TCM Schedule for Thursday, January 16, 2020 -- What's On Tonight: SAG Lifetime Achievement Award

[Staph]

Last edited Mon Mar 23, 2020, 06:31 PM - Edit history (1)

In prime time, TCM is celebrating this year's recipient of the Screen Actors' Guild Lifetime Achievement award, Robert De Niro. Take it away, Roger:

Oscar-winning actor, producer and director Robert De Niro has been named the 56th recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award for his artistic contributions to film and his accomplishments as a humanitarian.

The Annual SAG Awards will be simulcast live on TCM sister channels TNT and TBS on Sunday, January 19 at 8 p.m. (ET). Actor Leonardo DiCaprio will present De Niro's award. Three evenings earlier, TCM presents a quartet of De Niro films in honor of his career.

Robert Anthony De Niro, Jr. was born in Manhattan on August 17, 1943, the only child of painters Robert De Niro Sr. and Virginia Admiral. His ancestry is a blend of Irish, Italian, Dutch, English, French and German. De Niro's parents divorced when he was two years old, and he was raised by his mother in the Greenwich Village and Little Italy areas of Manhattan. His father lived nearby, so he continued to spend much time with him. De Niro was educated in public and private schools in New York City. He dropped out of high school at age 16 to pursue acting and studied at HB Studio, the Stella Adler Conservatory and Actors Studio.

De Niro made his film debut in Brian De Palma's The Wedding Party, completed in 1963 but not widely released until 1969. Among the early films for which he gained attention were Bloody Mama (1970) and Bang the Drum Slowly (1973). He began his long-term artistic partnership with director Martin Scorsese, one of the movies' most significant, in 1973.

De Niro won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974) and a Best Actor award for Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980). He earned Best Actor nominations for his roles in Taxi Driver (1976), The Deer Hunter (1978), Awakenings (1990), Cape Fear (1991) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012). BAFTA Award nominations came for The King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas (1990) and other films.

His other numerous honors include the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the Golden Lion, the AFI Life Achievement Award, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and four nominations each for Primetime Emmy Awards, Golden Globe Awards and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

De Niro has directed as well as acted in films including A Bronx Tale (1993) and The Good Shepherd (2006). His total screen credits number more than 100, with several new projects due for release in 2020.

Here are the films in the TCM tribute to Robert De Niro:

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971), an ensemble comedy about the Mafia, has Jerry Orbach as a budding mobster whose boss (Lionel Stander) demotes him to chauffeur. De Niro, who is billed sixth, plays a young Italian bicyclist who is drawn into the gang's schemes and ends up posing as a priest. James Goldstone directed.

Mean Streets (1973) is a seminal work from Scorsese, his first feature that was entirely personal and drew from his background growing up in New York City's Little Italy. Harvey Keitel plays a young Italian-American whose struggle to lead a decent life is hampered by his work as a collector for a loan shark and by his friendship with the reckless and self-destructive De Niro character. Dave Kehr wrote in the Chicago Reader that "the acting and editing have such original, tumultuous force that the picture is completely gripping." De Niro won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor.

New York, New York (1977) is an underrated masterpiece from Scorsese - an original and darkly brilliant drama with music that blends the look of movie musicals of the 1940s and '50s with the corrosive energy of 1970s filmmaking. Liza Minnelli and De Niro play a pair of musicians--she's a singer, he's a saxophone player--whose love for each other can't overcome career conflicts and professional jealousy. Their sparring is electric, and the dynamic score combines pop standards of the 1940s with original songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Minnelli, De Niro and the film itself were nominated for Golden Globes.

True Confessions (1981) is a neo-noir directed by Ulu Grosbard and loosely based on the case of the "Black Dahlia." De Niro and Robert Duvall costar as the Spellacy brothers, a priest and a police detective. After many years apart, the brothers clash over the brutal murder of a young prostitute who is labeled the "Virgin Tramp" because she is believed to be Catholic. De Niro and Duvall shared the Golden Phoenix Award of the Venice Film Festival as Best Actor.

by Roger Fristoe

Enjoy!



6:00 AM -- AFFAIR WITH A STRANGER (1953)
A playwright and his wife search the past for the key to saving their troubled marriage.
Dir: Roy Rowland
Cast: Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Mary Jo Tarola
BW-87 mins, CC,

Story and screenplay by Richard Flournoy.


7:30 AM -- WEEK-END AT THE WALDORF (1945)
In this remake of Grand Hotel, guests at a New York hotel fight to survive personal tragedy.
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
Cast: Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon
BW-129 mins, CC,

Some interior and exterior scenes were shot on location at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, but the majority of the film was produced at the MGM studios - where the lobby, Starlight Roof Garden, and about sixty other sets were created.


9:45 AM -- IS MY FACE RED? (1932)
A gossip columnist witnesses a gangland killing.
Dir: William Seiter
Cast: Helen Twelvetrees, Ricardo Cortez, Jill Esmond
BW-66 mins, CC,

While the film was playing in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in July of 1932, Ricardo Cortez published his own gossip column in the Scranton Republican.


