TCM Schedule for Friday, June 26 -- Great Directors -- David Lean/Norman Jewison

[Staph]

Today's great directors are David Lean and Norman Jewison. I'm on vacation with limited Internet access, so I won't be able to include the usual trivia. Enjoy!


6:00am -- Madeleine (1950)
A beautiful young woman stands trial for poisoning her lover.
Cast: Ann Todd, Norman Woland, Ivan Desny, Leslie Banks
Dir: David Lean
BW-115 mins, TV-PG


8:00am -- The Passionate Friends (1949)
A married woman has one last fling with her childhood sweetheart.
Cast: Ann Todd, Claude Rains, Isabel Dean, Betty Ann Davies
Dir: David Lean
BW-91 mins


10:00am -- Great Expectations (1946)
A mysterious benefactor finances a young boy's education.
Cast: John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Bernard Miles, Francis L. Sullivan
Dir: David Lean
BW-118 mins, TV-G

Won Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- John Bryan and Wilfred Shingleton, and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Guy Green

Nominated for Oscars for Best Director -- David Lean, Best Writing, Screenplay -- David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Best Picture


12:00pm -- Brief Encounter (1945)
Two married strangers meet in a train station and fall in love.
Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Cyril Raymond, Stanley Holloway
Dir: David Lean
BW-86 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Celia Johnson, Best Director -- David Lean, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean and Ronald Neame


1:30pm -- Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Illicit lovers fight to stay together during the turbulent years of the Russian Revolution.
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay, Alec Guinness
Dir: David Lean
C-200 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color -- John Box, Terence Marsh and Dario Simoni, Best Cinematography, Color -- Freddie Young, Best Costume Design, Color -- Phyllis Dalton, Best Music, Score - Substantially Original -- Maurice Jarre, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Robert Bolt

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Tom Courtenay, Best Director -- David Lean, Best Film Editing -- Norman Savage, Best Sound -- A.W. Watkins (M-G-M British SSD) and Franklin Milton (M-G-M SSD), and Best Picture


5:00pm -- The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
The Japanese Army forces World War II POWs to build a strategic bridge in Burma.
Cast: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa
Dir: David Lean
C-162 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Alec Guinness (Alec Guinness was not present at the awards ceremony. Jean Simmons accepted the award on his behalf.), Best Cinematography -- Jack Hildyard, Best Director -- David Lean, Best Film Editing -- Peter Taylor, Best Music, Scoring -- Malcolm Arnold, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Pierre Boulle, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson were blacklisted at the time and received no screen credit. They were posthumously awarded Oscars in 1984. Pierre Boulle was not present at the awards ceremony. Kim Novak accepted the award on his behalf.), and Best Picture

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Sessue Hayakawa


What's On Tonight: GREAT DIRECTORS: NORMAN JEWISON


8:00pm -- Private Screenings: Norman Jewison (2007)
Director Norman Jewison discusses his life and career with TCM host Robert Osborne.
Dir: Sean Cameron
C-60 mins, TV-PG


9:00pm -- In The Heat Of The Night (1967)
A black police detective from the North forces a bigoted Southern sheriff to accept his help with a murder investigation.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant
Dir: Norman Jewison
C-110 mins, TV-14

Won Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Rod Steiger, Best Film Editing -- Hal Ashby, Best Sound, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Stirling Silliphant, and Best Picture

Nominated for Oscars for Best Director -- Norman Jewison, and Best Effects, Sound Effects -- James Richard


11:00pm -- The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
Card sharps try to deal with personal problems during a big game in New Orleans.
Cast: Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden
Dir: Norman Jewison
C-103 mins, TV-14


1:00am -- Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
In Russia before the revolution, a Jewish milkman tries to marry off his daughters who have plans of their own.
Cast: Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon
Dir: Norman Jewison
C-181 mins, TV-G

Won Oscars for Best Cinematography -- Oswald Morris, Best Music, Scoring Adaptation and Original Song Score -- John Williams, and Best Sound -- Gordon K. McCallum and David Hildyard

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Topol, Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Leonard Frey, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- Robert F. Boyle, Michael Stringer and Peter Lamont, Best Director -- Norman Jewison, and Best Picture


4:15am -- A Soldier's Story (1984)
During World War II, an African-American officer investigates a murder that may have been racially motivated.
Cast: Howard E. Rollins Jr., Adolph Caesar, Denzel Washington, Dennis Lipscomb
Dir: Norman Jewison
C-101 mins, TV-MA

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Adolph Caesar, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Charles Fuller, and Best Picture

[Staph]

1. Profiles of David Lean and Norman Jewison

David Lean Profile

From the exquisite intimacy of Brief Encounter (1945) to the sweeping adventure of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Sir David Lean (1908-1991) excelled in many film styles, proving to be that rare director who could draw the best from actors while staging spectacle for maximum impact.

Born into a Quaker family in Croydon, England, Lean was fascinated by the movies from an early age despite the disapproval of his parents, and entered the film industry at Gaumont Studios as a "tea boy" in 1927. After working his way up as clapperboy and messenger, he began editing newsreels in 1930 and feature films four years later. Among the well-known films he edited are Pygmalion (1938), 49th Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942).

