TCM Schedule for Friday, December 4 -- Primetime Feature -- Pen Pals

[Staph]

Today we have movies about misfits, and tonight we have a trio of films about pen pals, including 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), The Little Shop Around The Corner (1940), and A Letter For Evie (1945). And at 6:00 a.m., don't miss the saddest movie ever made -- Old Yeller (1958). Enjoy!


6:00am -- Old Yeller (1958)
A frontier boy develops close ties with a yellow dog.
Cast: Dorothy McGuire, Fess Parker, Jeff York, Chuck Connors
Dir: Robert Stevenson
C-84 mins, TV-G

The dog, Old Yeller, although described in the dialogue as a mongrel, is portrayed by a Yellow Labrador Retriever and, in the book, is a Black-Mouthed Cur, which is not recognized as a separate breed.


7:30am -- The 400 Blows (1959)
A 12-year-old boy turns to crime to escape family problems.
Cast: Guy Decomble, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Remy
Dir: François Truffaut
BW-100 mins, TV-14

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen -- François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy

The title of the film comes from the French idiom "faire les quatre cents coups", meaning "to raise hell".


9:15am -- The Member of the Wedding (1952)
When her brother marries, a 12-year-old girl faces the awkward pains of adolescence.
Cast: Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, Brandon de Wilde, Arthur Franz
Dir: Fred Zinnemann
BW-89 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Julie Harris

Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, and Brandon De Wilde all repeated their roles from the original Broadway production. Julie Harris was 27, when she played 12 year-old Frankie Addams in the film.


11:00am -- A Thousand Clowns (1965)
A free-living New Yorker fights to maintain custody of his nephew.
Cast: Jason Robards Jr., Barbara Harris, Martin Balsam, Barry Gordon
Dir: Fred Coe
BW-118 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Martin Balsam

Nominated for Oscars for Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment -- Don Walker, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Herb Gardner, and Best Picture

Jason Robards originated the role "Murray Burns" on Broadway in 1962 with Sandy Dennis in a Tony Award-winning performance as "Sandra Markowitz". The play won the 1963 Tony Award as Best Play.


1:00pm -- Kes (1970)
A young man finds escape from his working-class life training a pet falcon.
Cast: David Bradley, Lynne Perrie, Freddie Fletcher, Colin Welland
Dir: Kenneth Loach
C-111 mins, TV-PG

The child actors who were beaten (actually caned on the hand) by the character of the school headmaster were paid an additional 50 pence for their trouble, according to a BBC Radio 4 interview.


3:00pm -- Billy Liar (1963)
An emotionally stunted clerk retreats into his fantasies.
Cast: Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne
Dir: John Schlesinger
BW-99 mins, TV-PG

Keith Waterhouse wrote the novel "Billy Liar" inspired by the cartoon story "Walter Mitty" by James Thurber.


4:45pm -- The Young Stranger (1957)
A neglected teen gets into trouble with the law.
Cast: James MacArthur, Kim Hunter, James Daly, James Gregory
Dir: John Frankenheimer
BW-84 mins, TV-PG

James MacArthur, best remembered as Danno -- Detective Danny Williams in the television series Hawaii Five-O, is the adopted son of playwright Charles MacArthur and actress Helen Hayes.


6:15pm -- Edge of the City (1957)
An army deserter and a black dock worker join forces against a corrupt union official.
Cast: John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier, Jack Warden, Kathleen Maguire
Dir: Martin Ritt
BW-86 mins, TV-PG

Known as A Man Is Ten Feet Tall in the UK.


7:52pm -- One Reel Wonders: Italy's In Season (1967)
Promotional short for MGM's Three Bites in the Apple (1967).
Cast: David McCallum, Tammy Grimes, Sylva Koscina
C-7 mins

Watch for a cameo by Robert Vaughn, McCallum's co-star in the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Vaughn was also in Italy, filming The Venetian Affair (1967)


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: PEN PALS


8:00pm -- 84 Charing Cross Road (1986)
A shut-in's correspondence with a London book dealer leads to a close friendship.
Cast: Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench, Jean De Baer
Dir: David Jones
C-99 mins, TV-PG

When they made the film the famous shop was a record store so they rebuilt it at Shepperton Studios. That also made it easier to change the passing traffic from the 1940's to the 1970's.


