cast: George Murphy, Frances Gifford, John Hodiak. Dir: Arch Oboler. BW-87 mins, TV-PG

12:30pm Romance Of Rosy Ridge, The (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. Dir: Roy Rowland. BW-106 mins, TV-PG

2:18pm Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Czechoslovakia On Parade (1938)
In this "Traveltalk," we learn about the landmarks, people and customs of Czechoslovakia.
Cast: James A. Fitzpatrick C-9 mins

2:30pm Boy With Green Hair, The (1948)
An orphaned boy mystically acquires green hair and a mission to end war.
Cast: Dean Stockwell, Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan. Dir: Joseph Losey. C-82 mins, TV-G

4:00pm Secret Garden, The (1949)
An orphaned girl changes the lives of those she encounters at a remote estate.
Cast: Margaret O'Brien, Herbert Marshall, Dean Stockwell. Dir: Fred M. Wilcox. BW-92 mins, TV-G

5:35pm Short Film: One Reel Wonders: India On Parade (1937)
In this "Traveltalk," we learn about the landmarks, people and customs of India.
Cast: James A. Fitzpatrick C-9 mins

5:45pm 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. Dir: Victor Saville. C-113 mins, TV-PG

What's On Tonight: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!: DEAN STOCKWELL

7:39pm Short Film: One Reel Wonders: I Love My Wife, But! (1946)
A short about the various types of wives that one can have and how to deal with them
Cast: Dave O'Brien Dir: Richard L. Bare BW-9 mins

8:00pm Rake's Progress, The (1945)
A man's efforts to seduce his way to a fortune destroy all around him.
Cast: Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, Godfrey Tearle. Dir: Sidney Gilliat. BW-121 mins, TV-PG

10:00pm My Fair Lady (1964)
A phonetics instructor bets that he can pass a street urchin off as a lady.
Cast: Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, Stanley Holloway. Dir: George Cukor. C-172 mins, TV-G

1:00am Reluctant Debutante, The (1958)
British parents try to prepare their Americanized daughter for her social debut.
Cast: Rex Harrison, Kay Kendall, Angela Lansbury. Dir: Vincente Minnelli. C-96 mins, TV-G

2:39am Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Looking At London (1946)
C-10 mins

3:00am Happy Thieves, The (1962)
A worldly art thief gets mixed up with murder.
Cast: Rex Harrison, Rita Hayworth, Gregoire Aslan. Dir: George Marshall. C-89 mins, TV-PG

4:30am Long Dark Hall, The (1951)
A naive family man is framed for the murder of his showgirl girlfriend.
Cast: Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, Tania Heald. Dir: Reginald Beck, Anthony Bushell. BW-88 mins, TV-PG

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

...and sending good wishes. :hi:

And here's the birthday cake for Dean Stockwell, who shares a birthday but not a birth year with my father.

I'm kicking ass and taking names! :)