TCM Schedule for Friday, September 10 -- TCM Prime Time Feature -- Cornel Wilde

[Staph]

Happy birthday to Robert Wise, born 96 years ago today. We have a potload of his films today -- beginning with his directorial debut (The Curse of the Cat People (1944)), and continuing with a broad selection of his films up to but not including The Sound of Music (1965). Tonight we have a trio of films starring Cornel Wilde, including one that is also directed by Wilde, as well as his only Oscar-nominated role in A Song To Remember (1945). And late night, we've got a couple of Johnny Cash films, in anticipation of his birthday on Sunday, September 12. Enjoy!


6:00am -- The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
A lonely child creates an imaginary playmate with surprisingly dangerous results.
Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter
Dir: Gunther V. Fritsch
BW-70 mins, TV-PG

Robert Wise's first directorial screen credit, after he was called in to finish what was going to be short subject director Gunther von Fritsch's first feature film debut. Fritsch had fallen behind schedule and was replaced by Wise and the film was completed nine days behind schedule and over budget.


7:15am -- The Body Snatcher (1945)
To continue his medical experiments, a doctor must buy corpses from a grave robber.
Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-78 mins, TV-PG

This film featured the 8th and last on-screen teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Filming took place October 25-November 17 1944, delaying the completion of Karloff's "Isle of the Dead".


8:45am -- Born To Kill (1947)
A murderer marries a young innocent then goes after her more experienced sister.
Cast: Claire Trevor, Lawrence Tierney, Walter Slezak, Phillip Terry
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-92 mins, TV-PG

Filmed in Reno, Nevada.


10:30am -- Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)
True story of boxer Rocky Graziano's rise from juvenile delinquent to world champ.
Cast: Joseph Buloff, Sal Mineo, Everett Sloane, Eileen Heckart
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-114 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown, Edwin B. Willis and F. Keogh Gleason, and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Joseph Ruttenberg

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Film Editing -- Albert Akst

Film debuts of Steve McQueen, Dean Jones, Frank Campanella, Robert Loggia, and Angela Cartwright.


12:30pm -- This Could Be The Night (1957)
A schoolteacher gets a secretarial job at a gangster-run nightclub.
Cast: Jean Simmons, Paul Douglas, Anthony Franciosa, Julie Wilson
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-104 mins, TV-PG

Coming from Broadway, Anthony Franciosa made his debut in this film in a leading role.


2:15pm -- 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).


4:00pm -- Two For The Seesaw (1962)
A conservative attorney considering a divorce gets involved with an emotionally fragile dancer in New York.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shirley MacLaine, Edmon Ryan, Elisabeth Fraser
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-119 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Ted D. McCord, and Best Music, Original Song -- André Previn (music) and Dory Previn (lyrics) (as Dory Langdon) for the song "Song from Two for the Seesaw (Second Chance)"

Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman were both set to do this film but when Taylor became ill during the early filming of Cleopatra (1963), Newman was able to do The Hustler (1961) instead.


6:00pm -- The Haunting (1963)
A team of psychic investigators moves into a haunted house that destroys all who live there.
Cast: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-112 mins, TV-PG

Director Robert Wise read a review of Shirley Jackson's novel "The Haunting of Hill House" in Time Magazine and decided to get the rights to the novel. He later met the writer herself to talk about ideas for the film. He asked her if she had thought of other titles for the novel, because the title would not work for the film. She told him that the only other title she had considered was simply "The Haunting", so Wise decided to use it for the film.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: CORNEL WILDE


8:00pm -- Beach Red (1967)
American soldiers fight to take a Japanese-occupied island during World War II.
Cast: Cornel Wilde, Rip Torn, Burr De Benning, Patrick Wolfe
Dir: Cornel Wilde
C-104 mins, TV-MA

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Film Editing -- Frank P. Keller

In an interview with British Films and Filming magazine in October 1970, director Cornel Wilde discussed his on-set methodology : "I used to find so often in Hollywood that there was nothing more tedious than waiting around. Many directors used a stereotypical system of master shot, medium shot, over-shoulder shots, and then close-ups, with long pauses in between for cameras and lights to be adjusted. I got to my dressing room to paint or write- anything to keep my mind alive. So now my policy is to keep three camera crews working simultaneously, so that actors can move from one set-up to the next without delay. I get the occasional protest, but it isn't easy for anybody to complain that I'm working them too hard, because they can see that I'm working harder than anybody else myself."


