So, we’ve been considering for some time offering a weekly round-up of the classic pictures we’re inclined to recommend among those being aired in the week ahead on our favorite network (and surely it’s yours, too), Turner Classic Movies.

We’ll stick mostly to the same years in this listing that we generally focus on here at Cladrite Radio—the 20th century up to 1960 or so—but we reserve the right to step outside those boundaries when we’re so inspired. We’ll recommend whatever tickles our fancy that week; some movies we love won’t get cited, and other that we know are special-interest only will. No squawking allowed (well, you can squawk, but it won’t do you any good).

We’ll try to post this every weekend, usually on Sunday. If you think it’s a good idea and you’d like to see this weekly listing continue, let us know by clicking the Like button at the bottom of this post. If we don’t hear from enough of you, we’ll pull the plug, and no hard feelings.

All that said, here are our TCM recommendations for the upcoming week:

Monday

1:45 PM
THE FEMININE TOUCH (1941)
Cast: Rosalind Russell, Don Ameche, Kay Francis. Dir: W.S. Van Dyke II.
A frothy comedy with two of our favorite actresses.

8:00 PM
KINGS ROW (1942)
Cast: Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan. Dir: Sam Wood.
Can’t go wrong with Ms. Sheridan, and it’s said to be Reagan’s best work. If you’re going to watch just one Ronald Reagan movie, perhaps this should be it.

10:15 PM
CAUGHT (1949)
Cast: James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan. Dir: Max Ophuls.
Ophuls is one of our ten favorite directors of all time, and this is a crackerjack thriller.

2:30 AM
THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Kuninori Kodo. Dir: Akira Kurosawa.
Should be seen on a big screen, of course, but perhaps you have one of those at home.

Tuesday

3:45 PM
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)
Cast: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden. Dir: Elia Kazan.
A classic, but the changes required by the Production Code grate exceedingly if you know the play well.

8:00 PM
WIFE VS. SECRETARY (1936)
Cast: Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow. Dir: Clarence Brown.
Jean Harlow’s the star of the month in March on TCM, and there’s not a picture among the six listed below that we wouldn’t recommend to you.

9:45 PM
RED DUST (1932)
Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor. Dir: Victor Fleming.
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But what if you aren’t satisfied with driving by the homes in which Bogie and Bacall, Jimmy Stewart, and Bette Davis resided? What if you’re more interested in viewing the former residences of the likes of Ted Healy, Una Merkel, or Gummo Marx—not Groucho, Chico, Harpo, or Zeppo, but Gummo Marx?

Then you need only dial up The Movieland Directory, a very impressive online resource, indeed.

The Movieland Directory is downright hard to stump, and don’t think we didn’t try. It gave us addresses for Ned Sparks, for Jack Pickford (Mary’s prodigal brother, don’t you know), for Zasu Pitts, for Billy Gilbert—it even had addresses for El Brendel, for Pete’s sake.

The site also does reverse look-ups. You can enter an address, and if someone related to the movie industry ever lived there, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll turn up.

For instance, our friend Pat used to live on Alta Vista Boulevard, between Sunset and Fountain Avenues. By looking up her block (we’ve forgotten her exact address), we learned that Billy Wayne, who appeared in more than 250 pictures between 1931 and 1958 (but apparently starred in none of them—he’s listed as “uncredited” at IMDB.com in the overwhelming majority of them), used to live just a few doors south of Pat. That’s not terribly exciting, perhaps, but what if it had been Joan Crawford or Buster Keaton or Raymond Chandler? (Considering how often the peripatetic Chandler moved, it well could have been.)

John Ince, brother to motion picture pioneer Thomas Ince and a silent-movie actor and director in his own right, who would became a full-time character actor with the advent of talkies, also lived on what would later be Pat’s block.

And Peter Ostberg, a cabinet maker who was a Universal Studios employee in 1917 (and perhaps before and after that year, who knows?), lived right next to where Pat would live, though his residence has since been replaced by a contemporary apartment building that sits beside the similar one in which Pat resided.

Now, we don’t know Peter Ostberg from Adam, but it’s intriguing to have his name and these tidbits of info turn up in a search like this. (It is to us, anyway—perhaps we’re too easily fascinated.)

You’ll find former addresses of contemporary stars listed in the database, too, and it’s fun to see what those stars have in common with the stars of years gone by.

For instance, in the 1990s, Julia Roberts lived in the Colonial House Apartments at 1416 Havenhurst Drive. And so, at some point in their lives, did Fred Allen, Joan Blondell, Eddie Cantor, Marion Davies, Bette Davis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Norma Talmadge, not to mention a slew of more contemporary stars.

We managed to stump the Movieland Directory database only twice. It returned no addresses when we submitted the name of author Ursula Parrott, a once bestselling author of scandalous fiction that might be considered an arguably more sensational precursor to today’s chick lit—but then, though many of her novels were made into movies, we’re not sure Parrott ever resided in L.A., which would take the site off the hook. And the Movieland Directory has no info on Ed Wood, Jr., everyone’s favorite famously inept movie director, which came as something of a surprise to us.