11:00 AM -- TALK ABOUT A STRANGER (1952)
Small-town gossips rage over the arrival of a mysterious stranger.
Dir: David Bradley
Cast: George Murphy, Nancy Reagan, Billy Gray
BW-65 mins, CC,

Made during the height of the Joseph McCarthy era, this film is an allegory of the anti-communist fervor that commanded America's headlines at the time. Ironically, co-star and M-G-M contract player Nancy Reagan (née Davis) previously had her career derailed when she was erroneously branded a communist in one of the many red-baiting publications of the time. She sought dispensation from the then-president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. This was how they met and they married a month before this film was released.


12:15 PM -- BLESSED EVENT (1932)
An unscrupulous gossip columnist lands himself in hot water.
Dir: Roy Del Ruth
Cast: Lee Tracy, Mary Brian, Allen Jenkins
BW-80 mins, CC,

Film debut of Dick Powell and Isabel Jewell.


2:00 PM -- MY REPUTATION (1946)
A widow generates small-town gossip when she falls in love too soon after her husband's death.
Dir: Curtis Bernhardt
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Warner Anderson
BW-94 mins, CC,

Filmed from November 1943 to January 1944, and not generally released until 1946. It was only screened for military audiences during the war as the studio thought it would be more well-received by the general public after the war ended.


3:45 PM -- THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE (1958)
British parents try to prepare their Americanized daughter for her social debut.
Dir: Vincente Minnelli
Cast: Rex Harrison, Kay Kendall, John Saxon
C-96 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

For years, John Saxon said he had been bothered by something about Sandra Dee during filming that he just couldn't put his finger on. Decades later he figured out what it was: Sandra's mother had lied about her age to get her more adult roles. Sandra was only fourteen-years-old at the time of filming.


5:30 PM -- THE WOMEN (1939)
A happily married woman lets her catty friends talk her into divorce when her husband strays.
Dir: George Cukor
Cast: Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell
BW-133 mins, CC,

George Cukor told Rosalind Russell to play the part of Sylvia very broad. "Because in this picture Sylvia's breaking up a family, and there's a child involved, and if you're a heavy," Cukor told her, "audiences will hate you. Don't play it like a heavy, just be ridiculous." Of this advice Russell said, "He was a hundred-percent right. I was frightened to death, but from then on, I did what he said, and everything that came to me from 'The Women'--namely, my reputation as a comedienne--I owe to George . . . He was marvelous to work for, he could think of a hundred bits of business for every moment."



TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: SAG LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD



8:00 PM -- NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977)
A jazz musician and a singer fight and love their way through the show biz world of the late forties.
Dir: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro, Lionel Stander
C-163 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

The original song titled "Theme from New York, New York" was scrapped at the insistence of Robert De Niro. Grudgingly, John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote a new version, which has since become one of the most famous and often recorded songs in history. Kander and Ebb have often expressed extreme gratitude to De Niro for his influence.


11:00 PM -- MEAN STREETS (1973)
A small-time hood must choose from among love, friendship and the chance to rise within the mob.
Dir: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval
C-112 mins, CC,

This marks the first film collaboration of Director Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. They would go on to make nine films together, as of 2019: Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019).


1:00 AM -- TRUE CONFESSIONS (1981)
A police detective clashes with his brother, a monsignor, during a murder investigation.
Dir: Ulu Grosbard
Cast: Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Charles Durning
C-108 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

This was the first film that Robert De Niro did after Raging Bull (1980). He kept some of the weight that he gained for Raging Bull (1980), because he felt that it better fit the character, although he still had to drop fifty-five pounds.


3:00 AM -- THE GANG THAT COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT (1971)
A gang of penny-ante crooks bumbles their way through their shot at the big time.
Dir: James Goldstone
Cast: Jerry Orbach, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jo Van Fleet
C-96 mins, Letterbox Format

While Paramount brass dithered over whether to cast him as Michael Corleone, the role that would make him a star, a frustrated Al Pacino signed up for the role of Mario Trantino in this movie. When Paramount finally decided to offer him The Godfather (1972) role, they had to buy him out of his contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ironically, the role went to Robert De Niro, whom The Godfather: Part II (1974) would also help to make a star.


4:45 AM -- GANG BUSTERS (1955)
Hardened criminal repeatedly breaks out of Oregon State Prison, eluding police for prolonged periods afterwards.
Dir: Bill Karn
Cast: Myron Healey, Don Harvey, Sam Edwards
BW-71 mins,

The film was a reedited composite of the three-part "The Pinson Gang," including new footage and originally made for the 1955 first-run syndicated television series of the same name by Visual Drama, Inc., which also produced the series. This full-length feature derivative premiered on January 19, 1955 at the Paramount Theater in Boston before opening nationally.