TCM Schedule for Thursday, May 6 -- TCM Spotlight -- Race and Hollywood

[Staph]

In the morning we have more films with May's Star of the Month Donna Reed. In the afternoon we celebrate the 95th birthday of actor / writer / director / producer / editor / production designer / costume designer / art director / cinematographer Orson Welles. And tonight we continue the story of Race and Hollywood, a view of Native Americans in the movies. Enjoy!


4:44am -- One Reel Wonders: Judy Garland Biography (1962)
BW-4 mins

Judy Garland performed two songs in films that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song: "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz (1939) and "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" from The Harvey Girls (1946); performed four more songs that were nominated: "Our Love Affair" from Strike Up the Band (1940), "How About You?" from Babes on Broadway (1941), "The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and "The Man That Got Away" from A Star Is Born (1954); and performed others that became standards, including "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).


5:00am -- The Human Comedy (1943)
A small-town telegraph boy deals with the strains of growing up during World War II.
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Frank Morgan, James Craig, Marsha Hunt
Dir: Clarence Brown
BW-117 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story -- William Saroyan

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Mickey Rooney, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Harry Stradling Sr., Best Director -- Clarence Brown, and Best Picture

Writer William Saroyan wanted desperately to direct the film despite having no experience in directing. Louis B. Mayer told Saroyan that he would consider the request and assigned the writer to direct a one reel short. The short film was a disappointment and studio stalwart Clarence Brown was promptly assigned. Saroyan was so bitter about the experience he wrote a play about Mayer soon after titled "Get Away Old Man".


7:00am -- The Bugle Sounds (1942)
An old-time cavalry sergeant's resistance to change could cost him his post.
Cast: Wallace Beery, Marjorie Main, Lewis Stone, George Bancroft
Dir: S. Sylvan Simon
BW-102 mins, TV-G

The song Wallace Beery sings as he marches on horseback with his group is not the more famous song "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" appearing in the movie of the same name in 1949. It dates back to the Civil War, and there are many variations of it. The first known copyright of a version (listed in the soundtrack section) was in 1917, by George A. Norton.


8:45am -- Apache Trail (1942)
An outlaw and his brother are on opposite sides of a stagecoach robbery.
Cast: Lloyd Nolan, Donna Reed, William Lundigan, Ann Ayars
Dir: Richard Rosson
BW-66 mins, TV-G

Discarded footage from Stagecoach (1939) was used in this film.


10:00am -- Gentle Annie (1944)
A frontierswoman turns her family into a band of bank robbers.
Cast: James Craig, Donna Reed, Marjorie Main, Henry Morgan
Dir: Andrew Marton
BW-80 mins, TV-G

Production of the movie actually began in October 1942 with W.S. Van Dyke as director and Robert Taylor, Susan Peters, Spring Byington, Charley Grapewin, Van Johnson, Morris Ankrum and James Craig. The production was halted and finally shelved when Van Dyke became ill after 4 weeks of shooting, and when it was revived in 1944, only Ankrum and Craig remained in the cast, but in different roles.


11:30am -- Journey Into Fear (1942)
A munitions expert gets mixed up with gunrunners in Turkey.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead
Dir: Norman Foster
BW-68 mins, TV-PG

In late August 1942, RKO decided to delay the release of the movie because critics panned it in press previews. By that time, Orson Welles' contract was terminated by a new studio head. As part of the settlement, Welles agreed to recut the last reel and film additional scenes. He added the voice-over by Joseph Cotten at the beginning and end of the movie, and designed the pre-credit sequence.


12:45pm -- The Tartars (1961)
A barbarian army attacks Viking settlements along the Russian steppes.
Cast: Victor Mature, Orson Welles, Folco Lulli, Liana Orfei
Dir: Richard Thorpe
C-83 mins, TV-PG

According to Orson Welles' conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, as recounted in the book "This is Orson Welles", Victor Mature had his sandals built up by three inches to make him look taller.


2:15pm -- The Stranger (1946)
A small-town schoolteacher suspects her new husband may be an escaped Nazi war criminal.
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Philip Merivale
Dir: Orson Welles
BW-95 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story -- Victor Trivas

The vast New England town exterior sets including the church with its 124' clock tower were constructed in Hollywood on the back lot of the United Artists Studio located on Santa Monica Blvd. In some production shots taken by Like Magazine, the circular metal scaffolding of a huge collapsible natural gas storage tank can be seen behind some of the sets. The only such tank nearby a Hollywood studio was a block away from UA.


