TCM schedule for Wednesday, February 18 --- 31 Days of Oscar University: Law Department

[Dem2theMax]

TCM schedule for Wednesday, February 18

31 Days of Oscar University: Law Department



Constitutional Law


6:00 AM Princess O'Rourke (1943)
A flying ace's romance with a princess creates diplomatic problems.
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Robert Cummings, Jane Wyman. Dir: Norman Krasna. BW-94 mins, TV-G, CC


7:45 AM The Magnificent Yankee (1950)
True story of the lifelong love affair between Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and his wife.
Cast: Louis Calhern, Ann Harding, Eduard Franz. Dir: John Sturges. BW-89 mins, TV-G, CC


9:15 AM The Talk Of The Town (1942)
An escaped political prisoner and a stuffy law professor vie for the hand of a spirited schoolteacher.
Cast: Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman. Dir: George Stevens. BW-117 mins, TV-G, CC


Criminal Defense


11:15 AM A Free Soul (1931)
A hard-drinking lawyer's daughter falls for one of his underworld clients.
Cast: Lionel Barrymore, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable. Dir: Clarence Brown. BW-94 mins, TV-G, CC


1:00 PM Madame X (1929)
Infidelity and an accidental death force a society wife to leave her infant son.
Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Lewis Stone, Raymond Hackett. Dir: Lionel Barrymore. BW-95 mins, TV-PG


2:36 PM Short Film: La Cucaracha (1934)
C-20 mins


3:00 PM Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)
A small-town lawyer gets the case of a lifetime when a military man avenges an attack on his wife.
Cast: James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick. Dir: Otto Preminger. BW-161 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format


6:00 PM Witness For The Prosecution (1957)
A British lawyer gets caught up in a couple's tangled marital affairs when he defends the husband for murder. Cast: Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich. Dir: Billy Wilder. BW-116 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format


Military Law


8:00 PM The Life Of Emile Zola (1937)
The famed writer risks his reputation to defend a Jewish army officer accused of treason.
Cast: Paul Muni, Joseph Schildkraut, Gale Sondergaard. Dir: William Dieterle. BW-116 mins, TV-G, CC, DVS


10:00 PM The Caine Mutiny (1954)
Naval officers begin to suspect their captain of insanity.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Jose Ferrer, Van Johnson. Dir: Edward Dmytryk. C-125 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format


12:15 AM A Soldier's Story (1984)
During World War II, an African-American officer investigates a murder that may have been racially motivated. Cast: Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Adolph Caesar, Denzel Washington. Dir: Norman Jewison. C-101 mins, TV-MA, CC, Letterbox Format


2:00 AM The Last Detail (1973)
Two shore patrolmen decide to show a prisoner a good time on his way to the brig.
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid. Dir: Hal Ashby. C-104 mins, TV-MA, CC, Letterbox Format


4:00 AM Breaker Morant (1980)
When his commanding officers make a mistake, an Australian soldier faces court martial.
Cast: Edward Woodward, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown. Dir: Bruce Beresford. C-107 mins, TV-MA, CC, Letterbox Format



Movie Highlights and two interesting tidbits.


In the movie, A Free Soul, the scene where Lionel Barrymore's character collapses - that wasn't a fake collapse. Lionel Barrymore was very sick while filming the movie. What you see in the courtroom scene near the end of the film is real. I recently caught The Biography Channel bio of the Barrymores. If you ever have a chance to see the biography, I highly recommend it. It was fascinating. Strange as it may seem, neither John, Ethel or Lionel ever wanted to be actors!

Another goodie, this time about Breaker Morant. A few years ago, I saw an interview with Edward Woodward, one of the stars of Breaker Morant. I won't spoil anything, in case you haven't seen the movie. But Mr. Woodward told of a letter he had received from someone regarding a scene at the end of the film. The two characters, Lt. Harry Morant, (Woodward,) and Lt. Peter Handcock, (Bryan Brown,) take each other's hand at a very climatic scene in the movie. The actors did this out of nowhere. No one had told them to do it. The letter that Mr. Woodward received? The person who wrote to him told him that in in real life, that is actually what happened. Gave me goose bumps.

I've never seen The Last Detail. It sounds wonderful. I love Jack. So here is TCM's highlight. And I AM going to watch it!

(Smilies have the day off. Dem is not feeling well. So they, and I, are resting today!)


