April 15 and 22 at 8 pm | 6 Movies
Country Western and bluegrass legend Marty Stuart joined TCM host Alicia Malone two years ago for a “There’s No Place Like Hometowns” evening, featuring films celebrating the impact of people’s hometowns. It was a perfect fit for the multiple Grammy Award winner – he’s an unabashed TCM superfan. “I have always been a film buff,” Stuart said in a 2023 KGET interview. “I think I really went into the deep part of the water probably 10 years ago. I love the art of film. I love cinematography and costuming and makeup and lighting. It matters to me. I play a better show and write a better song when I have been inspired by [film]. I don’t care what Hollywood is doing, Turner Classic Movies is still the coolest game in town.”
Stuart also proved to be the coolest in 2023. A charming, knowledgeable guest, he and Malone had a breezy chemistry. So much so that he’s reuniting with Malone, whom he refers to as his “buddy,” on April 15 and 22 to present six movies featured over two nights. His picks run the gamut from the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), for which Sissy Spacek won the Best Actress Oscar, to Johnny Cash’s first acting role in the 1966 thriller Door-to-Door Maniac.
The series is tailor-made for Stuart who got his first guitar at the age of three. A guitar and mandolin child prodigy, Stuart began playing in a bluegrass band at the age of 12; the following year he was asked by Lester Flatt to join his group. After Flatt died in 1979, Stuart became a member of Johnny Cash’s band for six years and even married his daughter Cindy in 1983. Stuart signed a solo recording contract in 1989 and since 2002, he’s recorded and toured with his band, the Fabulous Superlatives. Nominated for 15 Grammys, he’s won five. He’s also a member of the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame as well as a Golden Globe-nominated composer along with Larry Paxton and Kristin Wilkinson for their score of All the Pretty Horses (2000).
“What I learned scoring the films was that every bar, every beat, every note matters,” he explained in 2023. “What I found is that with a 30-second music cue along with a scene—if it is right—it goes by in a split second. If it’s wrong, 30 seconds can seem like five hours.”
Back in 2011, Loretta Lynn performed “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “Blue Kentucky Girl” on “The Marty Stuart Show.” So, it seems more than appropriate that “Marty Stuart Celebrates Music in the Movies” kicks off with Coal Miner’s Daughter. Biopics are often more fiction than fact. But Coal Miner’s Daughter gets it right, thanks to Michael Apted’s astute direction, Tom Rickman’s strong screenplay based on Lynn’s best-selling 1976 autobiography and stellar performances from Spacek as Lynn, Tommy Lee Jones as her husband Mooney, and The Band’s Levon Helm as her coal miner father. It was Lynn who picked out Spacek from a series of photos of young actresses to play her in the movie. At this point in her career, Spacek had one Best Actress Oscar nomination to her credit for Carrie (1976). Lynn was so sure that Spacek was the right choice, she would even publicly state that the lithe actress would play her.
In her autobiography, Spacek admitted she was “slightly dumbfounded because I’d never even met Loretta, and I certainly never agreed to be in her film.” But eventually, she did agree. Not only did Spacek do her own singing, but she also performed live on the set instead of lip-synching because Apted wanted to capture the realism of the performance scenes. Spacek beautifully captures Lynn’s resiliency as she journeys from her early life in the poverty-stricken Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, to hitting the top of the charts while enduring marital problems, drug issues, personal tragedies and a nervous breakdown. “The New York Times” wrote: “Miss Spacek is luminous and lovely, easily outshining her previous work, as good as it has been.” Coal Miner’s Daughter was one of the top films of 1980, earning over $67 million and seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Spacek was the only winner.
Also in the lineup is The Road to Nashville (1967), which is personal for Stuart. His mother named him after her favorite country artist, Marty Robbins, singer of “El Paso.” He’s the star and associate producer of the low-budget musical which also features popular singer Connie Smith, who has been married to Stuart since 1997. The film’s threadbare plot finds movie studio head Richard Arlen (of Wings, 1927, renown) barking orders at his clueless employee (Doodles Weaver) to go to Nashville to sign up acts for a movie. This musical features performances by numerous established country stars such as Kitty Wells as well as some up-and-comers including a clean-cut Waylon Jennings.Highlights include the Carter Family singing “I Walk the Line;” Johnny Cash, all hair and high cheekbones, joining them on the spiritual “Were You There?;” and Cash soloing on “The One on the Left Is the One on the Right.”
