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Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine in Billy Wilder's The Apartment Shirley MacLaine on TCM: Ocean's Eleven, The Yellow Rolls Royce Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Two Loves (1961) A conservative teacher struggles with her values while teaching natives in New Zealand. Dir: Charles Walters. Cast: Shirley MacLaine, Laurence Harvey, Jack Hawkins. C-97 mins, Letterbox Format. 8:00 Am The Sheepman (1958) A tough sheep farmer battles the local cattle baron for land and a beautiful woman. Dir: George Marshall. Cast: Glenn Ford, Shirley MacLaine, Leslie Nielsen. C-86 mins, Letterbox Format. 9:45 Am Two For The Seesaw (1962) A conservative attorney considering a divorce gets involved with an emotionally fragile dancer in New York. Dir: Robert Wise. Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shirley MacLaine, Edmon Ryan. Bw-119 mins, Letterbox Format. 12:00 Pm The Children's Hour (1961) A malicious student tries to destroy the teachers at a girls' school. Dir: William Wyler. Cast: Audrey Hepburn,...

By most accounts, Harry Cohn was a royal son of a bitch.

For the uninformed, Harry Cohn was co-founder of Columbia Pictures, and the autocratic ruler of the studio from its founding in 1919 until his death in 1958. He was vulgar, crass, tyrannical, a screaming, foul-mouthed verbal bully i.e. a royal son of a bitch.

He was also a cheap son of a bitch.

Originally considered a “Poverty Row” studio, Cohn’s Columbia – at least at first – refused to build a roster of salaried stars as the other studios did. Cohn didn’t want the overhead or the headaches he saw saddling other studio chiefs with their contract talent. Cheaper and easier was to pay those studios a flat fee for the one-time use of their marquee value stars to give Columbia’s B-budgeted flicks an A-list shine. Columbia was considered such a nickel-and-dime outfit at the time that other...

As far as westerns are concerned, shepherds have largely been ignored – an aggressive Glenn Ford as the eponymous hero of The Sheepman taking on angry cattlemen; an anonymous shepherd shot by an unseen cowboy in How the West Was Won; Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger getting the flock out of Wyoming in Brokeback Mountain. And not much more. So Sweetgrass, shot between 2001 and 2003 when a Norwegian-American clan conducted the last big sheep round-up in Montana's rugged Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, offers us a fascinatingly different view of the west. The images, including sheep on the move up near vertical hills, are remarkable, the landscape spectacular, the unsentimental account of back-breaking, backside-aching work impressive.

The directors are both documentary film-makers and anthropologists and I could have done with more facts and interpretation of what we were seeing on the screen.

DocumentaryPhilip French

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Canadian actor whose reputation was transformed by his deadpan comic persona in Airplane! and the Naked Gun series

Few people watching the career of the tall, husky and fair-haired Leslie Nielsen, who has died aged 84, could have predicted that the stolid actor who specialised in authority figures would become known as a comedy star after two and a half decades in show business. His reputation was transformed by playing Dr Rumack on board the threatened airliner in Airplane! (1980) and Frank Drebin, the hilariously inept plain-clothes cop, in three Naked Gun films.

What the writer-directors Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker saw in Nielsen, silvery grey and in his mid-50s, was his previously po-faced persona. "They spotted me for being what I really was, a closet comedian," he said. "And how lucky can you get? It's like they said to me, 'Leslie, come out and play.' Thank God for them.