The “Summer Under the Stars” on TCM is winding down, but the programming continues to be strong. The next three days, in fact, are some of the best of the month, starting with today’s look at the career of Charlie Chaplin. You can catch most of Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” films tonight from 8 PM-2:30, and if you’ve never seen any of them, try to watch at least one or two (they’re relatively short). If you want to catch a good overview of Chaplin’s life, career and talents, try to watch/record Charlie: The Life & Art of Charlie Chaplin today at 4 PM.
Tomorrow’s focus is Shirley MacLaine, and if you’ve never seen her earlier performances, you really are missing out. Thursday features the one of the greats from the golden age, the extremely versatile Claudette Colbert.
All are worth watching. Reprints of my original comments on each day, including highlights of what to watch, can be found after the jump. If you want to see the entire original post about the month, just go here. I’ll wrap up the remainder of the month later this week.
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Aug. 24 — Charlie Chaplin: TCM has bundled the majority of Chaplin’s classic “Little Tramp” silents into a period spanning from 8 PM to 2:30 AM. You could do worse than watch for the whole night starting at 8 PM with The Kid and continuing with The Gold Rush (9 PM), The Circus (10:15 PM), City Lights (11:30 PM) and Modern Times (1 AM). “The Little Tramp” famously made his final film appearance in Chaplin’s 1940 Nazi Germany satire The Great Dictator (2:30 AM), a remarkable film from a historical perspective if you consider that by 1940 the US had yet to enter WWII and the true horror of Hitler’s plans for the Jews was still years from being exposed to the world. One last highlight was also one of Chaplin’s last films: Limelight (1:30 PM) not only tells the story of the decline of a famous comedian (paralleling Chaplin’s own dwindling career) but it is also the sole moment in film history that Chaplin and his main silent-film rival Buster Keaton shared the screen.
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Aug. 25 — Shirley Maclaine: Forget all the weird stuff that has come out of her mouth over the years, Maclaine has an outstanding filmography. She received her first of eventually six Oscar nominations in 1959 for Some Came Running (8 AM), but she never won until 1983’s Terms of Endearment (1 AM). Still, the definite “don’t miss” for her will always be Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (3 PM), in her also Oscar-nominated role opposite the great Jack Lemmon, who shockingly is not represented this month.
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Aug. 26 — Claudette Colbert: For some stupid reason, I always used to get Colbert mixed up with de Havilland. I’ve managed to stop doing that in more recent years, thankfully. I actually haven’t seen most of the films on TCM’s schedule for this day, but an obvious one for those of you who haven’t seen any is Frank Capra‘s It Happened One Night in which Colbert’s runaway heiress fights against Clark Gable’s newspaperman, before they obviously fall in love. It Happened One Night was actually mentioned repeatedly at the Oscars in 1992 because until The Silence of the Lambs came along, it was the only film in history to sweep the Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay awards.
Out of Focus 