But that’s nitpicking. Give the site a try, and you’ll no doubt find 95% or more of the names you’re looking for. And you might learn just a little bit of Hollywood history

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the birth of Norma Shearer.

Shearer’s not as well known to the average person today as, say, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, but she was a huge star in her day until, like Greta Garbo, she opted to slip out of the spotlight, after making two pictures in 1942, rather than allowing the public to see her grow old on the screen (Davis and Crawford clearly had no such qualms, and more power to them).

Some insist to this day that Shearer hit it big in large part because she was married to Irving Thalberg, the wunderkind of MGM, but we don’t buy that. She’d appeared in at least 34 movies by the time she and Thalberg tied the knot. Their union did her career no harm, to be sure, but she was gritty and determined and talented, and she’d have done just fine without him, we’re convinced.

We like that she didn’t let the fact that she was a bit cross-eyed prevent her from hitting it big. We like that, when she was told by her own husband that she wasn’t sexy enough for the title role in the Pre-Code classic The Divorcee (1930), she took the initiative to have some sexy photos taken by soon-to-be-prominent photographer George Hurrell to prove him wrong.

She got the part and negated her good-girl image for all time. Thereafter, she was allowed to play a wide range of roles, but had it been left to Thalberg, she’d have stayed locked into her previous prim-and-proper image.

So here’s to Ms. Shearer, another talented gal who knew what she wanted and set out to get it.

We don’t know how we let it sneak by us, but Monday, July 5, was the 100th birthday of the wonderful Gloria Stuart, best known now for her work in James Cameron‘s Titanic, but a woman who’s led a remarkable life and was a pretty big movie star in the 1930s, to boot.

In 1999, when she was just a kid of 89, we got to interview Gloria on the occasion of the publication of her memoir, I Just Kept Hoping. The interview was conducted over the telephone, though we did get the chance to meet Ms. Stuart when she came to NYC for her book party.

We considered it quite a thrill, we don’t mind telling you, to get to interact with Ms. Stuart. After all, this is the women who starred opposite Claude Rains in James Whale‘s The Invisible Man, who appeared with Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, and Charles Laughton in The Old Dark House, who worked with greats such as Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy, Pat O’Brien, Lionel Barrymore, Lee Tracy, Nancy Carroll, Frank Morgan, Paul Lukas, Edward Arnold, Eddie Cantor, Ruth Etting, and dozens more.

So, to mark her centennial (a few days late, alas), we thought we’d share with the Cladrite Radio Clan the interview we did with her in 1999. Enjoy!

It’s been a long, eventful life for former and current movie star Gloria Stuart. She had her first go-around at stardom in the Hollywood heyday of the 1930s and ’40s; then, after taking off 30 years or so to pursue painting, travel, and political activism, she again began to act in the 1970s, eventually garnering a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in “Titanic.” Still going strong today at the age of 89, Stuart has now added authorship to her list of achievements. Her candid memoir, I Just Kept Hoping, is peppered with anecdotes about such memorable figures as Shirley Temple, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. I spoke to Gloria about her life, her two careers in the movies, and her secrets for living so long and so well.

An Interview with Gloria Stuart

You made three films with director James Whale: “The Invisible Man,” “The Old Dark House,” and “The Kiss Before the Mirror.” What can you tell us about him?

I’m very happy I was in those films. You know, James is a cult figure in England. There are a lot of James Whale fan clubs. Actually, right after I had read for Jim Cameron for “Titanic,” I had booked a month in London. I went right away, and there were two wonderful James Whale organizations that I met with. He’s getting his due now, thanks to “Gods and Monsters.”

What did you think of “Gods and Monsters”? Was it, in your view, an accurate portrayal of Whale?

Oh, yes, it was. Ian McKellan captured James’s elegance, the beautiful manners, the beautiful tailoring, the precision, the whole thing. Of course, no one could be James, but he came awfully close.

The special effects in “The Invisible Man” hold up remarkably well today for a film that was made in 1933.

Yes, people who see it today—it runs every so often—they say, gee, it’s not an old hat movie at all.

I’m wondering—did the processes that went into creating those special effects slow down the pace of moviemaking at all?

It was never evident. Only James and the cameraman and I guess all the process people at Universal—the rest of us never had any inkling of what was going on. We did do a lot of shooting in front of black curtains. Now, I wasn’t on the set when the bandages came off or anything like that, so I have no idea about that. But it was very, very secret. I wasn’t on the set when they were finagling the bandages off, and so forth.

That would’ve been fun to see.

Yes, it would’ve! Claude [Rains] may have known [how it all worked] but he never said so.

You and your second husband, Arthur Sheekman, were good friends with Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot, his wife at the time. What can you tell us about Bogie that we might not know?
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