Former monthly contribution by late TCM host Robert Osborne to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in June, 2009.
Not only is June busting out all over but so are we, with another supersized first for TCM: a full month devoted solely to the most influential directors who have worked their magic on movie screens through the ages, from Cecil B. DeMille (who is represented by four of his films, including The Cheat which dates back to the silent screen days of 1915) to today's Steven Spielberg (also with four films being shown, including the TCM premiere of his striking 1998 war saga, Saving Private Ryan).
Each and every day of the month we'll be giving you looks at some of the best work by the kind of magicians without whom no film could make it to a screen, no matter how earnestly some producers may wish it wasn't necessary to have a director involved. We have 52, count 'em, 52 such craftsmen getting our focus this month, a list from A to Z, literally, including Allen (Woody) and Zinnemann (Fred).
The biggest guns in the directorial fraternity will all be here, with names such as Ford, Huston, Capra, Welles, Stevens, Kazan, and Scorsese featured at a rate of two directors per day on weekdays. Saturdays and Sundays throughout the month will feature 24-hour tributes to a single director, spotlighting indispensables Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, Michael Curtiz and Mervyn LeRoy.
But the icing on the cake is the attention we'll be paying to many masters of the medium who are not well known, but should be. MGM's versatile Clarence Brown is one. He was never well known outside of the invisible walls of the film industry, not even with popular films to his credit such as Garbo's Anna Karenina and Anna Christie, or the classics National Velvet and The Yearling, which are among the seven Brown bell-ringers we'll screen. The same invisibility has also befallen the great Sam Wood despite his being responsible for such diverse and memorable films as Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Kings Row, which air along with five other Wood titles.
Nor will we be ignoring many of the legendary overseas talents. Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, Japan's Akira Kurosawa, Italy's Federico Fellini, England's Carol Reed and France's Francois Truffaut will be among those getting some well-deserved focus, along with many European-born artists who did a large body of work here in the U,S, including Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur and Otto Preminger. Also on our list are people such as the two fellows from America–Stanley Kubrick, born in NY, NY, and Jules Dassin, born in Middletown, Connecticut–who spent their most exciting and productive years working far, far away from these shores.
Unfortunately, what you won't find is a woman. So few (notably Dorothy Arzner in the ‘30s, Ida Lupino in the ‘50s) have managed to sustain any sort of long-distance career in that particular film field, which, by design or fate, has been very much a boy's club, much to the industry's shame. This first salute of ours to the greatest of the great film directors may be sans women but, hopefully, when we do this again in the future, many females will be on the roll-call. As Garbo says to Lenore Ulric in George Cukor's 1936 Camille, "But don't give up hope, Olympe...."
