In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese in January 2016.
TCM BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE: RAY MILLAND / STARRING DANA ANDREWS -- I was born in the '40s, a time that feels distant now. The decade as it was interpreted by Hollywood filmmakers was, of course, alive for anyone that owned a television set for quite a long time--with the exception of this channel, that consciousness of old Hollywood is fading away too. For many of us, the '40s was the peak of Hollywood moviemaking. The average level of moviemaking was so high that even the mediocre movies looked good. I think it also had a lot to do with the war, and the variety of tones and moods it provoked: speed, urgency, frenzied comedy, elegiac sadness during the war; buoyant optimism on the one hand and melancholy, bitterness and darkness on the other in the post-war years. New kinds of actors emerged, very different from their predecessors in the '30s--people like Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Teresa Wright and Gloria Grahame.
This month, TCM is celebrating the birthdays of two of the most unusual stars of the era: Ray Milland and Dana Andrews. Both of them were born around the turn of the century, Milland in Wales and Andrews to a Baptist family in Mississippi (his brother was the actor Steve Forrest). Both had careers before they went into acting, Milland as an expert rider and rifleman and Andrews as an accountant. Milland acted throughout the '30s--first in England and then in Hollywood at Paramount-- but he didn't become a star until the '40s; Andrews was signed by Goldwyn, who sold half of his contract to Twentieth Century-Fox. Both had unusual voices. Like Cary Grant, Milland's accent somehow translated as American, while Andrews carried an interesting hint of his southern drawl. Both of them hit a peak in the mid-40s, often playing characters who were a little off-balance, jittery, in some cases self-destructive. And in the '50s both actors shifted into B-movies (in Andrews' case), character roles and television--Milland because he lost his hair at a young age and Andrews due to severe alcoholism.
Milland's 111 birthday on January 3 is being celebrated with six pictures and an episode of Screen Director's Playhouse based on the Robert Louis Stevenson story "Markheim" and directed by Fred Zinnemann; Andrews' 107 birthday is on January 1, but you can see four of his pictures on January 21. Two of Milland's finest movies are included, both from Billy Wilder: The Major and the Minor (Wilder's first as a director) and an adaptation of Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, Milland's signature role and a brutally frank portrait of the kind of low-down alcoholism that Andrews would be experiencing in reality within a few years. There is also a fascinating, interestingly downbeat George Cukor picture with Lana Turner called A Life of Her Own and Hitchcock's great adaptation of Dial M for Murder--you should actually try to see that one in 3D. All four of Andrews' films are excellent: Fallen Angel by Otto Preminger (with whom Andrews had an interesting working relationship in the '40s), Elia Kazan's docudrama Boomerang!, and Fritz Lang's last two Hollywood films, While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, both extremely disturbing and both made with a low budget spareness put to creative use. Andrews was in bad shape when he made these pictures, but he was a real pro and he's excellent in both.
