TCM Schedule for Thursday, May 21, 2015 -- TCM Special Theme - Disaster Movies!

[Staph]

In the daylight hours, it's a celebration of Doris Day. It's not her birthday, but it's always a good day for some cheery music. And in prime time, it's the end of the world as we know it on the high seas -- on ships named Poseidon and Titanic, among others. Enjoy!


6:00 AM -- Romance On The High Seas (1948)
A singer on a Caribbean cruise gets mixed up in a series of romantic problems.
Dir: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Jack Carson, Janis Paige, Don DeFore
C-99 mins, CC,

Nominated for Oscars for Best Music, Original Song -- Jule Styne (music) and Sammy Cahn (lyrics) for the song "It's Magic", and Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Ray Heindorf

This was Doris Day's first ever acting role, and she was extremely naive about how films were made. She wrote in her autobiography that the first scenes to be filmed would be aboard the cruise ship, and the first day she walked onto the sound stage and asked when they would be leaving for the boat? The crew broke up laughing.


7:45 AM -- It's a Great Feeling (1949)
When nobody at Warner Bros. will work with him, movie star Jack Carson decides to turn an unknown into his co-star.
Dir: David Butler
Cast: Dennis Morgan, Doris Day, Jack Carson
C-85 mins, CC,

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song -- Jule Styne (music) and Sammy Cahn (lyrics) for the song "It's a Great Feeling"

Joan Crawford does a cameo and directs a short speech to Jack Carson before slapping his face. It's the same one she gives to Ann Blyth in Mildred Pierce (1945) before slapping her face. Carson co-starred in that film with Crawford.


9:15 AM -- My Dream Is Yours (1949)
A talent scout turns a young unknown into a radio singing star.
Dir: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Jack Carson, Doris Day, Lee Bowman
C-101 mins, CC,

The scenes in this film featuring Doris Day and her young on-screen son had a special emotional resonance for Day, since in real life she had often had to leave her own pre-school-aged son Terry behind with his grandmother while touring as a big band singer in the 1940s.


11:00 AM -- Tea For Two (1950)
An heiress has to say no to every question for 24 hours if she wants to star on Broadway.
Dir: David Butler
Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Gene Nelson
C-98 mins, CC,

In this version of the Broadway musical "No, No, Nanette", Eve Arden plays Pauline, but in the original 1940 version she played Kitty.


12:45 PM -- I'll See You in My Dreams (1951)
Songwriter Gus Kahn fights to make his name, then has to fight again to survive the Depression.
Dir: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Doris Day, Danny Thomas, Frank Lovejoy
BW-110 mins, CC,

Doris Day would play the wife and widow of another leading personality the following year when she appeared as the spouse of baseball legend Grover Cleveland Alexander in The Winning Team (1952).


2:45 PM -- On Moonlight Bay (1951)
A small-town tomboy falls for the boy-next-door in the years before World War I.
Dir: Roy Del Ruth
Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, ("Smiling&quot Jack Smith
C-95 mins, CC,

This movie proved to be so popular that the studio immediately filmed By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953) which is a direct sequel with all the actors playing the same characters. This was very unusual at the time.


4:30 PM -- April in Paris (1952)
A bureaucrat's mistake sends a chorus girl to Paris representing American theatre in place of a star actress.
Dir: David Butler
Cast: Doris Day, Ray Bolger, Claude Dauphin
C-100 mins, CC,

Doris Day writes in her autobiography that she only encountered trouble or tension on two of her Warner Bros. films, "Young at Heart" and "April in Paris". On "Paris", she writes that leading man Ray Bolger and director David Butler clashed early on, with Butler accusing Bolger of trying to steal scenes away from Day. Doris says that, being a relative newcomer to films, she was unaware of Bolger's tricks and managed to stay out of the line of fire.


6:15 PM -- By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953)
A small-town girl's love life goes ballistic when her sweetheart returns from World War I.
Dir: David Butler
Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Leon Ames
C-102 mins, CC,

This film departs from "On Moonlight Bay" in three main ways. First, the film opens with Stella (Mary Wickes) breaking the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly as she introduces the Winfield family. Second, the song and dance numbers are played like a traditional musical, while the original film incorporated the songs more organically within the story. Finally, the bespectacled music teacher, although the same basic character with the same mannerisms, has a different name and is played by a different actor, the only member of the cast who did not carry over from the original film.



TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: TCM SPECIAL THEME: DISASTER MOVIES!



8:00 PM -- The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Passengers and crew struggle to escape an ocean liner turned upside down.
Dir: Ronald Neame
Cast: Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons
C-117 mins, CC,

Won an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song -- Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn for the song "The Morning After"

Won a Special Achievement Award Oscar for L.B. Abbott and A.D. Flowers for visual effects

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Shelley Winters, Best Cinematography -- Harold E. Stine, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- William J. Creber and Raphael Bretton, Best Costume Design -- Paul Zastupnevich, Best Sound -- Theodore Soderberg and Herman Lewis, Best Film Editing -- Harold F. Kress, and Best Music, Original Dramatic Score -- John Williams

Red Buttons and Carol Lynley, whose characters fall in love in the movie, actually disliked each other intensely during filming. They refused to have anything to do with each other except when the cameras were rolling. Ironically, after being constantly reminded of this, they ended up becoming great friends in later years. Both Carol Lynley and Pamela Sue Martin were with Red Buttons at the time of his final public appearance -- the world premiere of Wolfgang Peterson's "Poseidon" at Mann's Chinese Theatre in May 2006.


10:05 PM -- The Sunshine Boys (1975)
This promotional short presents interviews with the cast and crew of "The Sunshine Boys" (1975).
C-7 mins,


10:15 PM -- Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)
Rival salvage parties enter an upside down ocean liner in search of treasure.
Dir: Irwin Allen
Cast: Michael Caine, Sally Field, Telly Savalas
C-114 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

After the movie was released, Angela Cartwright was quoted with saying, "I was disappointed in certain aspects of the film and in hindsight I realize it was really a film about water, fire and stunts."


12:15 AM -- Juggernaut (1974)
Two demolitions experts race the clock to find and disarm a set of bombs placed on an ocean liner at sea.
Dir: Richard Lester
Cast: Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, David Hemmings
BW-110 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

The film was shot mainly aboard a real ocean liner. The Hamburg had recently been sold by its German owners to the Soviet Union. Before the Soviets took delivery of the liner, they rented it to the film company. The liner was painted in the livery of a fictional shipping line, very similar to the livery used by the Soviet Morpasflot line, and renamed the Britannic. Advertisements were run in British papers, soliciting extras who would take a lengthy cruise in the North Sea for free, but with the knowledge that the ship would actually seek out the worst possible weather, as the story demanded seas too rough for the lifeboats to be lowered, trapping the passengers on board.


2:15 AM -- A Night to Remember (1958)
The crew and passengers of the Titanic fight to survive when the legendary ship strikes an iceberg.
Dir: Roy Ward Baker
Cast: Kenneth More, Honor Blackman, Anthony Bushell
BW-123 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

There was no tank big enough at Pinewood Studios to film the survivors struggling in the water to climb into lifeboats, so it was done in the open-air swimming bath at Ruislip Lido in London at 2:00 am on a cold November morning. Kenneth More recalled that when the extras refused to jump into the water, he realized he would have to set an example. But when he jumped into the water, he recalled: "I leaped. Never have I experienced such cold in all my life. It was like jumping into a deep freeze just like the people did on the actual Titanic. The shock of the cold water forced the breath out of my lungs. My heart seemed to stop beating. I felt crushed, unable to think. I had rigor mortis... without the mortis. And then I surfaced, spat out the dirty water and, gasping for breath, found my voice. 'Stop!' I shouted. 'Don't listen to me! It's bloody awful! Stay where you are!' But it was too late as the extras followed suit."


4:30 AM -- The Last Voyage (1960)
Passengers and crew fight to escape a sinking ocean liner.
Dir: Andrew L. Stone
Cast: Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, George Sanders
C-91 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects -- Augie Lohman

The ship used by the filmmakers was the SS Ile de France, the famous French liner which cruised the Atlantic from 1926 to 1959. She was leased for $4,000 a day. After shooting completed, she was re-floated (having been partially sunk for the film) and was towed to the scrap yard. She has a more heroic place in history, however. It was her that played a major role in the rescue of the passengers from the Italian liner Andrea Doria in 1956, after the latter ship collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm and sank off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. She was the first ship to arrive at the scene of the collision and immediately began taking aboard the Andrea Doria's passengers.