TCM Doesn’t Just Show Great Tough-Guy Movies on Noir Alley! On Thursday Night, January 23, at 10 p.m. ET, See One of the Greatest Boxing Pictures of All Time, Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), Starring Julius Garfinkle, with the Beautiful Lili Palmer; and on Friday, Catch Farewell My Lovely (1975) at 10 p.m. ET, Starring Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe in the Third Version of Raymond Chandler’s Novel

By David in TN
Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 7:20:00 P.M. EST

On Thursday Night, January 23, at 10 p.m. ET, TCM shows one of the most famous boxing movies of all time, Robert Rossen's Body and Soul (1947). John Garfield stars in one of his most famous roles, along with Lili Palmer, Hazel Brooks, William Conrad, Lloyd Goff, Anne Revere, Joseph Pevney and Canada Lee.

Film Noir Guide: “A heavyweight champion in the boxing noir category, Body and Soul has been hailed by some as the greatest of all boxing movies. Although The Set-Up has the more exciting boxing scenes, Body and Soul has Garfield and that's enough to make it a winner on any judge's card. Garfield plays a hungry young pugilist whose only motive is the dough. Like most poor kids who make it big, he learns how to spend it quickly and frivolously. After years of living the wild life as the undefeated world champion, his mettle is tested when he's given sixty grand and ordered to bet against himself in an upcoming championship fight.

“This film has loads of outstanding characters; Garfield's mother (Revere), who hates her son is mixed up in such a savage business; his loyal girlfriend (Palmer), seemingly willing to wait forever for her man to straighten out; a femme fatale (Brooks) out to get what she can for as long as the ride lasts; Garfield's conniving manager (Conrad); a crooked fight promoter (Goff); Garfield's trainer and childhood pal (Pevney), who hates the monster his best friend is becoming; and African-American ex-champ Lee, whose career was cut short because of a brain clot. None of the boxing clichés are missing from Body and Soul and its impact has been blunted by time, but the acting is great. Director Rossen was a professional boxer for a short time.”

[N.S.: They weren't "boxing clichés" at the time. Later screenwriters and directors turned them into boxing clichés.]

On Friday night, January 24, for the first rime on TCM, Farewell My Lovely (1975) runs at 10 p.m. ET. Robert Mitchum stars as Philip Marlowe in the third version of Raymond Chandler’s novel. To me, this is better than the Edward Dmytryk film, Murder My Sweet (1944) starring Dick Powell. I think Mitchum is better as Marlowe. Charlotte Rampling co-stars as the femme fatale, doing a kind of Lauren Bacall knock-off.

N.S.: I fell in love with Lilli Palmer when I saw Body and Soul on TV as a kid. During my first year in West Germany (1980-81), I was "adopted" by a local family. They would have me over sometimes on weekends, and I started reading Palmer’s German-language autobiography. The father told me I could keep it, so I gave him a slim, entertaining book called Your Swabian Neighbors written by an American who’d been living in Southwest Germany for years. I think it was commissioned by the U.S. Army for G.I.s. I can't recall which organization or agency gave it to me.

I didn’t recall that Palmer was a Jew who’d fled the Nazis. (I already knew from the picture that she was German; she played an expatriate beauty queen.) I recall her describing her father as a proper, stiff Prussian. Either my memory failed me, or Palmer was being very diplomatic. I (re-?)learned she was a Jew from her IMDB page.

My biggest disappointment, in reading her book, was that she had absolutely nothing to say about working with John Garfield on her biggest picture. No chemistry, I guess. She also had nothing of note to say about her marriage to Rex Harrison, but that was to be expected. Harrison demanded and got the concession in all his divorces that his soon-to-be-ex not say anything of substance about life with “Sexy Rexy,” suggesting to me that he a sadistic bully. I’m guessing she had to submit the manuscript to his lawyers, pre-publication.

The only actor she talked much about was Gary Cooper. She swooned like a fan about “Coop,” with whom she made one sub-par, Fritz Lang espionage film, Cloak and Dagger (1946), in which he played a professor-spy, when his career was on a downward trajectory. However, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that Cooper was arrogant and aloof. Anytime they weren’t filming a scene, he would go off in a corner and take a nap. Palmer didn’t get to know Cooper at all.