This Month

21 Movies / Wednesdays in July

Where exactly is the American Heartland? Geographers and the Census Bureau will tell you it incorporates about a dozen states in the center of the U.S., roughly the Midwest and Great Plains. A looser definition includes non-coastal, largely rural areas beyond the country’s major cities. For this special theme programming, TCM focuses more on the metaphorical term, the heart and soul of America, those places associated with small-town life and old-fashioned values. As such, the series also takes in stories set in New England, California and Texas.

Judging from the movies in this collection, Hollywood hasn’t always taken a rosy view of the lives and loves of people living in this part of the country. Our night of Small Town Dramas especially paints a darker picture of the Heartland, focusing on scandal (Lana Turner in Peyton Place, 1957; Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan in Kings Row, 1942), toxic family relations (James Dean in East of Eden, 1955) and sexual tension rumbling under the surface of a quiet town (William Holden and Kim Novak in Picnic, 1955). The one exception, perhaps, is Our Town (1940), adapted from Thornton Wilder’s beloved play, but even here death looms over the warm and gentle story of two families in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.

Things aren’t much sunnier in The Heartland, featuring five highly acclaimed films showing on the final night of the series. Crime, betrayal, murder and crushing disappointment cast a shadow over the lives portrayed in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) set in Texas; the South Dakota Badlands (1973); Some Came Running (1958) in Indiana; and The Last Picture Show (1971) set in Anarene, Texas. Audiences looking for a little levity, however, can find it in Paper Moon (1973), Peter Bogdanovich’s Academy Award-winning tale of father-daughter con artists working the Midwestern back roads.

Things lighten up considerably in our night of Small Town Comedies. Writer-director Preston Sturges’ zany satire of romance and motherhood set in the Midwest, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), is so loaded with barely veiled double entendres (including a female character named Kockenlocker) that critic James Agee noted it could only have been released because the censoring arm of the Hays Office had been either hypnotized or accosted in its sleep. Less barbed but no less enjoyable humor can be found in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), set in small town Vermont and starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur in her breakthrough role; and Theodora Goes Wild (1936), in which straight-laced Irene Dunne secretly pens a steamy best-seller that sends her Connecticut town into a frenzy.

Also showing on comedy night: Small Town Girl (1936), Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) and A Stranger in Town (1943).

The series is rounded off with a night of Small Town Musicals that highlights small towns in Wisconsin in Janie (1944), Iowa for The Music Man (1962) and Oklahoma for Bye Bye Birdie (1963) – the latter two also involving cons and deceptions but of a more melodious type. The line-up also includes Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the ultimate nostalgic small-town musical about a year in the lives of a family leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair. The film features perhaps Judy Garland’s most luminous performance, introducing her signature hits “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

Also featured is Four Daughters (1938), the first of a series of popular Warner Bros. pictures centered on the talented Lemp family, headed by patriarch Claude Rains. Less of a musical per se than a family melodrama with music, the Michael Curtiz-directed film introduced John Garfield to cinema audiences for the first time. It was remade as Young at Heart (1954) with Frank Sinatra in the role of the doomed, cynical composer created by Garfield.