4:00pm -- The Third Man (1949)
A man's investigation of a friend's death uncovers corruption in post-World War II Vienna.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard
Dir: Carol Reed
BW-104 mins, TV-14

Won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Robert Krasker

Nominated for Oscars for Best Director -- Carol Reed, and Best Film Editing -- Oswald Hafenrichter

Somewhat apocryphal stories abound about Carol Reed discovering musician Anton Karas while scouring Vienna bars and nightclubs. Reed actually heard Karas playing at a production party and insisted the Austrian zither player come to Reed's hotel room and record songs to use for the contract. Later in production, Reed realized he wanted to use Karas' music for the whole film and flew Karas out to London to record the score. Karas became a top-selling musician thanks to the film and opened a nightclub called "The Third Man" in Vienna, which he ran to the end of his days.


5:45pm -- Citizen Kane (1941)
The investigation of a publishing tycoon's dying words reveals conflicting stories about his scandalous life.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick
Dir: Orson Welles
BW-120 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Writing, Original Screenplay -- Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles (On Friday, July 19th, 2003, Orson Welles' Oscar statuette went on sale at an auction at Christie's, New York, but was voluntarily withdrawn so the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences could buy it back for just 1 dollar. The statuette, included in a large selection of Welles-related material, was going to be sold by Beatrice Welles, the youngest of the filmmaker's three daughters and the sole heir of his estate and was expected to sell at over 300,000 dollars.)

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Orson Welles, Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White -- Perry Ferguson, Van Nest Polglase, A. Roland Fields and Darrell Silvera, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Gregg Toland, Best Director -- Orson Welles, Best Film Editing -- Robert Wise, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture -- Bernard Herrmann, Best Sound, Recording -- John Aalberg (RKO Radio SSD), and Best Picture

The camera looks up at Charles Foster Kane and his best friend Jedediah Leland and down at weaker characters like Susan Alexander Kane. This was a technique that Orson Welles borrowed from John Ford who had used it two years previously on Stagecoach (1939). Welles privately watched Stagecoach (1939) about 40 times while making this film.


What's On Tonight: TCM SPOTLIGHT: RACE AND HOLLYWOOD


8:00pm -- The Outsider (1962)
A Native veteran who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima suffers from survivor's guilt.
Cast: Tony Curtis, James Franciscus, Gregory Walcott, Bruce Bennett
Dir: Delbert Mann
BW-104 mins, TV-PG

Film debut of Lynda Day George.


10:00pm -- Walk The Proud Land (1956)
A government agent tries to treat the Apaches with respect.
Cast: Audie Murphy, Anne Bancroft, Pat Crowley, Charles Drake
Dir: Jesse Hibbs
C-88 mins, TV-G

After his three years as an Indian agent, the real-life John Philip Clum ran newspapers in Tucson (The Arizona Citizen), and later Tombstone (The Tombstone Epitaph), Arizona Territory. He was the mayor of Tombstone during the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and was a lifelong friend of Wyatt Earp.


11:48pm -- One Reel Wonders: Challenge Of The Wilderness (1951)
This short shows the challenges faced by MGM's production crew and cast during the filming the Western feature Westward the Women (1951).
Dir: Jack Atlas
BW-11 mins

The filming took place in the Utah desert, about 50 miles west of the small town of Kanab. The studio had to build its own roads to the shooting locations and constructed all the sets on site. Water, food, and other supplies had to be trucked in daily. The difficult living conditions helped add to the realism of the story of a wagon train of women heading west.


12:00am -- The Far Horizons (1955)
Romanticized version of Lewis and Clarks voyage of discovery through the American West.
Cast: Fred MacMurray, Charlton Heston, Donna Reed, Barbara Hale
Dir: Rudolph Maté
C-108 mins, TV-PG

The lead roles were originally offered to Gary Cooper and John Wayne, but Cooper vehemently rejected the offer.


2:00am -- Apache (1954)
Refusing to accept peace, a renegade leads a one-man war against the U.S. Cavalry.
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Jean Peters, John McIntire, Charles Buchinsky
Dir: Robert Aldrich
C-87 mins, TV-PG

There really was a renegade Apache warrior called Massai, who was a bloodthirsty killer renowned for stealing, raping and murdering. He did indeed escape from a prison train bound for Florida and made his way back to his homeland. It is, however, doubtful that he was six feet tall and had blue eyes like Burt Lancaster.


3:45am -- Navajo Joe (1967)
An Indian takes vengeance on the outlaw band that killed his tribe.
Cast: Burt Reynolds, Aldo Sambrell, Nicoletta Machiavelli, Tanya Lopert
Dir: Sergio Corbucci
C-92 mins, TV-14

Burt Reynolds only agreed to make this film because he was under the impression that Sergio Leone would be directing. When he found out it was Sergio Corbucci he tried to pull out, but the contracts had already been signed and it was too late.

