FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: Adaptations All Month on Turner Classic Movies

Turner Classic Movies may just be having the best month they've ever programmed. I'm not kidding. Among the groups of movies they're offering this month, there are three different themes that rise to the top. All three are terrific choices.

Character actress Marie Dressler is the Star of the Month, with her movies on Monday nights, including Min and Bill on June 20 and Dinner at Eight on June 27, and director/screenwriter Billy Wilder, who is so revered he's achieved godlike status with up-and-coming moviemakers, is also spotlighted in June, with his fabulous movies screened on Friday nights. This week alone, you'll find Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole and Stalag 17, all cynical and smart and more than worth your time.

But the really big bonanza is what they're calling Stage to Screen, featuring 69 different movies adapted for the big screen from stageplays. If you're a theater fan, you can see match up how many of these classics you've seen on stage. Tonight you can see Marlon Brando bring his Stanley Kowalski from Broadway to Warner Brothers, with A Streetcar Named Desire on TCM at 7 pm Central time. Director Elia Kazan and costars Kim Hunter and Karl Malden also came from the Broadway production, but Vivien Leigh was a brand-new Blanche Dubois. There was a clash of styles and larger-than-life personalities that somehow worked to the movie's advantage when you see all that tension on screen. You can also understand why Brando became such a star and why Leigh, Hunter and Malden all won Oscars. It's quite a movie.

Also tonight, Miss Julie, a Swedish screen version of Strindberg's famous play directed by Alf Sjöberg, and a filmed adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House from 1973, when there were two versions filmed, both with star casts. I'm not sure which A Doll's House TCM has on tap, since their page is short on details. They link to a listing with Jane Fonda as Nora, but I believe the picture they're showing is from the other one, with Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins. I guess we'll take our chances and see what we get. Miss Julie is scheduled for 9:15, with A Doll's House at 11 Central.

After that, it's Equus, the 1977 film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play, starring Richard Burton as the psychiatrist and Peter Firth as the boy with the horse obsession, and then Picnic from 1955, which brought director Joshua Logan from the 1953 production to take on the film version, too. William Holden and Kim Novak play the bad-boy drifter and the beautiful woman stuck in a small town. In the early hours of Thursday morning, you can find Cyrano de Bergerac, which won a Best Actor Oscar for its Cyrano, Jose Ferrer, on top of the Best Actor Tony he'd already won, and The Green Pastures, another Pulitzer Prize winning play adapted for the screen. Marc Connelly's "broadly played black miracle play" offers Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and Rex Ingram in its African-American cast.

Thursday night the focus turns to musicals, with a line-up of Broadway shows from the 50s, from The King and I to Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Guys and Dolls and Kiss Me Kate running from 7 pm to just about 6 am Central. The Student Prince starts up the musical parade again at 7 am, followed by Kismet and Pal Joey. And if you've hung around for all of that, you will find yourself at 1 pm on Friday, ready for a nap before you start the Billy Wilder films at 7 pm.

Keep in mind that that's just this week. The Stage to Screen festival continues with more musicals, Shakespeare, dramas, history plays and comedies all the way through June. Amazing stuff!

Tonight on TCM: NINOTCHKA

Ah, the Lubitsch touch... Ernst Lubitsch was one of Hollywood's finest directors during its Golden Age, creating a continental world of wit and sophistication, where the elegant thieves of Trouble in Paradise can lift an increasingly intimate array of items -- a wallet, a watch, a garter -- off each other over dinner, where the two clerks in The Shop Around the Corner can wage a war of words even as they fall in love in a romantic version of Budapest that looks like it belongs inside a snow globe.

Lubitsch had the touch all right -- his movies are often about sex, but it's an amusing and knowing kind of sex, never crude, always as charming and sophisticated as his characters.

The two movies I mentioned above were written by Samson Raphaelson, the screenwriter whose dialogue Pauline Kael famously said "had the gleam of appliquéd butterfly wings on a Ziegfield girl's toque." In other words, he was the perfect match for Ernst Lubitsch. But in Ninotchka, the 1939 movie playing late tonight on TCM, the script came from Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch, teaming Lubitsch with Wilder, the clearest heir to his witty, perfectly polished throne.

