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TCM Morning & Afternoon Movies: Widows and Widowers
TCM, Beginning at 5:30 a.m.
Today’s daytime lineup on Turner Classic Movies features some memorable, and some perhaps lesser-known, films of various genres with main characters who have lost a spouse. The day starts with Make Way for a Lady (pictured) (1936), a romantic comedy/drama starring Anne Shirley as the teenage daughter of a widower (Herbert Marshall) who tries to hook her father up with every eligible woman in sight. Next, in the 1938 musical comedy Listen, Darling, Judy Garland plays Pinky Wingate, a teenager who is worried when her widowed mother, Dottie (Mary Astor), pursues a romance with a banker. Pinky, along with her friend Buzz (Freddie Bartholomew), takes Dottie and Pinky’s younger brother Billie (Scotty Beckett) on a road trip away from the banker. Along the way, they meet two men (Walter Pidgeon and Alan Hale), either of whom Pinky thinks would make a more preferable husband for her mother. Shirley Temple stars in the next film, the 1941 comedy/drama Kathleen, which marked her first comeback role since “retiring” from the
screen a year earlier. Temple plays the title character, Kathleen Davis, the 12-year-old neglected daughter of a wealthy widower (Marshall, again filling the role of a widowed dad) who tries to find the right wife for her father. After that, the 1948 musical Three Daring Daughters finds a trio of siblings (Jane Powell, Ann E. Todd and Elinor Donahue) who are shocked when their divorced mother, Louise (Jeanette MacDonald), returns from a Cuban vacation with famed Spanish pianist Jose Iturbi (playing a fictionalized version of himself) on her arm. The girls plot to reunite Louise with their longgone father, talking to their mother’s boss (Edward Arnold) about the situation, only to eventually learn that Louise has been keeping the truth about their father from them. Then, in 1963’s Golden Globe-nominated comedy A Ticklish Affair, when the three sons (Peter Robbins, Bill Mumy and Bryan Russell) of a young widow (Shirley Jones) inadvertently send an SOS while playing with their uncle’s (Red Buttons) Navy signal lamp, the Navy sends its top man (Gig Young) to investigate, and he falls for their mother. The next film is one of the more well-known titles in the “kid tries to set up widowed parent” subgenre of romantic comedy film, partly because of its cast, partly because it inspired a later TV series of the same name: The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963). Ron Howard (known then, in his child-star days, as “Ronny”) plays young Eddie, who tries to play matchmaker for his widowed father (Glenn Ford). Shirley Jones, Dina Merrill, Stella Stevens, Jerry Van Dyke and Roberta Sherwood also star in the film, which was directed by Vincente Minnelli. Up next, the 1965 romantic comedy Promise Her Anything boasts a screenplay by William Peter Blatty (later better known for his novel The Exorcist) and follows a recently widowed woman (Leslie Caron) with an infant son who finds herself choosing between two prospective suitors: her bohemian neighbor (Warren Beatty) and a psychologist (Bob Cummings) known as an authority on children who actually despises them. Finally, the family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) features both a widow (Golden Globe nominee Lucille Ball) and a widower (Henry Fonda), who fall for each other. He has 10 children, she has eight of her own, and they eventually combine to form an unconventional family that also includes the new child that they have together. Van Johnson costars.