10:00pm -- The Shop Around The Corner (1940)
Feuding co-workers don't realize they're secret romantic pen pals.
Cast: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut
Dir: Ernst Lubitsch
BW-99 mins, TV-G

While directing this movie, Ernst Lubitsch drew upon his extensive experiences working in his father's Berlin shop as a young lad. At the film's January 25, 1940 premiere at Radio City Music Hall, Lubitsch remarked, "I have known just such a little shop in Budapest...The feeling between the boss and those who work for him is pretty much the same the world over, it seems to me. Everyone is afraid of losing his job and everyone knows how little human worries can affect his job. If the boss has a touch of dyspepsia, better be careful not to step on his toes; when things have gone well with him, the whole staff reflects his good humor.


12:00am -- A Letter For Evie (1945)
A timid soldier sends his buddy's picture to a romantic pen pal.
Cast: Marsha Hunt, John Carroll, Hume Cronyn, Spring Byington
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-89 mins, TV-PG

Based on the short story The Adventure of a Ready Letter Writer by Blanche Brace, who apparently was a big fan of Cyrano de Bergerac.


2:00am -- The Wicker Man (1974)
A conservative police officer investigates a girl's disappearance on an island dominated by paganism.
Cast: Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt
Dir: Robin Hardy
C-88 mins

A body double was secretly used for the naked rear shots of Willow dancing. The scenes were filmed after Britt Ekland had left the set. The body double was used because Ekland would only agree to topless shots of her body. After shooting was over, not only was Ekland furious to learn she had been doubled in some shots but that she was also a few weeks pregnant in that scene. Director Robin Hardy says it was Ekland herself who did not want her bottom to be filmed, as she did not like it.


3:45am -- Curse of the Demon (1958)
An anthropologist investigates a devil worshipper who commands a deadly demon.
Cast: Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis, Maurce Denham
Dir: Jacques Tourneur
BW-96 mins, TV-PG

This film was mentioned in the opening song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) ("Science Fiction Double Feature"): "Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes, but passing them used lots of skill".


5:30am -- Time Out For Trouble (1961)
Filmmakers examine household accidents to determine their causes.
Cast: Bonnie Hammett, John Nesom, Stephen Bell
Dir: David B. Glidden
BW-19 mins, TV-PG

Produced by the University of Oklahoma, General Services Extension Division.

[Staph]

1. Old Yeller

It’s almost impossible to discuss Walt Disney’s Old Yeller without jumping straight into a consideration of the 1957 film’s third act raison d'etre – the death of the eponymous mongrel at the hands of his grief-stricken young owner (Tommy Kirk). Without this tragic turn of events, the story (based on a novel by Texas prairie writer Fred Gipson) would have made passable entertainment and still turned a profit for the Buena Vista Distribution Company without invalidating New York Times critic Bosley Crowther’s assessment of it as “a nice, trim little family picture.” With the inclusion of this unexpected and entirely horrific complication, the tale became legend – perhaps even a generational rite of passage. Stephen King might never have written Cujo had Old Yeller not become infected with rabies while protecting his adopted frontier family from an afflicted gray wolf; one of the best laugh lines in the 1981 military comedy Stripes is when loose cannon non-com Bill Murray rallies the troops with the truth-or-dare question “Who cried when Old Yeller got shot?” The twist in the wagging tail of Old Yeller has in the half century since its release become a pop cultural punch line for such sitcoms as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Friends (in which it is referred to as a “sick doggy snuff film”), while in the syndicated comic strip Garfield, the lasagna-loving, dog-hating fat cat praises the film’s “happy” ending.

Love it or hate it, the death of Old Yeller is thematically consistent with Walt Disney product of the post-WWII era, in which traumatic turning points were key to the studio’s aesthetic. Disney’s brand of tough love meant that Bambi (1942) had to see his mother gunned down before his very eyes while Dumbo (1941) was torn from his own mother’s embrace and sold into a kind of slavery and Pinocchio (1940) and his tearaway chums were turned into braying donkeys.

