Monday is the start of August, which means it's also the start of the annual Summer Under the Stars festival on Turner Classic Movies. Each day gives us 24 hours of films saluting a single actor (starting daily at 6 a.m. ET), including kickoff star Marlon Brando, first-week fellows Bette Davis and Lucille Ball, and subsequent names from Orson Welles to Anne Francis.
For silent film fans like me, there's one particularly special treat -- an entire day of Lon Chaney, the legendarily chameleon "man of a thousand faces," whose artistry in makeup, contortion and (let's not forget) performance fills Aug. 15 with a full 16 (!) feature films. He made just one speaking movie before his 1930 death -- an early-talkie remake of his 1925 hit The Unholy Three. But god bless TCM, they're running that one at 7:30 a.m. ET, while filling the hours around prime time with some of Chaney's more superior silents. Brave stuff, much appreciated by film buffs.
TCM's ace website maps it all for us in typically stylish fashion, starting here with its main Summer Under the Stars page and clicking through to individual pages for each day's actor with complete schedules, bios, insightful articles, video clips and other goodies. Start with Brando, and explore lots more, all through August.
Here's a look at the list for TCM's 2011 Summer Under the Stars, hosted by Ben Mankiewicz:
1 - Marlon Brando
2 - Paulette Goddard
3 - Bette Davis
4 - Ronald Colman
5 - John Garfield
6 - Lucille Ball
7 - Charles Laughton
8 - Orson Welles
9 - Ann Dvorak
10 - Shirley MacLaine
11 - Ben Johnson
12 - Claudette Colbert
13 - James Stewart
14 - Ralph Bellamy
15 - Lon Chaney
16 - Joanne Woodward
17 - Humphrey Bogart
18 - Jean Gabin
19 - Debbie Reynolds
20 - Montgomery Clift
21 - Cary Grant
22 - Joan Crawford
23 - Conrad Veidt
24 - Joan Blondell
25 - Burt Lancaster
26 - Peter Lawford
27 - Linda Darnell
28 - Carole Lombard
29 - Anne Francis
30 - Howard Keel
31 - Marlene Dietrich