TCM Film Fest: Romantic Couples - The Shop Around the Corner, Send Me No Flowers & Lady Sings the Blues

by Christopher James

Billy Dee Williams was present at a screening of Lady Sings the Blues for a Q&A as part of a tribute to him at the TCM Film Festival.It wouldn’t be a trip to the TCM Film Festival if I didn’t catch some of the great romances of yesteryear.

In particular, the enemies to lovers romantic comedy troupe was alive and well. Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner provides the foundation for this trope. Decades later, Doris Day and Rock Hudson would use this dynamic to great success in many collaborations, including the bonkers comedy Send Me No Flowers. Romance isn’t all fun and games though. The Billie Holliday biopic Lady Sings the Blues borrows less from the biopic genre and focuses more on the troubled relationship between Holliday (Diana Ross) and Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams, an honoree at this year’s festival).

Did all these pairs sell us on their celluloid love? Find out after the jump...

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Showbiz History: Do the Right Thing's snub and American Beauty's big win

On this day, March 26th, in Oscar history only...

1938 Jezebel opens in movie theaters. We discussed it in the Smackdown of '38. The movie will win Bette Davis her second and sadly final Best Actress Oscar. 

1958 The 30th annual Academy Awards are held honoring the Best of 1957...

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Showbiz History: Skeksis & Mystics... and Judy Garland & the Supremes?

7 random things that happened on this day, December 17th, in showbiz history

1943 Now forgotten Universal B franchise "The Inner Sanctum" begins with Calling Dr Death featuring Lon Chaney Jr. Intended as a series that would be carried by Chaney and Oscar winner Gale Soondergard, only Chaney actually made it to the screen. There were six films in all. 

1965 Judy Garland and the Supremes perform at Houston's then brand new 60,000 seat Astrodome Theater. Wait, what? Judy Garland AND Diana Ross and you could attend for a single dollar...

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Soundtracking: "Lady Sings the Blues"

The 1972 Smackdown is coming soon! Here's Chris on that year's Oscar nominated biopic on Billie Holliday...

We complain a lot about stodgy biopics in the “greatest hits” mold, simply relying on the known Wikipedia fenceposts to construct its narrative. Lady Sings The Blues is kind of the poster child for such frustrations - I mean, the original poster literally proclaimed “Diana Ross IS Billie Holiday”.

What we were given is a film mostly bored by subject and performer, or at least unable to capture what made Ross and Holliday such captivating performers. Blues meanders through the singer’s life story, halting for her performances with fly-on-the-wall passivity that’s as indifferent to the magnetism of the music as it is to Ross’ take...

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Showbiz History: La Strada, It Chapter Two, The King's Speech

7 random things that happened on this day, september 6th, in showbiz history...

←   1879 Max Schreck born in Berlin. He is immortalized by playing undead Orlok in Nosferatu. Later Willem Dafoe will be Oscar-nominated for playing him in all his creepy eccentric possibly actually vampiric glory in Shadow of the Vampire (2000).

1928 How's this for a weird bit of history? Warner Bros second talkie was released on this day (well, some accounts say August 15th... dates are so iffy the further back you go) and it was a horror film called The Terror. In '28 many theaters had yet to convert to sound so a silent version of the same picture was released the following month. The film is one of many lost films from the era. 

1954 Federico Fellini's La Strada premieres at the tail end of the 15th annual Venice Film Festival...

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