News

Conan O’Brien has been tapped to host Carson On TCM, a showcase of Hollywood interviews from Johnny Carson’s three decades as host of The Tonight Show. The series is set to air Mondays at 8 Pm beginning July 1. O’Brien, host of Conan on TCM’s sister network TBS, will introduce five interviews each week on the series. Carson On TCM is a joint effort between Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jones (Johnny Carson: King Of Late Night, TCM’s Stardust: The Bette Davis Story) of Peter Jones Productions and Jeff Sotzing of Carson Entertainment Group, which controls the Carson archives. The July 1 show will open with Johnny Carson’s 1982 interview with then-7-year-old Drew Barrymore. It will also feature interviews with Kirk Douglas (taped in 1988), Mary Tyler Moore (1978), writer Neil Simon (1980) and George Burns (1989). The July schedule for Carson on TCM will also feature interviews with...

Bette Davis on TCM: The Old Maid, Now, Voyager, The Working Man Bette Davis has a cameo in John Paul Jones (1959), which happens to be an insufferable bore despite the presence of Robert Stack in the title role, and she plays second banana to Spencer Tracy in the run-of-the-Warners-mill prison drama 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), but she is at the center of The Corn Is Green (1945) as Miss Lily Moffat, a teacher in a poor Welsh mining town. Now, Voyager's Irving Rapper directed this film adaptation of Emlyn Williams' semi-autobiographical play — and it shows. Davis is a little too stiff in Ethel Barrymore's Broadway role, John Dall fails to convey his character's emotional turmoil, the dialogue has a theatrical lilt to it, and for the most part the potentially compelling drama feels stilted. Had William Wyler directed The Corn Is Green, it would have been a fantastic movie.

Miriam Hopkins, Bette Davis, The Old Maid Bette Davis, Warner Bros.' top female box-office attraction from the mid-'30s to the late '40s, is Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" performer-of-the-day this Wednesday, August 3. TCM will be presenting 12 Bette Davis movies, in addition to the 2005 documentary Stardust: The Bette Davis Story. [Bette Davis Movie Schedule.] Unfortunately, none of TCM's Bette Davis movies is a local premiere. So, don't expect anything rare like The Bad Sister, Seed, The Menace, or Way Back Home. Or, for that matter, Connecting Rooms, Bunny O'Hare, The Scientific Cardplayer, or Wicked Stepmother. (Luigi Comencini's The Scientific Cardplayer, co-starring Alberto Sordi, Joseph Cotten, and Silvana Mangano, is an interesting film; hopefully TCM will get a hold of it one of these days.) Anyhow, at least there's the little-known The Working Man (1933), a perfectly enjoyable Depression Era comedy-drama starring a surprisingly effective George Arliss as a big businessman who,...