MAY Guide to Classics on TV

a huge roundup of full-month previews and picks! Learn about the month ahead here…

The League of Gentlemen

1960 Basil Dearden satirical heist classic is a memorable must see for the great cast and story and might just be Jack Hawkins’ best role.

Hell is a City

Though Hammer films is best known for its horror movies, this 1960 urban crime procedural from that studio is a fantastic picture that any noir fan will enjoy.

The Long Arm

This 1956 British crime movie (Alternate title The Third Key) begins as a burglar alarm goes off and we watch someone with very soft soled shoes emptying a safe at Stone & Co.

Payroll

Who doesn’t love a heist movie? You? Very well, you better leave now then. I love them and this one a UK production from 1961, is a good one.

Obsession / The Hidden Room

“Do you like mysteries?” and “we found your dog.” These two lines tell you just about everything you need to know about the fantastic British thriller Obsession, alternately titled The Hidden Room, a movie directed by Edward Dmytryk (Crossfire, Murder My Sweet).

Virginia Mayo

Virginia Mayo was so much more than just a blonde bombshell; in fact she wasn’t even that in real life. She was a welcome presence in any film, a great singer, dancer and comedienne, and especially fun in the crime films she made, because she was so good at being bad.

Must See: The Unsuspected

From each writer of source novels adapted to film, you get a signature and recognizable style, even when their material is reshaped by Hollywood. From W.B. Burnett (Little Caesar, High Sierra, Asphalt Jungle) you get rugged and realistic hardened criminals, gritty underworld settings and machine gun dialogue. From Raymond Chandler you find the creeps often live in the most opulent mansions. From Charlotte Armstrong, whom some called Queen of suspensers, you get unseen horrors hidden beneath a highly dusted and waxed veneer of domestic life, a juicy hot evil center baked right into the familiar conventions of a regular women’s novel of the time, something writer Ariel Swartley nicely describes as being trapped in a Doris Day movie gone bad.

Must See: The Mask of Dimitrios

Question: what do you get when you mix The Usual Suspects, The Third Man and The Maltese Falcon? A good evening of viewing, not to mention a cast of characters making for a highly memorable if slightly dark and frightening dinner party, you might also get something along the lines of this fantastic film.

Must See: From Here To Eternity

Wherein we engage in a little cinematic mythbusting… Anyone who’s seen The Godfather remembers the famous scene where the movie producer finds a horse’s head in his bed, left there to persuade him to give the singer “Johnny Fontane” a juicy part in a big war movie. “Johnny” was assumed by many to be based on Frank Sinatra, and the “offer you can’t refuse” was read as the way he got his role in From Here to Eternity. Sinatra’s daughter Nancy was just one of many people who eventually busted this Hollywood/mafia rumor, and the real tale goes like this. From the time the movie rights to the source novel From Here to Eternity were bought in 1951, to the shoot a couple of years later, Columbia studios went through tons of casting possibilities, including Broderick Crawford, Glenn Ford and John Derek. For the part Sinatra eventually played, “Maggio,” director Fred Zinneman had already screen tested and pretty much settled on Eli Wallach. Sinatra had read the bestseller, and so strongly identified with “Maggio” that he was determined to get the part, and sent a series of telegrams to the film’s producer, director and studio president Harry Cohn (who, by the way didn’t even own a racehorse, to further put that Godfather connection to rest) pleading with them to just give him a tryout.

At that time, Sinatra had to beg for a shot because, after scaling the pop culture mountaintop as the generation’s biggest teenybopper idol, teens were then as now, notoriously fickle fans. They grew up and out of their Sinatra hysteria, times and tastes changed, and Sinatra entered a down period of his career and personal life. As the 1950s started, he had fewer hits, made a couple flop films and had gone through a scandalous divorce. Though he was then with Ava Gardner, who certainly did her part to get the studio to consider him for Eternity, he seemed to have neither traction nor attention in Hollywood. He was so low down the totem pole that Columbia finally agreed to a screen test if he could get back from Africa (where Ava was shooting Mogambo) on his own dime; when they did give him the role they paid him $1,000.00 a week. But he got his chance, and was great in the movie, drawing authenticity from his own recent experiences with defeat, despair, disappointment, and rejection; he went on to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, capping off one of the greatest comebacks ever seen in Hollywood.

See it MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12 @ 10:15 PM on TCM