Ninotchka also gave Lubitsch a chance to work with Greta Garbo, known then as the queen of tragedies. In this movie, the poster makes sure we know that "Garbo laughs," playing off a famous campaign for Anna Christie, her first talkie, when it was all about "Garbo talks!" The fact that she was laughing -- or more specifically, that her character, a stern, all-business Russian woman named Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, begins to lighten up and laugh -- is pretty much the plot of Ninotchka.

In the film, Garbo's Comrade Yakushova comes to Paris to find out what's gone wrong with the mission of three previous emissaries (the wonderful character actors Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart and Alexander Granach) sent to sell some jewels confiscated in the Russian Revolution. But the Grand Duchess (Ina Claire) who once owned the jewels has sent her own emissary, suave Count Leon, played by Melvyn Douglas, to intercept the three Russians, and he's successfully sidetracked them with all the fine things Paris has to offer, like free-flowing champagne and cigarette girls. Once Nina Ivanovna gets there, she gets to work putting the mission back on track, until Count Leon starts to corrupt her, too.

The last time I talked about Ninotchka, I summed it this way:

Once chilly Comrade Ninotchka comes up against the debonair count and his pencil-thin mustache, she begins to thaw, going so far as to buy a frivolous hat, drink too much and spend the night in his arms. Will love prevail when the Grand Duchess steals back her jewelry? Will Ninotchka's sense of duty to the Soviet state force her to reject Leon's materialistic world? Will she ever find her way back to her Parisian count?

Is there even a doubt?

It's a lovely trifle, a perfect film for midnight (Eastern time -- 11 pm in the Central time zone) on a cold February night. Ninotchka is part of TCM's celebration of the Oscars. It was nominated for four of them, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Garbo, Best Writing for the original story by Melchior Lengyel, and Best Writing (Screenplay) for Brackett, Reisch and Wilder. If you are playing TCM's 360 Degrees of Oscar, look for Melvyn Douglas as the link between The Candidate (the movie before Ninotchka on the TCM schedule) and Ninotchka, and Felix Bressart as the link between Ninotchka and Bitter Sweet, the musical that comes after.

Barbara Stanwyck No. 2: BALL OF FIRE Tonight on TCM

Yesterday we talked about Barbara Stanwyck month on TCM through the lens of The Lady Eve, her 1941 romantic comedy with director and screenwriter Preston Sturges. The movie TCM will be screening right after The Lady Eve is another gem, and Stanwyck is just as spirited and sparkly.

So what's No. 2?

It's Ball of Fire, a screwball take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs directed by Howard Hawks, one of Hollywood's most versatile directors, with a fizzy, funny screenplay by Charles Brackett and the legendary Billy Wilder.

In this one, Stanwyck is Sugarpuss O'Shea, which has to one of the best names ever in film history, a nightclub entertainer romantically linked to a gangster. Gary Cooper is her screen partner, but he's not the gangster He's Bertram Potts, a professor of linguistics currently working on an encyclopedia with a group of elderly academic types, each with his own specialty. They're cooped up together in a house, slaving away, desperately trying to finish their project at long last.

But Bertram takes a stroll over to the nightclub where Sugarpuss is entertaining, hears her delicious slang, and invites her to help him out by giving him the inside scoop on her jazzy lingo. She declines, until she needs a place to hide out. It seems the coppers are on her tail to drop a dime on her main squeeze, Joe Lilac, who is on ice after maybe bumping off a rival.

Once ensconced at the house where all the professors live, Sugarpuss takes over, sharing all her best slang with Pottsie (she's given Bertram that nickname) and her slinkiest conga moves with his colleagues. Things are great until Joe Lilac resurfaces, huge engagement ring in hand. But by that time, Sugarpuss is starting to have feelings for shy, awkward professor Pottsie.