Lean began his directorial career by co-directing, with playwright Noel Coward, the highly regarded World War II patriotic film In Which We Serve (1942). Lean directed three more screenplays based on Coward's work including This Happy Breed (1944), starring Robert Newton and Celia Johnson as middle-class Londoners trying to get ahead in the world. The Coward/Lean partnership culminated in the bittersweet Brief Encounter, in which Johnson and Trevor Howard deliver impeccably understated performances as a proper English couple who tremble on the brink of an illicit love affair.

Lean then entered his Charles Dickens phase, directing extraordinary adaptations of Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). These two films began his long association with actor Alec Guinness, who would appear in a half-dozen Lean films. Lean's first independently produced film was the documentary-like Breaking the Sound Barrier (1952), with Ralph Richardson in a memorable performance as an aircraft manufacturer bent on developing a jet that would fly faster than the speed of sound. Lean guided Katharine Hepburn through one of her most appealing performances as the lonely spinster who visits Venice in Summertime (1955).

Lean's first expressed himself on a supersized canvas in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the story of prisoners of war in a Japanese camp in Burma in 1943, with Guinness in his Oscar®-winning role as a British colonel who becomes obsessed by the building of a bridge. An even more spectacular production, the historical epic Lawrence of Arabia told of the Allies' Middle-East campaign during World War I and provided Peter O'Toole with his star-making role as enigmatic adventurer T. E. Lawrence. Lean won Academy Awards as Best Director for both films.

Lean's winning blend of history and spectacle continued with Doctor Zhivago (1965), a sumptuously photographed adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel set during and after the Russian Revolution and starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie as star-crossed lovers. Lean brought epic sweep to a simple story in Ryan's Daughter (1970), set in Ireland and starring Sarah Miles as the restless young wife of schoolmaster Robert Mitchum. John Mills won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for his performance as the village idiot.

Lean was again Oscar®-nominated for directing, adapting, and editing his final film, A Passage to India (1984). E. M. Forster's story, set in colonial India in 1924, concerns a clash of cultures when a sheltered, high-strung British woman (Judy Davis) visits India for the first time. One of eleven performers to be nominated for performances in a Lean film, Peggy Ashcroft was named Best Supporting Actress for her role as Davis' elderly traveling companion.

Lean's six wives included a first cousin, Isabel Lean; and actresses Kay Walsh and Ann Todd. At the time of his death he was at work on pre-production of a film version of the Joseph Conrad novel Nostromo that was to star Marlon Brando. The project was never realized.

by Roger Fristoe



Norman Jewison Profile

A consummate craftsman known for eliciting fine performances from his casts, Norman Jewison has addressed important social and political issues throughout his directing and producing career, often making controversial or complicated subjects accessible to mainstream audiences. Like so many of his peers, he got his start in TV, but unlike the ones who made their marks in the live dramas of the day (i.e., Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer), Jewison's domain was the musical special. After serving in the Navy at the close of WWII and completing college in his native Canada, he moved to London in the early 1950s and finally broke into the business as an actor-writer with the BBC. An invitation to join a television training program at the CBC brought him home, where he rose rapidly and within a few years was directing and producing major variety programs (e.g., "Showtime", "The Big Revue"). CBS took note of his skills and hired him in 1958 to revitalize the live weekly music show "Your Hit Parade", and for the next four years, he solidified his reputation working with such artists as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye and Harry Belafonte.

Disillusioned by the effects of the ratings wars on the quality of TV programming, Jewison relocated from NYC to Hollywood to helm his first Hollywood feature, 40 Pounds of Trouble (1963), starring Tony Curtis in an updating of the classic Little Miss Marker about a selfish casino manager who "adopts" a spunky orphaned waif. The picture did so well that Universal offered a seven-picture contract, and his second film, The Thrill of It All (1963, scripted by Carl Reiner), a vehicle for Doris Day and James Garner, became one of the studio's big moneymakers that year. Jewison also banged out Send Me No Flowers (1964), which paired Day with Rock Hudson, and reteamed with Reiner and Garner for The Art of Love (1965) but was growing tired of the lightweight scripts the studio was offering. Eager to delve into more serious fare, he found a loophole in his contract and switched to MGM, replacing Sam Peckinpah at the helm of The Cincinnati Kid (1965), a tale of professional gamblers starring Steve McQueen, with whom he would also make the sumptuous, no-think entertainment The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), a triumph of style over substance which he has called "the only amoral-immoral film I've ever done."

Jewison achieved complete artistic control on The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) and has enjoyed the coveted final cut on every film since. A farcical take on the Cold War, it featured an all-star cast and scored pre-Glasnost points by emphasizing the shared humanity of Russians and Americans alike, earning its first-time feature producer an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. He followed its success with the gripping, pioneering civil rights drama In the Heat of the Night (1967), which boasted the dynamic pairing of Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger against the claustrophobic, small-town backdrop vividly photographed by Haskell Wexler. Despite losing head-to-head at the box office against Bonnie and Clyde, it still managed to beat out the competition for Best Picture, in addition to garnering four other Oscars®, including one for editor Hal Ashby. Jewison returned to comedy for Gaily, Gaily (1969), adapted from Ben Hecht's autobiographical novel of his apprenticeship on a Chicago paper, and though the expensive sets and period flavor evoked nostalgia, he fared better as producer of Ashby's feature directing debut, The Landlord (1970).

