Born on this date: Fred Kelsey in 1884; Marguerite Courtot in 1897; Charles Arnt in 1906; Alan Reed in 1907; Andre Morell in 1909; and Ted Donaldson in 1933.
All links lead to each actor's IMDb page, set to open in a new tab.
Classic Movie Daily subscribers will find images of Marguerite Courtot and Fred Kelsey inside today's mailing, plus a few shots of TCM's featured star of the day, Mae Clarke, who's also featured in a new lightning review.
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.
—Thursday, TCM Summer Under the Stars, Mae Clarke day (TCM.com link). Every year, one of TCM's Summer Under the Stars selections is always firmly planted in the pre-Code era, and this year's choice is Mae Clarke. After beginning the day with three later movies featuring Clarke in smaller supporting parts, the first of 13 early '30s films plays at 11:00 am with Clarke in The Fall Guy (1930). It's followed by a top-notch Lee Tracy entry, Turn Back the Clock (1933 - 12:15 pm), which is also subject of today's lightning review, and then Warner Baxter and Myrna Loy in another one previously covered on the site, Penthouse (1933 - 1:45 pm), which features Clarke briefly in a key supporting role.
The rest of Thursday's schedule features Mae Clarke in a variety of supporting roles in big-time classics and leading parts in smaller gems of the era. Picking up after Penthouse:
Parole Girl (1933) stars Clarke at 3:30 pm; William K. Howard's This Side of Heaven (1934) starring Lionel Barrymore at 5:00 pm; Edward G. Robinson is The Man With Two Faces (1934) at 6:30 pm; Clarke's top starring feature, Waterloo Bridge (1931) from James Whale gets the 8:00 pm spotlight; more Whale, with Universal horror classic Frankenstein (1931) playing at 9:30 pm; Clarke with John Gilbert and Robert Armstrong in Tod Browning's Fast Workers (1933) up next at 10:45 pm; original Hildegarde Withers entry The Penguin Pool Murder (1932) starring Edna May Oliver and James Gleason at 12:00 am; top notch Clarke entry Lady Killer (1933) starring James Cagney at 1:15 am; more Cagney with gangster classic The Public Enemy (1931), featuring the famous grapefruit scene, at 2:45 am; and the first adaptation of the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur newspaper classic The Front Page (1931) finishes out the day at 4:15 am.
By the way, our friend Danny at PreCode.com has dedicated all of August to covering most of these Mae Clarke classics on his site. Be sure to join the swarms of TCM-related traffic he earns today by checking out all of his Clarke-related reviews HERE.
—After all that fun, TCM brings us back down to earth by going super-modern with Wednesday's Summer Under the Stars schedule, dedicating 24 hours to Alan Arkin (TCM.com link). At least they'll have Dietrich on Saturday.
Cliff's Note
—From the birthday section, if you're curious about silent star Marguerite Courtot, I wrote a biographical post about her a few years ago. Check it out here.
—Alan Reed? That's the voice of Fred Flintstone. And it still freaks me out to hear Fred's voice when I'm watching The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)!
—Many thanks to Bernardo at The Movie Rat for plugging my Freddie Bartholomew eBook in his review of Dickie Moore's book about child stars.
—Speaking of eBooks, if you happened to pick up my pre-Code eBook from Amazon's UK site, I'd love it if you could leave a review (well, I'd love that no matter where you bought!). I had wondered why sales always seemed sluggish in Britain, and now I know. There's just one review on Amazon's UK site, and it awards me just one star because the book froze on their Kindle after five minutes. Ouch. So, if you're a UK buyer who has already read the book, you could really help me out. I'm pretty sure that whatever you thought of it, it's going to top what's already there! Thank you!
—Successful day off. I managed to update all of the plugins that make for the fun features on the site, even the third-party ones that can sometimes cause a lot of issues. None of them broke the site, not even the NextGen plugin, which powers the galleries—the past several updates of that plugin had brought things crashing down, so it's nice to finally be up to date!
—It was a race against the time to include my post about Turn Back the Clock in today's mailing, so if you're reading this later in the day, you may want to click over to the site for any potential revisions.
Have a great day,
Cliff
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