All Immortal Ephemera subscribers receive Classic Movie Daily as of this morning. I've knocked the Daily back to five days per week (sometimes four), but if it's still too much for you, you'll find some other subscription options and/or an unsubscribe button below.
Born on this date: Joseph Levering in 1874; Arthur Jarrett in 1907; Muriel Evans in 1910; K.T. Stevens in 1919; Lola Albright in 1925; Sally Ann Howes in 1930; and Natalie Wood in 1938.
All links lead to each actor's IMDb page, set to open in a new tab.
Classic Movie Daily subscribers will find an image of Natalie Wood and a couple of Muriel Evans in today's issue. Also included today is a new "Lightning Review," an image to go with that, plus two shots of TCM Star of the Month Shirley Temple, who's featured on TV this evening.
TCM TV Alerts through tomorrow at 7 am:
These titles play on TCM's US schedule and all quoted times are for my own local Eastern time zone.
—TCM plays a Natalie Wood marathon during Monday daytime, 6:00 am to 8:00 pm. Not much to say here, though I do like The Star (1952 - 9:15 am) with Bette Davis.
—GetTV has The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939) on (again) at 1:00 pm. The first entry of the series and, as I've said before, not my favorite, but it does have Ida Lupino (irritating love interest) and Rita Hayworth (more interesting spy villain), so it's worth checking out. Plus it stars Warren William, so I've covered it right here, on my Warren site.
—TCM evening features the next round of five movies featuring Star of the Month Shirley Temple. Evening begins with big Selznick film Since You Went Away (1944 - 8:00 pm) with Claudette Colbert, followed by I'll Be Seeing You (1944 -11:15) with Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotten (who's also in the 8 o'clock movie). That Hagen Girl (1947 - 2:30) with Ronald Reagan is interesting subject matter for its time period, the entire movie based around whether Shirley is Reagan's daughter or not. Kathleen (1941 - 4:00 am) is from that awkward period before those slightly later movies, when 13-year-old Shirley was already past her prime.
—Tuesday, 6:30 am - Star of Midnight (1935), isn't as thrilling as you'd hope a William Powell-Ginger Rogers teaming would be. Director Stephen Roberts had done a few more interesting talkies before this, titles like Lady and Gent (1932), The Night of June 13 (1932), The Story of Temple Drake, and One Sunday Afternoon (1933), and one of his few follow-ups was the better William Powell title The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936), but then Roberts died rather suddenly of a heart ailment at age 40.
Cliff's Notes
—With apologies to those of you who have been getting these every day, but today is sort of a housecleaning issue as I welcome several new subscribers to this format, with hopes that they stay. If you're new to this mailing I think you're going to like it: I believe it's only had one person unsubscribe since it began back in April. Anyway, here's what's what —
—As mentioned at the top, as of today all email subscribers receive the same newsletter. I decided on this because 1) I didn't like the way Google was handling my reviews and biographies because of the way I had to segment them for the mailings. I had them nestled inside an artificial category that I don't think the search engine spiders liked very much. 2) I stopped putting out weekend issues a couple of weeks ago, plus I miss a day here and there, so it's really 4-5 times per week and not Daily. That's a lot closer to what most people originally signed up for.
If it's too much there's a blue "unsubscribe" button at the bottom of this email. I'll be sorry to see you go, but you can still access all of the posts that non-Daily subscribers were receiving by subscribing to three RSS feeds: Reviews, Biographies, and News & Notes. There are ways to mash these three feeds together, and I tested a few back in April when I switched newsletter providers, but they all failed after the first day. Other ways to access the latest long form content include Facebook and Twitter, but the items roll by pretty fast on those sites.
—Hopefully you're still with me and haven't made a big sweeping scroll down to that unsubscribe button.
—Over the past three months of mailings in this format certain features have become somewhat regular. You'll find 3 or 4, sometimes more, of the photo-style posts that follow in every mailing. I try to tie them to the birthdays, failing that the TV schedule, then any reviews, and if I still don't have any related photos to share at that point I descend to randomness. Nothing random today and those first three categories are all covered. These photo posts are only larger-sized images: It's how I've taken to sharing still photos, postcards, and other images I can't organize into one of my more standard galleries.
—Today's mailing includes a "Lightning Review." Actually, current subscribers will see I've ironed out the format just a little bit more for these beginning today, as I've added punctuation and paragraph breaks. Yeah, "Lightning Reviews" are pretty rough, but they're meant to be. I describe them at the top of the category page.
—Newspaper clippings. These usually tie into the birthdays at the top or to research around posts and projects that I'm working on. There isn't any clippings post today, but all subscribers have seen these before with my recent Errol Flynn post. They're not always that intensive though.
—Then there's this post, which is included each day. The birthdays and TV schedule at the top are standard. Unfortunately, it's a light day on both, so we're not off to the greatest of starts, but tomorrow looks more promising, for birthdays at least. Then I use this space for site news, like up above, links to other blogs, DVD announcements, and classic movie news of any sort. I also do a little diary bit about what I'm working on off the site, not every day, but when I do it's something like this:
—So, I didn't get to spend the weekend relaxing on the couch marking up a hard copy of my draft, but I did complete the biographical section (of my coming Helen Twelvetrees book). I probably got a little ahead of myself thinking I'd completely finish the draft this weekend because while I did reach the end of Helen's life, I've still got to tie up all of the loose ends with a postscript that brings her story from 1958 to 2015. To my great surprise the biographical section did surpass the "Films of" section I had previously worked on in terms of word count. I've got a good deal of front and back matter to come, but we're already over 50,000 words. I didn't expect that.
—I am going to have to slow work on the book the next couple of weeks because ... I have a deadline. I have to finish up a piece on Red-Headed Woman for this project, which I'm really looking forward to seeing roll out. Luckily, I've already done a lot of research in this direction because Red-Headed Woman has been planned for inclusion in my own pre-Code eBook #2 for several months now. Don't worry though, because—and here's the challenging part—both essays will be completely different, as will a third piece that will be posted as a review on this site.
—Interesting bit of trivia that ties together both of my previous writing notes: Before they had cast Harlow, MGM wanted to test Helen Twelvetrees for the lead in Red-Headed Woman (understandable at the time, because of this), but RKO refused to loan her, even for just the screen test.
Back tomorrow with a more standard issue. Remember, there's a "Lightning Review" tucked among today's images.
Have a Happy Monday, and thanks for sticking around—
Cliff
Actually, the "Lightning Review" is up next, so I'm going to break up the run of text inside your email with an extra image of Muriel Evans -
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