[Staph]

1. The Outsider (1962)

The true story of World War II hero Ira Hamilton Hayes, a Pima Indian from an Arizona reservation, is one of the great American tragedies and one that deals with complex issues of personal identity, national fame and racial prejudice. Hayes had never ventured off his tribal land until he left to enlist in the Marines. After a grueling stint in Boot Camp, he was transferred to the Pacific where he saw action in the bloody fighting at Iwo Jima. After he was identified as one of the soldiers lifting the American flag on Mt. Suribachi in Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph, he was summoned to Washington, D.C. by the President and, along with the surviving members of the men in the photograph, was drafted into participating in a war bond drive to raise money for the armed forces. Still suffering from grief and depression from his war experiences and the deaths of his Marine friends, Hayes quickly went into a downward spiral, acerbated by his new-found taste for alcohol and the pressures of being trotted out as a national hero in endless public appearances. Even his own tribal community tried to pressure him to become a Washington lobbyist in the hope he could improve living conditions on the reservation but his drinking problem sabotaged any efforts he made. He then disappeared from the public eye, working in menial jobs and getting arrested habitually for drunkenness. Hayes eventually returned to his reservation a broken man and died of exposure after a night of heavy drinking on January 24, 1955.

His story was most recently told in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Clint Eastwood’s award-winning drama about the soldiers immortalized in Rosenthal’s iconic photo which was snapped on Feb. 23, 1945. Hayes (played by Adam Beach), however, was only part of the story depicted in Eastwood’s revisionist history lesson. The Pima Indian’s sad story was actually the main subject of two earlier works, one of which was a television production entitled The American with Lee Marvin in the title role, and the 1961 biopic The Outsider, directed by Delbert Mann and starring Tony Curtis as Hayes.

A sympathetic, well-intentioned social drama, The Outsider takes artistic license with some of the facts for dramatic reasons and adds a fictitious character, Jim Sorenson (James Franciscus), as Hayes’ best friend; he was allegedly based on Hayes’ fellow soldier Franklin Sousley. Inserting a fabricated character into the film biography of Hayes and have him play an important part in his life is problematic but so is the absence of any Native American actors in any of the main roles in The Outsider. Having Caucasian actors play ethnic roles was nothing new for Hollywood and this practice was still fairly standard up until the early sixties. Nevertheless, it is still jarring to see Tony Curtis in dark skin makeup with stylized eyebrows and hair.

But the main weakness of The Outsider is its superficial presentation of Ira Hayes' short, unhappy life; the title character remains an enigma and we never learn what makes him tick. His intense desire to become assimilated into white culture and become a good marine is realized through his relationship with Sorenson, which as depicted on-screen, suggests it is something much deeper than just a friendship. How else to explain Hayes’ shocked response to his friend’s death on the battlefield and his downward spiral that begins in reaction to that? According to The Outsider, this was a personal tragedy from which he would never recover. (He would probably be diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome now and treated). In the end, Hayes comes off as a man who barely had a life and spent his short years locked in a prison of his own making – a man estranged not just from his own culture but from the human race.


Despite the film's low key approach and downbeat tone, The Outsider deserves credit for tackling an unpopular topic in the Pre-Civil Rights era and even Tony Curtis considers the film one of his better dramatic efforts. In his autobiography, American Prince, he wrote, “People tell me I should have won an Oscar for my portrayal of Ira, but even though a lot of people went to see the picture, there wasn’t enough buzz about it to move the Academy’s voters. But I loved playing this role; I felt a special empathy for anyone in pain, especially the pain of being shunted aside or treated poorly.”

One final bit of trivia: You can see the real Ira Hayes playing himself in a recreation of the famous flag raising scene in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), a John Wayne war drama directed by Allan Dwan.

Producer: Sy Bartlett
Director: Delbert Mann
Screenplay: William Bradford Huie, Stewart Stern
Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle
Art Direction: Alexander Golitzen, Ted Haworth
Music: Leonard Rosenman
Film Editing: Marjorie Fowler
Cast: Tony Curtis (Ira Hamilton Hayes), James Franciscus (Pvt. James B. Sorenson), Gregory Walcott (Sgt. Kiley), Bruce Bennett (Gen. Bridges), Vivian Nathan (Nancy Hayes), Edmund Hashim (Jay Morago), Paul Comi (Sgt. Boyle), Stanley Adams (Noomie), Wayne Heffley (Cpl. Johnson), Ralph Moody (Uncle).
BW- 108m.

by Jeff Stafford

SOURCES:
American Prince by Tony Curtis (Harmony)
Ira Hamilton Hayes on www.findagrave.com
Ira Hayes on en.wikipedia.org
IMDB