9:48pm -- One Reel Wonders: Beach Of Nazare (1957)
This Screenliner short looks at the dress and customs of Nazaré, a fishing village on Portugal's Atlantic coast.
Narrator: Peter Roberts
Dir: Van Campen Heilner
BW-8 mins

Per Wikipedia -- "According to legend, the town derives its name from a small statue of the Virgin Mary, a Black Madonna, brought by a monk in the 4th century from Nazareth, Palestine to a monastery near the city of Mérida, Spain and brought to its current place in 711 by another monk accompanied by Roderic, the last Visigoth king. After their arrival at the seaside they decided to become hermits. The monk lived and died in a small already existing grotto, on top of a cliff above the sea. After his death and according to the monk wishes the king buried him in the grotto where he left, on an altar, the statue of the Black Madonna."


10:00pm -- Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
A beautiful neurotic will stop at nothing to hold onto her husband's love.
Cast: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price
Dir: John M. Stahl
C-110 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Color -- Leon Shamroy

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Gene Tierney, Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Color -- Lyle R. Wheeler, Maurice Ransford and Thomas Little, and Best Sound, Recording -- Thomas T. Moulton (20th Century-Fox SSD)

The title is taken from a line from William Shakespeare's "Hamlet".


12:00am -- A Song to Remember (1945)
The famed composer Chopin sacrifices everything, even love, for his native Poland.
Cast: Paul Muni, Merle Oberon, Cornel Wilde, Nina Foch
Dir: Charles Vidor
C-112 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Cornel Wilde, Best Cinematography, Color -- Tony Gaudio and Allen M. Davey, Best Film Editing -- Charles Nelson, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture -- Miklós Rózsa and Morris Stoloff, Best Sound, Recording -- John P. Livadary (Columbia SSD), and Best Writing, Original Story -- Ernst Marischka

Darren McGavin's film debut.


2:00am -- Five Minutes to Live (1961)
A deranged bandit holds a bank president's wife hostage.
Cast: Johnny Cash, Donald Woods, Cay Forester, Pamela Mason
Dir: Bill Karn
BW-74 mins, TV-PG

Lots of future television stars in this movie -- Ronnie Howard (Opie Taylor and Richie Cunningham, of course!), Vic Tayback (Mel the cook in Alice (1976-1985)), Norma Varden (Hazel's neighbor Harriet Johnson in Hazel (1961-1964), and in an uncredited bit part, Rue McClanahan (Blanche Devereaux from The Golden Girls (1985-1992)).


3:30am -- I Walk the Line (1970)
A Southern sheriff risks his life when he falls for a moonshiner's daughter.
Cast: Gregory Peck, Tuesday Weld, Estelle Parsons, Ralph Meeker
Dir: John Frankenheimer
C-96 mins, TV-14

Original music by Johnny Cash.


5:15am -- Short Film: Age 13 (1955)
A troubled teen deals with the death of his mother and ill treatment by his stepfather.
Cast: Michael Keslin
Dir: Arthur Swerdloff
C-27 mins, TV-G

Like many films produced and directed by Sid Davis, this one was recorded silently. The sound was recorded later and synched to fit the picture; in many cases, Arthur Swerdloff, the editor, cut to another shot to allow him to re-sync the audio and the video. See also, Gang Boy (1954).


5:45am -- Short Film: The Trouble Maker (1959)
In this educational film, a student attempts to cause problems for others around him.
Cast: Bret Waller
Dir: Herk Harvey
BW-12 mins, TV-G

Filmed in Lawrence, Kansas.

[Staph]

1. Robert Wise Biography

Veteran Hollywood craftsman Robert Wise directed 39 films from 1944 to 1989, establishing a reputation for proficiency in such a wide variety of genres as to cause some critics to say there is no Wise style. At the beginning of his career, he worked with equal facility in horror (The Curse of the Cat People 1944), film noir (Born to Kill 1947), Westerns ("Blood on the Moon" 1948), sports ("The Set-Up" 1949) and sci-fi ("The Day the Earth Stood Still" 1951), probably making his best films early on, before big budgets raised the stakes and made him a more cautious filmmaker. Still, you can't take those four Oscars away from him for directing and producing "West Side Story" (1961) and "The Sound of Music" (1965), and though critics may not have applauded, audiences approved his liberating the musicals from their stylized sets and taking them to the streets (and Alps).

In the decade that followed the Hoosier's arrival in Hollywood, Wise made a name for himself as an editor at RKO, earning an Oscar nomination for his work on Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) and even doing a little uncredited directing for Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942). An even greater influence than Welles on the young Wise was the producer Val Lewton who tapped him to take over for Gunther von Fritsch as director of the stylish horror picture The Curse of the Cat People. Wise's first three directorial projects (also "Mademoiselle Fifi" 1944 and Body Snatchers 1945) were all under Lewton's aegis, and he benefited from his mentor's taste for literate material, psychological drama and the film noir style.

