Spotlight

26 Movies | Wednesdays beginning 8 p.m.

The story of Columbia Pictures reads much like that of any of the film studios that were founded in the early days and dominated the industry for most of the 20th century: the children of immigrants, primarily European Jews, making forays into the entertainment field, eventually spotting the great opportunity offered by the fledgling medium and building their empires from the ground up. Columbia, however, came a bit late to the party.

By the time brothers Harry and Jack Cohn and friend Joe Brandt formed their modest independent company CBC in 1918, motion pictures had already become big business in the U.S. with major work produced by Universal, First National and Paramount studios and the newly formed United Artists. Walt Disney and the four Warner brothers had entered the market a short time before CBC officially changed its name to Columbia in January 1924. A few months later, three successful production-distribution-exhibition companies merged to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which hit the ground running with releases featuring established stars and directors.

Columbia didn’t even have its own lot until Harry Cohn, looking to break out of the Hollywood backwater known as Poverty Row, took out a mortgage on two sound stages and an adjoining office near the corner of Sunset and Gower in 1925. The company went public the following year, making the bold decision not to operate its own theater chains like the established big studios, which proved beneficial in later years when economic setbacks and government actions nearly ruined the other majors but left Columbia relatively unscathed. On the other hand, it also meant the company needed to be sure its films were consistently high quality to guarantee theater chains would keep booking their product. And that’s what Harry, as head of production, set out to do.

Wednesday, January 3: The 1920s and 1930s

Dividing this month-long tribute into two-decade chunks, TCM begins with the studio’s earliest output, represented by the backstage melodrama The Belle of Broadway (1926), starring Betty Compson, a popular silent performer who contracted for this production as a freelancer. Initially unable to maintain a roster of contractors, Columbia had to rely for years on actors and directors either working freelance or borrowed from other studios. Such was the case with the rather daring pre-Code romantic drama Man’s Castle (1933), with on-loan Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young well paired as down-on-their-luck Depression Era lovers under Frank Borzage’s sensitive direction (TCM screens the restored original 75-minute version.). At the other end of the spectrum is the slapstick comedy Woman Haters (1934), a TCM premiere. It was the first of nearly 200 shorts the Three Stooges made under contract with the studio between 1934 and 1957, a dependable source of income for the company.

The studio’s steady climb to commercial and critical success was in many ways tied to a young director hired in 1928 to make features that could compete with the best of the majors. Frank Capra would eventually direct over 20 films at Columbia, including many of his greatest classics, among them Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

The evening’s programming begins with an important breakthrough for Columbia, Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), not only the studio’s first Academy Award winner but the first of only three films in Oscar history to have won the “Big Five” (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay). It is also considered one of the first of the very 1930s style of comedy now known as “screwball,” a genre that was more or less born at Columbia. Over the next decade the studio made some of the best, including Twentieth Century (1934), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), His Girl Friday (1940) and one of the most acclaimed and enduring of the type, The Awful Truth (1937), with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne sparking off each other as a divorced couple still very much in love. Even Capra got on board, adding his characteristic brand of populism to the screen adaptation of the zany Kaufman and Hart hit Broadway comedy You Can’t Take It with You (1938).

Wednesday, January 10: The 1940s and 1950s

In the 1930s, while MGM boasted “more stars than there are in heaven” and Paramount could boast such luminaries on its roster as Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, W.C. Fields and Mae West, Columbia’s biggest contract players were the Three Stooges, Jean Arthur (who made about as many pictures on loan as she did at the studio) and Cary Grant (who was non-exclusive, having a contract with RKO as well). Harry Cohn became obsessed with the idea of cultivating his very own star; he found his dream in a young dancer named Margarita Cansino, who had been doing bits at other studios. He signed her to a contract in 1936, dyed her dark hair red, raised her widow’s peak through electrolysis to make her forehead broader and anglicized her name to the now immortal Rita Hayworth.

She quickly rose from supporting roles in melodramas, comedies and adventure pictures to become the studio’s greatest star in musicals, romances and, in her most famous role, film noir. Cast as the titular Gilda (1946), Hayworth performed a mock striptease to “Put the Blame on Mame” as the seductive center of a steamy triangle (though which way the seduction flowed through that triangle has been a matter of much discussion over the years). Her first appearance in the movie, in her boudoir wearing a nightgown, brought to mind the iconic 1941 photo of Hayworth that made her the number one pin-up of the war years.

Speaking of World War II, the evening’s line-up also includes the TCM premiere of another Stooges short, You Natzy Spy (1940), often credited as the first Hollywood release to satirize Hitler, preceding Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) by ten months.

By the early 1950s, Columbia was no longer just nipping at the heels of the big studios but an equal player in terms of box office and prestige. The first half of the decade saw the release of acclaimed films that showcased actors at the top of their game. In language typical for his reputation as a vulgar, disagreeable tyrant, Harry Cohn objected to casting Judy Holliday to recreate her Broadway role in the comedy Born Yesterday (1950), but she went on to win the Best Actress Academy Award over two Hollywood heavyweights in arguably their greatest roles also from 1950: Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. The studio also produced Elia Kazan’s gritty working-class drama On the Waterfront (1954), earning Best Actor for Marlon Brando. The film also won Best Picture over the studio’s other prestige drama released that year, The Caine Mutiny (1954), starring Humphrey Bogart as a Naval officer suspected of mental instability and relieved of his command. The tense courtroom drama brought Oscar nominations to Bogart and four of the supporting actors in the cast.