Some cultural critics have gone so far as to accuse Walt Disney of inflicting unnecessary trauma on a generation of innocents. In a 1993 issue of Bright Lights Film Journal, writer C. Jerry Kutner declared “Old Yeller isn’t just about child abuse, it is child abuse.” Yet none of the particulars cited to support this argument are Walt Disney’s invention and come instead straight from the 1956 novel by Fred Gipson.

Born Frederick Benjamin Gipson in 1908 on a cotton farm in Mason, Texas, Gipson worked his way toward a journalism degree at the University of Texas at Austin as a goat driver. While writing cowboy short stories and novels, he toiled as a reporter for The Daily Texan, the San Angelo Standard-Times and The Denver Post, among other papers. Gipson published his first novel in 1946 - The Fabulous Empire: Colonel Zack Miller's Story - and had his first success three years later when Hound Dog Man was included in Doubleday’s Book-of-the-Month Club. His novel Old Yeller was inspired by his maternal grandfather’s recollections of frontier life, which included an anecdote of how the family’s herding dog became infected with rabies and had to be put down with a musket round. Gipson traveled to Burbank to assist in Disney’s adaptation and to bestow his blessing on the project but couldn’t wait to quit the noise and congestion of Los Angeles for his native Mason, Texas, where he died in 1973.

Tightly constructed around a series of episodic vignettes and directed with a sure hand by Disney mainstay Robert Stevenson, Old Yeller was filmed at the 700 acre Golden Oak Ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley, thirty miles north of Disney. Utilizing a small cast (as one of the actors put it, “the only extras were chickens”), the film benefits from warm and winning performances by Fess Parker (whose screen time amounts to less than fifteen minutes), Dorothy McGuire, a pre-Rifleman Chuck Connors and gifted child actors Tommy Kirk, Kevin Corcoran and Beverly Washburn. Kirk and Corcoran would play brothers in five films (among them Swiss Family Robinson (1960) and Old Yeller’s 1963 sequel Savage Sam) but Kirk’s promising career derailed after his homosexuality proved a deal-breaker for Disney. (An arrest for marijuana possession also caused Kirk to lose a choice role in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965).) More successful in transitioning to non-juvenile fare was Beverly Washburn, who went on to feature prominently in Jack Hill’s cult classic Spider Baby (1968) and appear as a guest on a number of popular television series (Wagon Train, Star Trek, The Streets of San Francisco) through the next two decades. Purchased for three dollars from a Van Nuys animal shelter, the real star of Old Yeller was a yellow Black Mouth Cur that trainer Frank Weatherwax named Spike. Spike went on to appear in 20th-Century-Fox’s 1960 remake of A Dog of Flanders, as well as on the short-lived NBC series The Westerner starring Brian Keith, and sired two more generations of animal actors.

Producer: Bill Anderson, Walt Disney
Director: Robert Stevenson
Screenplay: Fred Gipson, William Tunberg
Music: Oliver Wallace, Will Schaefer
Cinematography: Charles P. Boyle
Editing: Stanley E. Johnson
Art Direction: Carroll Clark
Cast: Dorothy McGuire (Katie Coates), Fess Parker (Jim Coates), Tommy Kirk (Travis Coates), Kevin Corcoran (Arliss Coates), Jeff York (Bud Searcy), Beverly Washburn (Lisbeth Searcy), Chuck Connors (Burn Sanderson), Spike (Old Yeller).
C-83m.

by Richard Harland Smith

SOURCES:
Fred Gipson biographical sketch, Harry Ransom Center/The University of Texas at Austin
Tommy Kirk interview by Kevin Minton, Filmfax No. 38, 1993
The Horror of Disney’s Old Yeller by C. Jerry Kutner, Bright Lights Film Journal No. 11, 1993
Interviews with Fess Parker, Tommy Kirk, Kevin Corcoran, Beverly Washburn, T. Beck Gipson, Roy Edward Disney and Robert Weatherwax, Old Yeller: Remembering a Classic, 2002