And fun fact, one of the cinematographers on the film is “William” Zsigmund who would eventually use his real name Vilmos Zsigmond and win an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Cash certainly isn’t in a spiritual state-of-mind in 1966’s thriller Door-to-Door Maniac. The poster proclaimed “When the doorbell rings…Don’t answer! It could be the Door-to-Door Maniac!” The film was initially released as Five Minutes to Live in 1961. Reviews were bad and audiences stayed away. American International Pictures (AIP) picked it up five years later, shot a rape scene with a stand-in for Cash and retitled it. It quickly died on the box-office vine.
Cash plays a soulless criminal, who has no qualms with killing people and is on the lam after a botched robbery in New Jersey leaves two cops dead. He teams up with another criminal (Vic Tayback from “Alice” fame) to rob a bank. Cash must hold the social-climbing wife (Cay Forester, who also wrote the screenplay) of a bank executive hostage while Tayback forces the banker to give him the money or his wife will die. Oscar-winning director Ron Howard, billed as Ronnie and looking like he walked off the set of “The Andy Griffith Show,” plays the couple’s young son who is threatened by Cash. The singer does manage to sing two of his compositions “Five Minutes to Live” and “I’ve Come to Kill” in between uttering such lines as “I like a messy bed” and “She may live like a magazine ad, but she doesn’t look like one.”
Cash only made $700 a week for the film and even put in $20,000 when the production ran out of money. According to Robert Hilburn’s biography on the country legend, Cash had a 20-a-day pill addiction when he made the movie. He would later say the movie was a “misstep…My leadin’ lady was the producer’s wife.”
The April 22 programming begins with MGM’s 1943 all-Black musical comedy Cabin in the Sky, which marked the directorial debut of Oscar-winner Vincente Minnelli (Gigi, 1958) and features a who’s who of Black performers of the day such as Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Rex Ingram. Cabin in the Sky was just the fourth all-Black musical produced by a major studio. Considering Black performers would be featured in stand-alone numbers that could be cut for Southern audiences, MGM took a big risk with the film which would make a profit at the box office. Based on a popular 1940 Broadway musical that also starred Waters, the film revolves around the religious Petunia (Waters) who prays to God to give her wastrel of a husband, Little Joe (Anderson), a second chance at life so he can go to heaven after he is shot and seriously wounded in a barroom brawl. God gives Petunia her wish but Lucifer Jr. (Ingram) and God’s General (Kenneth Spencer) duke it out for Joe’s soul. The film features everything from spirituals to such standards as “Taking a Chance on Love” from the Broadway production, as well as such new songs as the Oscar-nominated “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.”
Two vastly different documentaries round out the second evening: Murray Lerner’s Festival from 1967 and Dean Martin: King of Cool (2021). Festival has been overshadowed by the 1968 documentary Monterey Pop and the Oscar-winning 1970 Woodstock, but it’s an exceptional piece of filmmaking. If you enjoyed A Complete Unknown (2024), you’ll want to check out Festival, filmed at the Newport Folk Festival from 1963-1966. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul & Mary, Johnny Cash, Theodore Bikel and the Staple Singers are among the many acts featured along with interviews of the fans and the artists.
Amanda Petrusich writes on Criterion.com that the film illustrates what the festival meant in its earlier years – “a gathering of like-minded people who were drawn not only to the populist music they were playing and listening to but also to genuine engagement in the larger questions that were agitating their society.”
Dean Martin: King of Cool is an entertaining look at, well, the coolest of the Rat Pack who had success in almost every medium including records, radio, clubs, TV and films. He made things look effortless and his eight children adored him. But he was an enigma. His second wife Jeanne Martin told the “L.A. Times” in 2002, “Nobody really got to know him,” she said. “He loved doing the nightclub work. He loved being on stage. He loved doing Westerns because he could be outdoors…. He was always a loner.”
Though no match for Stuart in the country music field, Dino did release two country albums in 1963, “Dean ‘Tex’ Martin: Country Style” and “Dean ‘Tex’ Martin Rides Again.” And of course, he and Ricky Nelson performed the iconic “My Rifle, My Pony and Me” in 1959’s Rio Bravo.
