Wednesday, October 18
TCM Spotlight: Architecture in the Movies

Home Sweet Home

8:00 PM The Magnificent Ambersons ('42)
10:00 PM The Heiress ('49)
12:00 AM Mildred Pierce ('45)
2:00 AM The Enchanted Cottage ('45)
4:00 AM The House of Usher ('60)

“There it is, the Amberson mansion.
The pride of the town....Sixty thousand
dollars’ worth of woodwork alone...”

—Townspeople in The Magnificent Ambersons (RKO, 1942)

Whether it is a grand mansion, an enchanted cottage or a beach bungalow, in these classic films the house is a true character, forming the persona and social class of the story’s inhabitants.

A stately mansion is the central player in The Magnificent Ambersons (8:00 PM), a tale of the rise and fall of an upper-middle-class Midwestern family at the dawn of the Industrial Age. A combination of suffocating period furnishings and the repression of a young woman living at home with her wealthy father becomes a metaphor in The Heiress (10:00 PM). Set in New York’s Washington Square in the mid 1800s, the heiress must choose between inheritance and love. Mildred Pierce (12:00 AM) is classic film noir at its finest, mixed with the soap-opera elements of mother versus daughter and murder. Mildred’s (Joan Crawford) modest Glendale home and Malibu beach house represent the trappings of the American dream as she rises to the top as a business tycoon. A charming cottage becomes a catalyst for transformation in The Enchanted Cottage (2:00 AM) as a scarred war veteran (Robert Young) and a homely girl (Dorothy McGuire) fall in love and are physically changed by the romantic spirit of their surroundings. The menacing mansion of House of Usher (4:00 AM) reveals a foreboding terror in this modern Gothic horror tale. Sinister Rodney Usher (Vincent Price) portrays the master of the dilapidated ruin in the Edgar Allan Poe story.