(See previous post: Fourth of July Movies: Escapism During a Weird Year.) On the evening of the Fourth of July, besides fireworks, fire hazards, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, if you're watching TCM in the U.S. and Canada, there's the following: Peter H. Hunt's 1776 (1972), a largely forgotten film musical based on the Broadway hit with music by Sherman Edwards. William Daniels, who was recently on TCM talking about 1776 and a couple of other movies (A Thousand Clowns, Dodsworth), has one of the key roles as John Adams. Howard Da Silva, blacklisted for over a decade after being named a communist during the House Un-American Committee hearings of the early 1950s (Robert Taylor was one who mentioned him in his testimony), plays Benjamin Franklin. Ken Howard is Thomas Jefferson, a role he would reprise in John Huston's 1976 short Independence. (In the short, Pat Hingle was cast as John Adams; Eli Wallach was Benjamin Franklin.) Warner...
- 7/5/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Fourth of July movies: A few recommended titles that should help you temporarily escape current global madness Two thousand and seventeen has been a weirder-than-usual year on the already pretty weird Planet Earth. Unsurprisingly, this Fourth of July, the day the United States celebrates its Declaration of Independence from the British Empire, has been an unusual one as well. Instead of fireworks, (at least some) people's attention has been turned to missiles – more specifically, a carefully timed North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile test indicating that Kim Jong-un could theoretically gain (or could already have?) the capacity to strike North America with nuclear weapons. Then there were right-wing trolls & history-deficient Twitter users berating National Public Radio for tweeting the Declaration of Independence, 140 characters at a time. Besides, a few days ago the current U.S. president retweeted a video of himself body-slamming and choking a representation of CNN – courtesy of a gif originally created by a far-right Internet...
- 7/5/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Bette Davis on TCM: The Old Maid, Now, Voyager, The Working Man Bette Davis has a cameo in John Paul Jones (1959), which happens to be an insufferable bore despite the presence of Robert Stack in the title role, and she plays second banana to Spencer Tracy in the run-of-the-Warners-mill prison drama 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), but she is at the center of The Corn Is Green (1945) as Miss Lily Moffat, a teacher in a poor Welsh mining town. Now, Voyager's Irving Rapper directed this film adaptation of Emlyn Williams' semi-autobiographical play — and it shows. Davis is a little too stiff in Ethel Barrymore's Broadway role, John Dall fails to convey his character's emotional turmoil, the dialogue has a theatrical lilt to it, and for the most part the potentially compelling drama feels stilted. Had William Wyler directed The Corn Is Green, it would have been a fantastic movie.
- 8/3/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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