For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

FLICK PICKS: Movies not on DVD

Two of my favorite not-available-on-DVD films are coming up on Turner Classic Movies in the next week. Hearts of the West (Saturday at noon ET, TCM) is 1975's warmhearted portrait of early western moviemaking, pairing naive Hollywood aspirant Jeff Bridges with delightfully mean cowboy star Andy Griffith. The Solid Gold Cadillac (Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET, TCM) is the 1956 comedy gem starring the brilliantly effervescent Judy Holliday [photo below] as a little-guy stockholder who causes big trouble for a big corporation.

Also coming up on TCM but not DVD are such vintage favorites as 1938's Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald musical Sweethearts (Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET), 1949's Betty Hutton delight Red, Hot and Blue (late Tuesday at 1:45 a.m. ET), Tom Laughlin in young director Robert Altman's 1957 social drama The Delinquents (Thursday night at midnight ET), and Jack Benny's 1942 comedy with Ann Sheridan, George Washington Slept Here (late Friday, July 2 at 12:15 a.m. ET).

Yes, I know one or two of these actually did get released on DVD at some point. But they're not in print anymore. TCM used to have a scheduled "not on DVD" showcase, but now it's catch as catch can.

One way to make sure you don't miss something you need to record is to subscribe to TCM's Now Playing magazine (it's really more of a monthly schedule pamphlet), which not only lists films chronologically by airtime and alphabetically, but also spotlights the month's festivals, tributes and showcases like Sunday night silents. I wouldn't watch TCM without it.

2 Comments

Mac said:

TCM will also send an email to remind you of an upcoming showing. Oddly enough, I searched many weeks ago for "The Solid Gold Cadillac", gave TCM my info, and the other day the email came through. "Cadillac" is a nice companion piece to "Born Yesterday" that will truly leave you feeling the loss of Judy Holliday in her prime; no one has ever matched her darkness under the bubbly act since. Two films with Jack Lemmon proved her to be the perfect foil to Lemmon's everyman. What would later pairings of these two have added to their resumes? She looked like the stereotypical dumb blonde but she always was the smartest one in the room.

June 25, 2010 7:46 AM

Diane Werts said:

So glad you share my Judy Holliday crush! She is indeed one of a kind -- you put it so well -- and I feel completely robbed by her early death. She and Lemmon had such great chemistry. Absolutely perfectly matched in both brains and wit.

She was also one of those rare performers who always seemed kind of ageless -- never an ingenue, and I suspect even in senior years she wouldn't have seemed like an old lady. Sort of a female Cary Grant that way.

Now I'm really missing her . . .

June 26, 2010 8:31 PM

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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