Deborah Kerr movies on TCM: British and Hollywood classics
Deborah Kerr day Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” series on Aug. 15 will feature two TCM premieres: The Day Will Dawn / The Avengers, a British-made 1942 spy drama, and Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957), one of Kerr’s best-known films.
I haven’t seen The Day Will Dawn, but An Affair to Remember is an effective romantic comedy-drama, with both Kerr and Cary Grant in top form as the couple who fail to meet as near to heaven as possible, but who go on loving one another, anyways.
As I’ve said before in this blog, Deborah Kerr is one of my favorite dozen or so actors. Her performances, however cool and composed on the surface, always carry within them the seeds of unbridled, un-moral, undignified passions – which are probably illegal in most countries. And few performers have been able to say as much with a mere quiver of the lips or a lowering of the eyelids.
Perhaps because she’d played the role about a million times on Broadway or perhaps because Robert Anderson’s play was toned down (by Anderson himself) for the screen, Kerr’s acting feels disappointingly mechanical in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 version of Tea and Sympathy. That’s too bad, as her concerned housemaster’s wife who saves a nice young man (John Kerr, no relation) from both (potential) homosexuality and virginity could have been one of the actress’ greatest screen roles. Unfortunately, just about everything else about Minnelli’s good-looking film feels mechanical as well.
On the other hand, Kerr steals the show in (what amounts to) two supporting parts: as the adulterous captain’s wife in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953) and as Spencer Tracy’s neglected-turned-alcoholic wife in George Cukor’s Edward, My Son (1949). Both films are excellent whenever Kerr is on screen, but when she’s not they abruptly turn into conventional melos. (Though Donna Reed holds her own in From Here to Eternity as well.)
Even if The End of the Affair isn’t nearly as good as Neil Jordan’s 1999 version, Deborah Kerr – an excellent performance – holds it together as another adulterous character, this time cheating on husband Peter Cushing with lover Van Johnson.
In I See a Dark Stranger, she plays an Irish lass who hates England so much she becomes a Nazi spy.
Julius Caesar would have been a better – or at least a more interesting – movie had Kerr, not Marlon Brando, been cast as Mark Antony. And Rear Window and Vertigo would have unquestionably been far better movies had Kerr landed the James Stewart roles.
And when will TCM unearth Love on the Dole and The Naked Edge? Have The Gypsy Moths and The Assam Garden ever been on?
Deborah Kerr movies: TCM schedule (PDT)
3:00 AM The End of the Affair (1955)
Director: Edward Dmytryk.
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson, John Mills.
106m5:00 AM Julius Caesar (1953)
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Cast: Marlon Brando, James Mason, Louis Calhern, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, John Gielgud, Edmond O’Brien, George Macready, Michael Pate, Douglass Watson, Edmund Purdom.
121m7:30 AM The Avengers (1942)
Director: Harold French.
Cast: Hugh Williams, Griffith Jones, Deborah Kerr.
100m9:30 AM I See A Dark Stranger (1945)
Director: Frank Launder.
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Trevor Howard, Raymond Huntley.
112m11:30 AM The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Directors: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger.
Cast: Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook.
163m2:30 PM Tea And Sympathy (1956)
Director: Vincente Minnelli.
Cast: Deborah Kerr, John Kerr, Leif Erickson.
122m5:00 PM An Affair To Remember (1957)
Director: Leo McCarey.
Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning, Neva Patterson, Cathleen Nesbitt.
115m7:15 PM From Here to Eternity (1953)
Director: Fred Zinnemann.
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Montgomery Clift, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, Don Dubbins.
118m9:30 PM The Hucksters (1947)
Director: Jack Conway.
Cast: Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner, Sydney Greenstreet, Edward Arnold, Adolphe Menjou, Keenan Wynn.
116m11:30 PM Edward My Son (1949)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Deborah Kerr, Ian Hunter.
113m1:30 AM Please Believe Me (1950)
Director: Norman Taurog.
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Robert Walker, Peter Lawford, Mark Stevens, James Whitmore.
87m