Things go south from there. Or maybe west, since they all end up in New Jersey. Gangsters! Adorable old men in a conga line! Barbara Stanwyck in gold lamé with a bare midriff! Gary Cooper in a bowtie! Gene Krupa drumming "Drum Boogie" with matchsticks! It just doesn't get any better than that.

This time, the supporting players include Richard Haydn, Oscar Homolka, Leonid Kinskey, Tully Marshall, Aubrey Mathers, S. Z. "Cuddles" Sakall and Henry Travers as the encyclopedia scribes, Dana Andrews as Joe Lilac the thuggish boyfriend, and Dan Duryea and Ralph Peters as Duke Pastrami and Asthma Anderson, Joe's henchmen.

C'mon. Who can resist a movie with people named Sugarpuss, Asthma and Pastrami?

Don't resist. Give in to Ball of Fire. It's at 12:15 am (Central time) tonight on TCM, right after The Lady Eve. You'll be drum-boogieing all night long.

Is "Sabrina" Still Fair After All These Years?

I can't even say how many times I've seen the movie "Sabrina." I loved the Cinderella story of the chauffeur's daughter with a massive crush on the wealthy family's golden boy, the girl who starts as a waif but grows up to acquire a fabulous wardrobe and the ability to attract every male in sight. Yep. Cinderella, all right.

But that was when I was eight or ten, and the idea of Audrey Hepburn, luminous and impossibly lovely at 25, matched up with world-weary Humphrey Bogart at 55, didn't seem all that weird. After all, I was already familiar with Audrey as a love interest for Fred Astaire (also 30 years older) and Gary Cooper (a spring chicken at 28 years older) and I adored "Funny Face" and "Love in the Afternoon."

That worked for me when I was ten, but would it work for me now, when my sensibilities are quite different? Would "Sabrina" seem creepy and sexist and all the other things I complain about now when they pair senior-citizen men with teenage girls?

Well, no. Watching "Sabrina" again, I was caught up in Billy Wilder's magic pretty much from the opening "Once upon a time." Wilder produced and directed "Sabrina" and also collaborated with Ernest Lehman on the script, a script that is lighter than air, terribly romantic, and quite often hilarious. And I buy every bit of it, every time.

It helps that Sabrina is clearly the heart of the movie and Audrey Hepburn is absolutely perfect in the role. She's believable as the ragamuffin who hides in trees to eavesdrop on the Larrabees' fabulous parties, and just as believable as the sophisticated beauty wearing Givenchy gowns. (I chose the French poster to accompany this piece because it shows off the famous dress. I think about 90% of girls who see "Sabrina" wish they could wear that dress just once.)

But there's more to recommend in "Sabrina" than just Audrey. Humphrey Bogart, as tight-laced Wall Street wizard Linus Larrabee, and William Holden, as David Larrabee, the careless playboy Sabrina pines for, are both playing against the type we expect from them. This is not the thug or tough guy Bogie from "The Maltese Falcon," not even the crazy Captain Queeg from "The Caine Mutiny" released earlier that same year. Instead, he's a conservative businessman who doesn't remember how to have fun. It's to Bogart's credit that he's so very good at playing stuffy Linus, and that he was willing to look silly in a too-small Yale sweater and beanie.

Ditto for William Holden, best known for playing cynical, hard-luck smart guys in serious films like "Stalag 17" and "Sunset Boulevard." Here, he's gone blond and a little silly, but it doesn't stop you from rooting for his character. Holden really does look like a Golden Boy.

The supporting cast is one of the highlights of this upstairs/downstairs plot, as you'll notice Grandma Walton (Ellen Corby) showing up as Linus's secretary, Miss Jane Hathaway from The Beverly Hillbillies (Nancy Kulp) as a servant in the Larrabee household, and silent film star Francis X. Bushman as David's prospective father-in-law. John Williams is also terrific as Sabrina's father, who knows no good can come from a chauffeur's daughter falling in love above her (or his) station.

But I think most of the credit for "Sabrina" has to go to Billy Wilder. There's just something about the way humor and sentiment combine in this movie that works like a charm.

"Sabrina" plays the Normal Theater tonight and tomorrow night. What a treat to get to see it on the big screen!