The Last Detail


It’s strange how some truly great performances manage to fall through the cracks of our cinematic consciousness. Everyone knows that, at his best, Jack Nicholson is one of the more electrifying actors in movie history, with his highly-focused work in Chinatown (1974) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) standing as veritable monuments to Sixties-bred iconoclasm. But Nicholson’s equally dazzling, Oscar®-nominated turn as a bullheaded sailor in Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973) never gets the attention it deserves. Nicholson’s performance is a marvel to behold, as he alternates between unbridled machismo and moments of great compassion, all courtesy of Robert Towne’s profanity-laced script. Be warned, though - these sailors definitely talk like sailors. And Nicholson revels in every minute of it.

Nicholson plays “Bad Ass” Buddusky, a hell-raising lifetime Navy man who’s been around long enough to know that he doesn’t always have to play by military rules...so long as he doesn’t get caught. When the film begins, Buddusky and a fellow lifer named Mulhall (Otis Young) are ordered to transport a naïve midshipman named Meadows (Randy Quaid) to a military prison in a distant state. It seems Meadows was caught lifting $40 from a charity box on the base, but had the misfortune of choosing the admiral’s wife’s pet charity. So poor Meadows gets the book thrown at him, receiving eight years in jail and a dishonorable discharge for his petty theft.

At first, the sailors are shocked by the sentence, but they roll with the absurdity of Navy existence and proceed to lug their handcuffed ward, via bus and train, to the looming prison. However, both Buddusky and Mulhall slowly befriend Meadows, who’s as sweet and optimistic as they are grizzled. Before long, Buddusky takes pity on the kid and decides to force-feed him the life that he’ll miss while rotting away in a prison cell, a decision that doesn’t always sit well with Mulhall. This leads to a string of often hilarious, sometimes tender, testosterone-charged activities. It also causes a seismic shift in Buddusky’s consciousness, as he comes to recognize that he’s lived most of his life in a prison of his own making. Buddusky and Mulhall must also wrestle with the knowledge that, eventually, they must deliver Meadows to the brig.

Outside of Nicholson, the real star of The Last Detail is Towne’s profane, heartbreaking screenplay. Until this point, Towne was mainly known as a virtuoso script doctor, a hired gun who could put an un-credited polish on somebody else’s work until it shined like a newly-cut diamond. His re-tooling of both Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972) were poorly-kept secrets in movie circles, and most people felt that he would one day deliver a stunning screenplay of his own. Nicholson, who had known Towne for years, already had him lined up to pen a re-make of the John Garfield melodrama, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). But when that film fell through, both Nicholson and Towne elected to do The Last Detail (Nicholson would later make The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) for director Bob Rafelson with David Mamet writing the screenplay). Nicholson, it should be noted, also passed on the role that Robert Redford eventually played in The Sting (1973) in order to do The Last Detail.

Given the iconoclastic nature of the script’s main character, Nicholson and Towne couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator than director Hal Ashby. Ashby was, by anyone’s standards, about two steps away from being a straight-up hippie, a shaggy-haired, bearded man whose previous film, Harold and Maude (1971), was too eccentric and bizarre for mainstream audiences and was written off as a failure at the time. Nicholson, Towne, and Ashby knew that Darryl Ponicsan’s source novel was a richly metaphorical piece that would allow them to comment on the rift in American society between the innocents and the good ol’ boys who were beginning to fear the rumblings of the youth movement. It would be an understatement to say that they made the most of what they were given.

The film they delivered to Columbia Pictures is a marvel of small details, colorful language, and utterly believable character development, which cumulatively pack a real emotional wallop. The dour atmosphere is also helped immensely by the washed-out look of the film, courtesy of Michael Chapman, who would go on to shoot both Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). (Chapman briefly appears in The Last Detail as a friendly cabbie.)

There’s a sad note about the casting of The Last Detail. From the moment he read the book, Nicholson wanted his dear friend, Rupert Crosse, to play Mulhall, and looked forward to verbally jousting with him on the big screen. But Crosse became ill with cancer, and died of the disease in March of 1973. As it stands, Nicholson’s Buddusky tends to overshadow Mulhall, even though Young is nothing short of solid. However, the film may have played as more of an overt buddy picture had Crosse been able to fill the role.

Director: Hal Ashby
Producer: Gerald Ayres
Screenplay: Robert Towne (based on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan)
Cinematography: Michael Chapman
Music: Johnny Mandel
Editing: Robert C. Jones
Production Design: Michael Haller
Costume Design: Ted Parvin
Cast: Jack Nicholson (Buddusky), Otis Young (Mulhall), Randy Quaid (Meadows), Clifton James (Chief Master-at-Arms), Michael Moriarty (Marine Duty Officer), Carol Kane (Young Whore), Luana Anders (Donna), Kathleen Miller (Annette), Nancy Allen (Nancy), Gerry Salsberg (Henry), Don McGovern (Bartender).
C-106 min.

by Paul Tatara


~for Kendra~