By the middle of the decade, cinema audiences had dwindled drastically, a situation generally blamed on competition from television. Despite such successes as Death of a Salesman (1951) and From Here to Eternity (1953), Columbia’s finances moved into the red after the deaths of Cohn brothers Jack in 1956 and Harry two years later. (A popular but apocryphal quote has circulated for years claiming Groucho Marx, looking at the crowds gathered for the hated Harry’s funeral, remarked, “See? Give the people what they want and they’ll come.”)

Even with diminished resources, the studio strove for quality. The night’s programming includes Ride Lonesome (1959), one of the five low-budget Westerns Randolph Scott made with director Budd Boetticher in the late 1950s, which the Criterion Collection notes “transcend their B-movie origins to become rich, unexpectedly profound explorations of loyalty, greed, honor, and revenge.”

Wednesday, January 17: The 1960s and 1970s

In the 1960s, with most of their founders deceased or retired, the major film studios began losing their identities, functioning more and more as distribution and financing entities rather than creators of original content. Columbia was no different, relying for many of its releases on independent producers who used studio resources to get their projects made and brought to theaters. Such was the case with David Lean’s historical epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), produced by Sam Spiegel’s Horizon Pictures. Although having no hand in the creative aspects of the production, Columbia fared well as distributor; it was the second highest-grossing release of the year and won multiple awards, including seven Oscars and four BAFTAs.

Columbia had a greater hand in the production of its second highest-grosser of the decade, the musical Funny Girl (1968), but studio executives almost blew that good fortune by initially insisting on casting box office name Shirley MacLaine over first-timer Barbra Streisand. Producer Ray Stark, who owned the rights to the stage play based on the life of his mother-in-law, Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, refused to let the picture be made if Streisand was not allowed to recreate her Broadway success. The studio relented, quite wisely, as it turned out; the success of subsequent Streisand movies, especially The Way We Were (1973), helped keep the company afloat through the lean years of the early 1970s.

The second half of that decade saw Columbia’s fortunes rise again, both in terms of high profits and critical acclaim. Martin Scorsese, one of the leading lights of the so-called New Hollywood, made a distribution deal with Columbia for the release of his powerful and controversial neo-noir thriller Taxi Driver (1976). Steven Spielberg, fresh off the success of his blockbuster Jaws (1975), was granted virtually unlimited creative control by the studio for a sci-fi project he had been thinking about for years. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) gave the studio its biggest hit of the year and earned high praise, not only from film critics but from the likes of French director Jean Renoir and science fiction writer Ray Bradbury.

The studio rounded out the decade with a timely, eerily prescient thriller about a nearly disastrous malfunction at a nuclear power plant, The China Syndrome (1979). The gripping drama starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon was given even greater timeliness (not to mention a huge commercial boost) by the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island 12 days after the film’s general release.

Wednesday, January 24: The 1980s and 1990s

Through years of regime changes and new ownership, including for a time Coca-Cola, Columbia once again found success in the 1980s, an era of BIG pictures, beginning with Gandhi (1982), a monumental project that director Richard Attenborough had been trying to get off the ground for nearly 20 years. Once again, the studio was the distributor, not the producer, but it didn’t hurt to have its name so firmly attached to the multiple award winner, despite the unquestioningly reverent treatment of the subject at the expense of historical accuracy.

Complete accuracy was called into question at the other end of the decade when Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci made another biographical epic, The Last Emperor (1987), a sweeping story of social and political upheaval in early 20th century China. Although independent producer Jeremy Thomas raised the film’s almost $25 million budget on his own, the new regime at Columbia was reluctant at first to take on the North American distribution. Bertolucci was given unprecedented permission by the Chinese government to film in Beijing’s Forbidden City, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro made stunning use of that location’s visual splendor.

Also showing the same evening is Tom Hanks’ first Oscar-winning role as a gay attorney suing his firm for unlawful dismissal in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), inspired by one of the first AIDS discrimination cases to be tried in the U.S.

In contrast to the big names and big ideas on view in the evening’s line-up, perhaps the most compelling film of the night is One False Move (1991), a noirish thriller about three criminals hiding out in a small Arkansas town. The Criterion Collection calls it “a masterclass in slow-burn tension thanks to the nuanced direction of [African-American actor-turned-director] Carl Franklin, whose haunting film travels a crooked road across America’s most fraught divisions—urban and rural, Black and white—while imbuing noir conventions with a wrenching emotional depth.”

Wednesday, January 31: The 2000s and 2010s

In the 21st century, Columbia, now owned by Sony Pictures, has continued the quest for quality begun by Harry Cohn, showcasing the singular visions of some of the most original film artists of our time.

Ang Lee’s action-fantasy Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was the surprise hit of its year, achieving wide mainstream appeal unusual for a Mandarin-language picture. Sony/Columbia also released Lee’s Jane Austen adaptation, Sense and Sensibility (1995), with the screenplay written by its star, Emma Thompson.

Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, 1999; There Will Be Blood, 2007) gave comic actor Adam Sandler his first dramatic role as a lonely man filled with rage and social anxiety in the offbeat, darkly comic romantic drama Punch Drunk Love (2002). The highly praised film earned Sandler positive notices alongside co-stars Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Damien Chazelle released his drama about an ambitious music student and his abusive instructor, Whiplash (2014), through Sony/Columbia, a breakthrough project that gave him the clout to make his award-winning musical La La Land (2016).

Sophia Coppola followed the success of Lost in Translation (2003) with the tale of the doomed French queen Marie Antoinette (2006), with Kirsten Dunst in the title role. The highly stylized, intentionally modernized film polarized critics in the U.S. but was lauded in France.

This final evening of programming gives a nod back to Columbia’s screwball days with writer-director Nancy Meyers’s middle-aged romcom Something’s Gotta Give (2003), starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Meyer followed up later with the Sony/Columbia-distributed The Holiday (2006).