Thursday, April 1, 2010

Speaking of Raquel Welch

I briefly mentioned Raquel Welch's One Million Years BC several days ago. She actually shows up on TCM tonight. Not any of the movies in which she's either scantily clad or wearing tight outfits, but as the TCM Guest Programmer. The four movies she has selected are:

Adam's Rib, the battle of the sexes between competing lawyers Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, at 8:00 PM ET;
Jimmy Stewart filibustering Congress in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, at 10:00 PM;
Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, at 12:15 AM; and
the movie that gave us one of the most overrated love stories ever, that of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall: To Have and Have Not, at 2:15 AM.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the program coming up after To Have and Have Not. It's one of the The Men Who Made the Movies episodes, this time about director Howard Hawks, the man who directed To Have and Have Not. It's part of a series of specials made for PBS back in the early 1970s, with vintage interviews from the directors, who have of course all since died, but left behind these valuable archives on their life and work. Back in the 1970s, of course, all TV was in 4:3 and standard definition, so any of the film clips they showed back then would have been panned and scanned (although, to be fair, a lot of the directors' work was before the introduction of Cinemascope in 1953). However, with the rebroadcast of them on TCM, the movie clips were remastered and, where appropriate, put back into the original letterboxed form.

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