TV Guide: Robert Benchley

Video: How to Eat - (A Short Film)

TCM — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:12:41 -0400

How To Eat (1939) is a comedy short in which Robert Benchley lectures on the nature of food digestion and its emotional adversities.

Video: David O. Selznick "Your New Producer" - (A Short Subject)

TCM — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:12:18 -0400

Humorist Robert Benchley presents the history of producer David O. Selznick up to 1935 in this short subject.

Video: You'll Never Get Rich

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:22:28 -0400

You'll Never Get Rich was the first of two films made by Fred Astaire at Columbia, and also the first in which he was paired with his favorite female dancing partner--not Ginger Rogers or Cyd Charisse, but Rita Hayworth. Fred and Rita play a team of Broadway dancers whose partnership is abruptly rent asunder when Fred is drafted into the Army. Unable to adapt to military routine, Astaire frequently ends up in the guardhouse; during one of these visits, he and the Delta Rhythm Boys collaborate on the lively song-and-dance number The A-starable Rag. Back to the plot: Rita shows up on the army base as the girl friend of captain John Hubbard. This leads to more fancy footwork, and, of course, a happy ending for our stars. Though the Cole Porter score yielded no hits, one of the songs, Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye, was nominated for an Academy Award. Robert Benchley provides comic relief, as he would in the subsequent Astaire vehicle The Sky's the Limit. You'll Never Get Rich was followed by the even better Asta

Video: Flesh And Fantasy

Video Detective — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:56:02 -0400

In the tradition of his earlier Carnival in Flanders and Tales of Manhattan, director Julien Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy is a pormanteau film, consisting of several short stories. Linking the three tales unfolded herein are clubmen Doakes (Robert Benchley) and Davis (David Hoffman), who carry on a spirited debate about Destiny. In the first story, homely Henrietta (Betty Field) is made beautiful through the love of handsome Mardi Gras reveller Michael (Robert Cummings)-and the help of an enigmatic mask-maker (Edgar Barrier). The second story, based on Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Saville's Crime, concerns a fortune teller named Septimus Podgers (Thomas Mitchell) who predicts that socialite Marshall Tyler (Edward G. Robinson) will commit a murder. In the final tale, psychic high wire artist Paul Gaspar (Charles Boyer) dreams that he will meet his doom during the performance of his act-and then falls in love with Joan Stanley (Barbara Stanwyck), who looks exactly like the girl who appeared in that dream. A fourth