TCM Schedule for Friday, March 6 -- In Too Deep

[Staph]

The morning begins with movies based on novels by Rudyard Kipling and Sir Walter Scott. The afternoon includes a couple of classics -- Flower Drum Song (1961) and Picnic (1955). And in the evening we go deep, very deep with a trio of submarine movies. Enjoy!


6:00am -- 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.


8:00am -- Quentin Durward (1955)
A gallant Scots knight falls in love with his uncle's future wife.
Cast: Robert Taylor, Kay Kendall, Robert Morley, George Cole
Dir: Richard Thorpe
C-101 mins, TV-G

The lead was first offered to Grace Kelly, who declined.


9:45am -- Ivanhoe (1952)
Sir Walter Scott's classic tale of the noble knight torn between his fair lady and a beautiful Jew.
Cast: Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders
Dir: Richard Thorpe
C-107 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Cinematography, Color -- Freddie Young, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture -- Miklós Rózsa, and Best Picture

Scriptwriter Marguerite Roberts was a member of the American Communist Party and in 1951 she was ordered to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Roberts and her husband John Sanford refused to name fellow members of the party and were both blacklisted. M-G-M received permission from the SWG (Screen Writer's Guild) to remove Roberts' name from the film after she refused to testify before HUAC.


11:45am -- Beau Brummell (1954)
An English Don Juan courts the Prince of Wales' favor while romancing his way through society.
Cast: Stewart Granger, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Ustinov, Robert Morley
Dir: Curtis Bernhardt
C-112 mins, TV-PG

The character of Lady Patricia Belham (played by Elizabeth Taylor) was invented for this film in order to present Brummell as unambiguously heterosexual, in accordance with the Production Code Administration's strictures. (The PCA was begun by Will Hays and later headed by Joseph Breen, creators of the oft-mentioned Hays Code and Breen Code.)


1:45pm -- The Runaway (1961)
A priest and a dog help a young delinquent find a new lease on life.
Cast: Chick Chandler, St. Mike (A Greyhound), Alex Montoya, Roger Mobley
Dir: Claudio Guzman
BW-85 mins, TV-G

80% of the script was filmed with a crew of five with a stand-in for Romero. (And personally, let me add that I once had a terrible crush on Roger Mobley -- he was sooooo cute in Emil and the Detectives (1964).)


3:30pm -- Flower Drum Song (1961)
A refugee travels to Chinatown as a mail-order bride.
Cast: Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, Juanita Hall, Jack Soo
Dir: Henry Koster
C-131 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color -- Alexander Golitzen, Joseph C. Wright and Howard Bristol, Best Cinematography, Color -- Russell Metty, Best Costume Design, Color -- Irene Sharaff, Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Alfred Newman and Ken Darby, and Best Sound -- Waldon O. Watson (Revue SSD)

Jack Soo who plays Sammy Fong in the film appeared in the original Broadway cast, but not as Sammy. On Broadway he played Frankie Wing, Sammy Fong's emcee.


6:00pm -- Picnic (1955)
A handsome drifter ignites passions at a small-town Labor Day picnic.
Cast: William Holden, Kim Novak, Betty Field, Susan Strasberg
Dir: Joshua Logan
C-113 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color -- William Flannery, Jo Mielziner and Robert Priestley, and Best Film Editing -- Charles Nelson and William A. Lyon

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Arthur O'Connell, Best Director -- Joshua Logan, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture -- George Duning, and Best Picture

Insisting on authenticity, director Joshua Logan filmed in several Kansas towns, including Hutchinson, only 75 miles from Udall, a town leveled by a tornado days after filming began. "It's gotta look like Kansas and it will if I have to kill every last one of ya!," the volatile Logan yelled at his cast. William Holden suffered a leg gash on a railroad signal light, Kim Novak was stung on the hip by a bee underneath her $500 Jean Louis gown, and Rosalind Russell was "bruised from earlobe to toenail during a wild gambol across a suspension bridge." A local 70-year-old "spinster" saw her film debut canceled when she broke both legs and several ribs during a fall down an embankment. Filming was interrupted almost daily by hailstorms and "wailing" tornado warnings. The actual picnic was on a muddy fairground at Halstead, Kansas. Cast and crew were "half-consumed" by "carnivorous" bugs. Phone calls had to be made from old-time crank telephones at Halstead's Baker Hotel.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: IN TOO DEEP


8:00pm -- Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)
Officers on a WWII submarine clash during a perilous Pacific tour.
Cast: Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster, Jack Warden, Brad Dexter
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-93 mins, TV-PG

The older / younger dynamic (deskbound older commander taking the reins of what was to be the younger commander's first ship, yet keeping the younger officer on as the Exec) was featured prominently in another Robert Wise film some 20 years later: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).


9:45pm -- Submarine Command (1951)
A Naval commander torments himself over a crewman's death.
Cast: William Holden, Nancy Olson, William Bendix, Don Taylor
Dir: John Farrow
BW-87 mins, TV-G

Although Nancy Olson hated the script to Big Jim McLain (1952), an anti-communist movie, she figured that six weeks in Hawaii and a chance to work with an iconic star like John Wayne seemed a good enough reason to accept. Besides, she thought the film would flop and nobody would see it. She didn't count on the constant TV exposure the film has had and says people stop her all the time to say they've seen her in it. Olson is a staunch liberal Democrat and she said she and Wayne would often have political arguments but she would always let Wayne have the last word. She also said he loved women and was a flirt but never crossed the line and was always the perfect gentleman.


11:15pm -- Ice Station Zebra (1968)
A sub commander on a perilous mission must ferret out a Soviet agent on his ship.
Cast: Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown
Dir: John Sturges
C-152 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Cinematography -- Daniel L. Fapp, and Best Effects, Special Visual Effects -- Hal Millar and J. McMillan Johnson

Patrick McGoohan was filming his famous TV series "The Prisoner" (1967) at the time he appeared in this movie. In order to allow him to take time off from his TV series, the episode "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" was written in which McGoohan's character, Number Six, has his mind transferred into the body of another man.


2:00am -- Willie Dynamite (1974)
A social worker tries to reform a pimp.
Cast: Roscoe Orman, Diana Sands, Thalmus Rasulala, Joyce Walker
Dir: Gilbert Moses
C-102 mins, TV-MA

Roscoe Orman, who plays Willie Dynamite, is much better known as Gordon on Sesame Street.

4:00am -- Sweet Jesus, Preacher Man (1973)
A black hit man poses as a Baptist preacher in a ghetto church.
Cast: Roger E. Mosley, William Smith, Michael Pataki, Tom Johnigarn
Dir: Henning Schellerup
BW-99 mins, TV-MA

The hitman/preacher is played by Roger E. Mosley, much better known as Thomas Magnum's helicopter pilot/buddy TC.

[Staph]

1. Kim (1950)

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