TCM Schedule for Friday, October 15 -- TCM Prime Time Feature -- Hammer Horror Festival

[Staph]

Happy birthday to Mervyn LeRoy, born on this day in 1900. We have a day full of his films, and an evening of mummy-based horror from Hammer Studios. Enjoy!


5:00am -- Charley's Big-Hearted Aunt (1940)
A student tries to escape expulsion by pretending to be his own rich aunt.
Cast: Arthur Askey, Phyllis Calvert, Murdoch, Felix Aylmer.
Dir: Walter Forde
BW-76 mins, TV-G

Brandon Thomas's play, "Charley's Aunt," opened in London, England on 21 December 1892. It has been made into a film more than 20 times, from the 1925 version starring James Harrison, to the 1952 version with Ray Bolger, to versions made in Sweden, Germany (both the original unifed Germany pre-WWII and West Germany post-WWII), France, Argentina, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Spain, and Hungary.


6:30am -- Five Star Final (1931)
An unscrupulous newspaper editor searches for headlines at any cost.
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Marian Marsh, H. B. Warner, Anthony Bushell
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
BW-89 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture

The Evening Gazette is based on the real-life New York Evening Graphic, the most sensational of all the Front Page-era tabloid papers. (Critics called it the Porno-Graphic.) The paper, owned by Bernarr Macfadden, published from 1924 to 1932. At the time this film was made, the Graphic had been losing circulation, because its new editor had been trying to make it a more respectable paper, just like in the film. The paper was best known for its "composographs," composite photographs used to create an otherwise unobtainable illustration.


8:00am -- Without Reservations (1946)
A woman writer falls for a war hero who's a perfect match for the hero of her latest novel.
Cast: Claudette Colbert, John Wayne, Don DeFore, Anne Triola
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
BW-101 mins, TV-PG

The opening shot shows "Arrowhead" Pictures motion picture studio. This is the actual RKO Pictures Studio Building at 780 Gower Street in Hollywood, retouched with "Arrowhead" replacing the RKO signs on the building. It remains a historic structure on the corner to this day.


10:00am -- Homecoming (1948)
A married man's wartime love affair spells trouble when peace comes.
Cast: Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Anne Baxter, John Hodiak
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
BW-113 mins, TV-PG

"The Screen Guild Theater" broadcast a 30 minute radio adaptation of the movie on October 6, 1949 with Lana Turner and Clark Gable reprising their film roles.


12:00pm -- Million Dollar Mermaid (1952)
True story of Annette Kellerman, the world's first great swimming star.
Cast: Esther Williams, Victor Mature, Walter Pidgeon, David Brian
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
C-110 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Color -- George J. Folsey

Esther Williams broke her neck diving off a 50-foot tower during the sequence in which she wears a golden swimming costume. She spent six months in a body cast before recovering to complete the film.


2:00pm -- Latin Lovers (1953)
An heiress searches for true love while vacationing in Brazil.
Cast: Lana Turner, Ricardo Montalban, John Lund, Louis Calhern
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
C-104 mins, TV-PG

Fernando Lamas was originally cast in the role that Ricardo Montalban played. Lamas and Lana Turner were lovers and when they broke up, she insisted he be replaced.


4:00pm -- Rose Marie (1954)
A trapper's daughter is torn between the Mountie who wants to civilize her and a dashing prospector.
Cast: Ann Blyth, Howard Keel, Fernando Lamas, Bert Lahr
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
C-104 mins, TV-G

Previously filmed twice, as a silent film starring Joan Crawford, Rose-Marie (1928), and later starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Rose-Marie (1936).


5:45pm -- Mister Roberts (1955)
A naval officer longing for active duty clashes with his vainglorious captain.
Cast: Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, Jack Lemmon
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
C-121 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Jack Lemmon

Nominated for Oscars for Best Sound, Recording -- William A. Mueller (Warner Bros.), and Best Picture

Before shooting the scene where Pulver identifies himself and tells the Captain that he's been on the ship for "14 months, sir", James Cagney realized that he would have to rehearse the moment with Jack Lemmon again and again so he wouldn't burst out laughing during the actual filming. Lemmon agreed, and when the scene was filmed Cagney claimed he was just barely able to hang on with a straight face, even after all the rehearsal time.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: HAMMER HORROR FESTIVAL


8:00pm -- The Mummy (1959)
A resurrected mummy stalks the archaeologists who defiled his tomb.
Cast: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Yvonne Furneaux, Eddie Byrne
Dir: Terence Fisher
C-88 mins, TV-PG

A door that Christopher Lee must crash through was accidentally bolted by a grip before the scene is shot. Lee's shoulder was dislocated when he broke down the door, but the shot remains in the movie.


9:45pm -- The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
An unearthed mummy returns to life to claim the reincarnation of his lost love.
Cast: Ronald Howard, Terence Morgan, Fred Clark, Jeanne Roland
Dir: Michael Carreras
C-80 mins, TV-PG

Michael Carreras' screenwriting pseudonym "Henry Younger" was a play on fellow Hammer producer Anthony Hinds' nom de plume "John Elder."


11:15pm -- The Mummy's Shroud (1967)
The words on an Egyptian prince's burial shroud revive a vengeful mummy.
Cast: Andre Morell, John Phillips, David Buck, Elizabeth Sellars
Dir: John Gilling
C-90 mins, TV-PG

Peter Cushing is often credited as Narrator, but Hammer Films had no record of who the Narrator is.


