Turner Classic Movies in August

I cannot say enough in praise of the estimable TCM, the only station that shows classic films uninterrupted, uncut and in the proper aspect ration, the only reason I still have cable TV.   A few things to mention about TCM in August.

This week I wrote about Walter Pidgeon and a number of his films are showing on TCM in August.  Of the ones I have seen I strongly recommend John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, in which he plays a sympathetic and understanding minister, and Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, in which he plays the very human and very intelligent majority leader of the Senate.

There are also a number of Barbara Stanwyck movies, as we wait for the second volume of Victoria Wilson's biography.  I particularly like King Vidor's Stella Dallas (Durgnat and Simmon, in their book on Vidor, say Barbara Stanwyck's performance is a "knockout") and Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, one of the best films about the American bourgeois family.

I strongly recommend Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, this very serious comedy about love is often lumped in with other so-called "screwball comedies," but I'm a splitter, not a lumper, and I see it as an intelligent and perceptive film that also happens to be very funny.  Walter Reisch and Charles Brackett, who wrote comedies for Lubitsch and Wilder, also wrote Mitch Leisen's The Mating Season; Leisen usually does a good job when he has a good script (he directed a couple of marvelous Preston Stuges scripts) and this is an amusing film about class and social snobbery in America.

Two beautiful Westerns are also on TCM in August:  King Vidor's Duel in the Sun and Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur, as well as excellent films noirs:  Walsh's White Heat, Rudolph Mate's D.O.A. and Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, and the important gangster film, Howard Hawks's Scarface, with its intense performance by Ann Dvorak.

Also recommended are Preson Sturges's Christmas in July ("if you can't sleep at night it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!") and Chaplin's A Woman of Paris.  The Chaplin is not a comedy and he does not appear in it; Chaplin himself felt it was too old-fashioned and kept it out of circulation for many years (I even know people who made special trips to East Berlin when they had the only available copy).  It was both influenced by early Lubitsch films and influenced later ones, as one can see in the several Lubitsch films on TCM in August.