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TCM Spotlight: Columbia Pictures 100th Anniversary
TCM, beginning at 7 p.m.
Columbia Pictures may not necessarily be one of the names that jumps into people’s heads when asked to name a movie studio, but it has a long history of producing notable films across a variety of genres. That long history began 100 years ago this month, in fact; the company known as Columbia Pictures, based off an existing company that had begun in New York City in 1918, was founded on Jan. 10, 1924. You can enjoy many of the movies Columbia has produced over the past century each Wednesday night this month when Turner Classic Movies airs lineups devoted to Columbia titles from two decades per night. Up first is a look at highlights from the studio’s first two decades, the 1920s and ’30s. It begins with the legendary 1934 screwball comedy It Happened One Night (pictured), which was the first of only three movies in Hollywood history to win all five major Oscar categories: Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Capra), Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert) and Best Screenplay (Robert Riskin). After that comes the TCM premiere of 1934’s Woman Haters, the first comedy short starring what would become one of Columbia’s most beloved and enduring acts: the Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Jerry “Curly” Howard were billed under their own names at the time of the film’s release, since the Stooges had yet to be professionally known as the Stooges at that point). A couple of more acclaimed early comedies from Columbia follow: The Awful Truth (1937), starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, and You Can’t Take It With You (1938), another Best Picture-winning classic from Best Director winner Capra. The lineup concludes early tomorrow with the 1933 drama Man’s Castle, led by Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young, and silent romantic drama
(1926).