RKO finally gave Wise his first 'A' film budget for the ambitious Western "Blood on the Moon", starring Robert Mitchum, but it was his last film at RKO, the boxing feature "The Set-Up", that established him as a leading Hollywood talent. Praised for its uncompromising realism, the virtuoso editing of the fight sequences and the quasi- expressionistic reaction shots of the animalistic ringside crowd, "The Set-Up" won the Critics' Prize at Cannes but did not earn Wise a new contract with the studio. He departed for a three-year nonexclusive contract with 20th Century-Fox, where he helmed the landmark sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still", making a serious statement in a genre without any tradition or respectability. Its story of an extraterrestrial emissary of peace (Michael Rennie) was blatantly anti-nuclear in the middle of the Cold War and a significant step in sci-fi's development away from the simple-mindedness of the past (i.e., the Buck Rogers serial).

Wise entered the MGM fold to direct the multifaceted tale of a company power struggle, "Executive Suite" (1954), the first of four collaborations with screenwriter Ernest Lehman that would also include the Academy Award-winning "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music". He reteamed for the second time with Lehman on Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), adapted from the autobiography of the middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano. Wise's biggest hit of the 50s offered an outstanding star turn by Paul Newman (in his second film role) plus noteworthy debuts by Steve McQueen and Robert Loggia and picked up an Oscar for Joseph Ruttenberg's photography. Wise earned his first Oscar nomination as Best Director for "I Want to Live!" (1958), a gritty prison drama about condemned criminal Barbara Graham, which did win Susan Hayward the statuette as Best Actress.

For the balance of his career, Wise continued to pursue a varied course, often returning to genres in which he had previously distinguished himself. In horror, many consider "The Haunting" (1963) the finest supernatural story of the 60s. He revisited sci-fi at the helm of "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) and "Star Trek--The Movie" (1979) and even trod once again in the very large footprints left by "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music", faltering with "Star!" (1968) and "Rooftops" (1989), his last movie to date. Wise's thirst for diversity extended to his casts and crews. In a town where longtime associations are common, Wise never employed the same cinematographer more than twice, and that occurred on only eight occasions. In recognition of his body of work, the American Society of Cinematographers honored him with their Board of Directors Governors Award in 1997, and the American Film Institute presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award the following year. The honors may have been a bit premature, however, as Wise returned to the director's chair a final time for the 2000 Showtime remake of the TV-movie "A Storm in Summer." A popular and insightful interview subject for documentary projects on the actors and filmakers he worked with throughout his long career in the later years of his life, Wise dies in 2005 at age 91.

Films in bold type are featured on September 10


Notes

The library of the Directors Guild of America was named in honor of Wise in 1998.

Received the first Sidney P. Solow Memorial Award from the Technology Council (1992)

"In 1947, I had just finished editing a film called 'My Favorite Wife', when my boss asked if I knew Orson Welles. The studio had just given him a green light, and he needed an editor. I was aware of his remarkable record on the stage in New York and on radio but had never met him. To meet him, I visited a stage where he was shooting a test. We chatted for just a few minutes and I headed back to the editing department. My boss told me Orson had already called and wanted me to edit 'Citizen Kane'. It was an incredible experience.

"I've been asked many times if Orson looked over my shoulder and directed the editing. He never came into the editing room. I worked with him as I had with any other director. I would take notes on his comments when we ran dailies. There was a lot of give and take. There was a certain timing and rhythm he was after." --Robert Wise, from American Society of Cinematographers press material on the occasion of his receiving their Board of Governors Award

"On 'I Want to Live!' Susan Hayward wanted us to use a cameraman that she liked very much, someone who had made other pictures with her and had a knack for the glamorous look. Well, he had been last on my list for this particular drama, which was a gritty sort of crime story, the Barbara Graham murder trial piece.

"I had liked Curly Lindon's texture on a couple of films that he gave a documentary-like look to. So, I had a set-to with Susan Hayward and then a stand-off. Her agent finally got us to meet. And she said, 'So-and-so is free to do this,' and I said he won't be able to give us the documentary look we want. She finally decided to go along with us and won the Academy Award for best actress. But she sure watched the rushes." --Robert Wise in DAILY VARIETY, February 21, 1997

Inducted into the Producers Guild Hall of Fame in 1999