1:00am -- Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971)
An evil Egyptian princess' sprit possesses an Egyptologist's daughter.
Cast: Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon, James Villiers, Hugh Burden
Dir: Seth Holt
C-93 mins

The to-let sign outside the house occupied by the nefarious Corbeck bears the company name Neame and Skeggs, named for the film's production manager and production supervisor, Christopher Neame and Roy Skeggs, respectively.


2:45am -- Repo Man (1984)
A young punk gives up stealing cars for a job repossessing them.
Cast: Jorge Martinez, Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Olivia Barash
Dir: Alex Cox
C-92 mins

When filming began, they only had one 1964 Chevy Malibu. It was stolen a couple of days into filming, forcing the film crew to scramble to find a replacement. Shortly after finding a replacement, the original was recovered by the police undamaged. This was fortunate timing because about a day later Fox Harris severely damaged one of the Malibus by accidentally plowing it into a gasoline pump! In the carwash scene, one of the gas pumps is clearly severely dented up and damaged. This is the pump Fox plowed into in a previous take.

[Staph]

1. The Mummy (1959)

Baby-boomer horror film fans bear a particular affection for the output of Britain's Hammer Studios, the family-owned facility renowned through the '50s and '60s for delivering tidy-budgeted fear and fantasy forays and reaping equally tidy box office returns. The company's sanguinary takes on a pair of familiar fright figures, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), spurred franchises for the British studio in the same manner as these iconic monsters had for Universal a generation before.

Hammer's successes wound up spurring a 1958 agreement with Universal, wherein the American studio granted remake rights to its legendary stable of monster properties. The first production made pursuant to the deal - The Mummy (1959) - stands as one of the most crisply crafted and memorable shockers to emerge from Hammer's heyday.

This remake of the 1932 Karloff opus pulled together the signature talents of the House of Hammer. The leads were assigned to Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, already established as a fiend-and-foil tandem through playing the creature and his creator in The Curse of Frankenstein and the vampire and Van Helsing in Horror of Dracula. Director Terence Fisher, the once self-described "oldest clapper boy in the business" who found breakout success with The Curse of Frankenstein, was on board, as were screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and production designer Bernard Robinson.

The narrative opens in 1895 at the site of an Egyptian archaeological dig, where a party headed by Dr. Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer) prepares to breach the walls of its find, a tomb believed to be the lost resting place of the Egyptian princess Ananka. Banning's son John (Cushing), confined to camp with a fractured leg, cannot share the moment of triumph. So Banning and his brother-in-law Joseph Whemple (Raymond Huntley) enter the crypt without him, shrugging off the arcane warnings of Mehemet (George Pastell). After confirming their find, Whemple leaves Banning to share the news with John, but returns to the tomb to find his brother-in-law reduced to gibbering lunacy.

Britain, three years later: the institutionalized Banning finally becomes lucid, and John is summoned to his side. The elder archaeologist warns his son of a curse on their entire party, which John chalks up to continuing delusion. However, they soon gain a new neighbor in the shire in the person of Mehemet, who in turn has transported the mummy of Kharis (Lee), the high priest who had been entombed alive with Ananka, and resuscitated him with an incantation from an ancient scroll.

John and Whemple pore over their research on the legend of Ananka, as a flashback sequence reveals how the princess was abruptly taken mortally ill, and how the heartsick Kharis was condemned for his heresy in attempting to revive her through the power of the scroll. They are also struck by the resemblance of a rendering of Ananka to John's beautiful wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux). This coincidence, of course, will come into play as Mehemet seeks to fulfill his promise of vengeance.

Swathed in the effective makeup of Roy Ashton, with his imposing physical presence and the profound sadness conveyed through his eyes, Lee added another classic monster characterization to his resume. The scene where Kharis emerges from the bog where Mehemet's porters lost his crypt remains memorable. As always, Cushing provided the ideal complement, as a man of reason forced to confront the terrible truth underlying a legendary curse.

In retrospect, The Mummy is surprisingly free of the degree of gore that marked the early Hammer Dracula and Frankenstein efforts. In an interview given to The Kinematograph Weekly during production, Fisher stated that "I have always strenuously tried to avoid being blatant in my pictures. Instead, whenever possible, I have used the camera to show things - especially nasty things - happening by implication."

Further, The Mummy bears more commonality with the subsequent entries in the Universal series than with the Karloff original. "I must, at some point, have been shown these earlier Universal films," Sangster recalled for Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio's Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography (McFarland & Company, 1995). "How else could one explain the same character names and plot elements? But I honestly don't recall doing so - it has been thirty-five years, you know!"

The Mummy would prove prodigiously successful in Britain and abroad, and Hammer would plumb the Egyptian sands a few more times over the years with The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), The Mummy's Shroud (1967) and Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971). Of the other projects initially contemplated under the Universal deal, The Phantom of the Opera (1962) proved a double rarity for Hammer flicks of the era, with its large budget and largely disappointing returns. The third property ultimately went unproduced, and a Hammer remake of The Invisible Man (1933) would, ironically, never be seen.

Producer: Michael Carreras, Anthony Nelson Keys
Director: Terence Fisher
Screenplay: Jimmy Sangster
Cinematography: Jack Asher
Film Editing: Alfred Cox, James Needs
Art Direction: Bernard Robinson
Music: Franz Reizenstein
Cast: Peter Cushing (John Banning), Christopher Lee (Kharis, The Mummy), Yvonne Furneaux (Isobel Banning/Princess Ananka), Eddie Byrne (Inspector Mulrooney), Felix Aylmer (Stephen Banning), Raymond Huntley (Joseph Whemple).
C-88m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Jay S. Steinberg