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Wallace Beery from Pancho Villa to Long John Silver: TCM schedule (Pt) on August 17, 2013 (photo: Fay Wray, Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa in ‘Viva Villa!’) See previous post: “Wallace Beery: Best Actor Oscar Winner — and Runner-Up.” 3:00 Am The Last Of The Mohicans (1920). Director: Maurice Tourneur. Cast: Barbara Bedford, Albert Roscoe, Wallace Beery, Lillian Hall, Henry Woodward, James Gordon, George Hackathorne, Nelson McDowell, Harry Lorraine, Theodore Lorch, Jack McDonald, Sydney Deane, Boris Karloff. Bw-76 mins. 4:30 Am The Big House (1930). Director: George W. Hill. Cast: Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Robert Montgomery, Leila Hyams, George F. Marion, J.C. Nugent, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betz, Claire McDowell, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Tom Wilson, Eddie Foyer, Roscoe Ates, Fletcher Norton, Noah Beery Jr, Chris-Pin Martin, Eddie Lambert, Harry Wilson. Bw-87 mins. 6:00 Am Bad Man Of Brimstone (1937). Director: J. Walter Ruben. Cast: Wallace Beery, Virginia Bruce, Dennis O’Keefe. Bw-89 mins.

Wallace Beery: Best Actor Academy Award winner and Best Actor Academy Award runner-up in the same year (photo: Jackie Cooper and Wallace Beery in ‘The Champ’) (See previous post: “Wallace Beery Movies: Anomalous Hollywood Star.”) In the Academy’s 1931-32 season, Wallace Beery took home the Best Actor Academy Award — I mean, one of them. In the King Vidor-directed melodrama The Champ (1931), Beery plays a down-on-his-luck boxer and caring Dad to tearduct-challenged Jackie Cooper, while veteran Irene Rich is Beery’s cool former wife and Cooper’s mother. Will daddy and son remain together forever and ever? Audiences the world over were drowned in tears — theirs and Jackie Cooper’s. Now, regarding Wallace Beery’s Best Actor Academy Award, he was actually a runner-up: Fredric March, initially announced as the sole winner for his performance in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, turned out to have...

Jean Harlow, National Air Race director Cliff Henderson (top); Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy directed by Victor Fleming (Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz) on the set of Bombshell; cinematographer Harold Rosson, with whom Harlow was briefly married, is at the camera (middle); Jean Harlow by the pool of her Beverly Glen home (bottom) Jean Harlow-Mark Vieira Interview Part I What are your impressions of Jean Harlow as an actress? Do you have a favorite movie and/or performance? Harlow only became an actress under the expert tutelage of MGM drama coaches. I think she’s really great in both China Seas and Wife vs. Secretary. Jean Harlow and Paul Bern. What brought those two together? Harlow needed a father figure to guide her. Bern needed a rescue project. Neither person expected the consequences. What about Jean Harlow and William Powell? How did their relationship develop? Both...

One of MGM's brightest stars of the 1930s, Jean Harlow died of uremic poisoning in 1937. At the time, the 26-year-old actress had been playing opposite Clark Gable in what turned out to be her last film, Saratoga. Perhaps because she died so young, Harlow has remained a well-known film personality from that era. Her MGM vehicles — Dinner at 8, Bombshell, China Seas, Wife vs. Secretary, Libeled Lady — are often shown on Turner Classic Movies; David Stenn has written a well-regarded biography; and now comes Mark Vieira and Darrell Rooney's Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital 1928-1937 (Angel City Press, 2011). Celebrating Jean Harlow's centenary (she was born on March 3, 1911), Harlow in Hollywood is a both a written and a (stunning) visual chronicle of Jean Harlow's career, as Vieira and Rooney cover Harlow's ascendancy from movie extra and bit player in the late 1920s [...]...

"MGM writer Harry Ruskin recalled: 'The day "the baby" died there wasn't one sound in the commissary for three hours... not one goddamn sound.'" That's from Dina-Marie Kulzer's overview of a life cut short in 1937 by kidney failure. Jean Harlow was all of 26, but she'd appeared in 36 films and — a first for any movie actress — on the cover of Life. She would have turned 100 today and to celebrate, the Kitty Packard Pictorial is hosting a rich and varied blogathon running through Sunday. Do go and explore.

By the way, out this week from Warner Home Video and TCM's new series of four-title DVD packages is TCM Greatest Classic Legends: Jean Harlow, featuring Dinner at Eight (1933), Libeled Lady (1936), China Seas (1935) and Wife Vs Secretary (1936). TCM also wants Angelenos to know that on Sunday, Darrell Rooney and Mark A Vieira, authors of Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital,...

From TCM’s Classic Movie Blog:

McDaniel took what might have been a clichéd role embodying the ugliest of racial stereotypes and transformed it into a portrait of human being of considerable complexity, endowing her character with a rich blend of humor, empathy, and intelligence. While the story did not acknowledge her character’s life when white people weren’t around, a viewer would have to be quite obtuse not to recognize her vital sense of her own power and her intuitive understanding of others. This is particularly true of Scarlett (Vivien Leigh), whose ploys she readily sees through, but there is also a particularly sympathetic affinity passing between Mammy and the realistic and dashing Rhett Butler, who was played by Clark Gable, an actor who had enjoyed working with her previously in China Seas (1935-Tay Garnett) and Saratoga (1937-Jack Conway). (If you have a chance, see Saratoga...