Jewison's next two movies were adaptations of very successful stage musicals. For the first, Fiddler on the Roof (1971), he faced one of the most agonizing casting decisions of his career, turning down both Zero Mostel (who had originated the role of Tevye on Broadway) and his good friend Danny Kaye in favor of the little-known Topol. He told the LOS ANGELES TIMES (March 14, 1999), "I wanted an Israeli actor who didn't speak English very well to play this first-generation Russian Jew. I didn't think it would ring true with a New York Yiddish actor." Filmed on location in Yugoslavia, it received eight Academy Award® nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, earned three, for Best Sound, Best cinematography (Oswald Morris) and Best Musical Scoring (John Williams) and raked in the profits. A similar commercial fate awaited Jesus Christ Superstar, which he filmed in Israel while managing to simultaneously produce Ted Kotcheff's offbeat Western Billy Two-Hats (both 1973), proving his flexibility, if nothing else. The sci-fi drama Rollerball (1975) also pointed up his incredible versatility, earning somewhat of a cult following.

Jewison's labor movement picture, F.I.S.T (1978), was a giant flop despite the director's careful attention to detail, and when he focused his attention on the legal system, not even a powerhouse performance by Al Pacino could overcome the weak script (by Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin) of ...And Justice for All (1979), though it performed better commercially than had its predecessor. When he reteamed with Levinson and Curtin for Best Friends (1982), the picture failed to meet audience expectations for a Goldie Hawn-Burt Reynolds vehicle, resulting in tepid ticket sales. He finally turned it around with the socially conscious A Soldier's Story (1984), adapted from the 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Charles Fuller. A solid whodunit plus a probing look at racism within blank ranks during WWII, it featured most of its original Negro Ensemble Company cast, including Adolph Caesar in his Oscar-nominated role as the bigoted master sergeant found shot to death on a country road near a Louisiana army base. It also marked Jewison's first collaboration with Denzel Washington, as well as his return to the ranks of Oscar nominees (Best Picture).

A Soldier's Story had not completely escaped its theatrical origins but was still a riveting picture. The same cannot be said for Jewison's next two stage-to-film transfers Agnes of God (1985) and Other People's Money (1991), with neither coming up to the level of its forerunner. In between, however, Jewison enjoyed a mighty box office at the helm of playwright John Patrick Shanley's original screenplay Moonstruck (1987), deftly handling the romantic comedy which won Oscars for Best Actress (Cher), Best Supporting Actress (Olympia Dukakis) and Best Screenplay (Shanley). In Country (1989), however, despite a fine performance by Bruce Willis as a cynical, shell-shocked recluse and beautifully-handled concluding scenes at the Washington (DC) Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was a disappointing treatment of Bobbie Ann Mason's acclaimed novel. Jewison reemerged from a three-year hiatus with the tepid romantic comedy Only You (1994), starring 1993 Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei as a bride-to-be who leaves her groom at the altar to search for her true soul mate (Robert Downey Jr.), followed by the treacly comedy-drama Bogus (1996), featuring Whoopi Goldberg and Gerard Depardieu in a story of a young boy's reliance on an imaginary friend to cope with the death of a parent.

Jewison returned to TV as executive producer of the TNT biopic Geronimo (1993) and two years later served as an executive producer for Showtime's Picture Windows anthology, as well as directing its Soir Bleu segment. In Canada, he executive-produced Bruce McDonald's feature Dance Me Outside (1994) and then shared executive producing responsibilities with McDonald on the Canadian TV series The Rez in 1996. The 90s also found him acting in the Canadian picture Harold Knows Best (1995), playing a TV director in John Landis' The Stupids and appearing as himself in the satirical Burn, Hollywood, Burn (1997). On the heels of accepting the prestigious Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award, he helmed the feature-length Showtime documentary Norman Jewison on Comedy in the 20th Century: Funny Is Money (1999), but the entire decade was just a prelude for The Hurricane, released in the waning days of the 20th Century. Unleashing his social conscience on the film he had wanted to make for 10 years, he masterfully told the story of Reuben 'Hurricane' Carter (Denzel Washington), a former middleweight boxing champion unjustly imprisoned 19 years for murders he did not commit. A fabulous tribute to the power of the human spirit, it was arguably Jewison's best film in decades and possibly his best ever.

Information provided by TCMdb

[Matilda]

2. I saw "Brief Encounter" again a couple of weeks ago.

It was on very late one Friday night, and I couldn't resist it. It's
so dated in many ways, but absolutely irresistible still.

I had "Great Expectations" on my Quickflix list because it's many years
since I've seen it, but they advised that it's no longer available in
this country. Typical of this country - if it's old, throw it out.