It’s a Saintly marathon of great movies

A great movie career will soon be flashing before us.
That’s when Turner Classic Movies has an Eva Marie Saint marathon. From noon to midnight ET on Oct. 25, it will show five films — including “On the Waterfront” (shown here with Saint and Marlon Brando), one of the best-acted movies ever — and an interview.
And yes, it was a long life. Saint’s death –Oct. 6, at 102 — came 72 years after “Waterfront” drew raves and awards.
Born on the 4th of July, Saint was a high school cheerleader (in a small hamlet near Albany, New York) and a college sorority girl (at Bowling Green, in Ohio). Then it was on to New York and NBC, where she was a page and a regular on two late-40’s shows; she did commercials on “Campus Hoopla” and being one of the singing maids on “Bonnie Maid’s Versa-Tile Varieties.”
But she’d studied theater in college and soon was given serious roles in New York. She won an award for a stage role in a Horton Foote play and — in the era of live TV dramas — drew Emmy nominations in plays by Thornton Wilder and Paddy Chayevsky.
That’s when “Waterfront” came, with Saint playing the woman who pushed an ex-boxer (Marlon Brando) to fight union corruption. When Elia Kazan was directing other scenes, he told Brando and Saint to keep rehearsing together. The result was extraordinary.
“Waterfront” won eight Oscars, including best picture and ones for Kazan, Brando, Saint and (for his only movie score) Leonard Bernstein. The American Film Institute puts it at No. 19 on its best-movie list.
That was Saint’s first movie and her only Oscar nomination, (She later added three more Emmy nominations and a win.) But she continued a great career, including a Hitchcock classic, “North by Northwest.” The TCM marathon will have:
— Noon ET: “Raintree County” (1957), a mega-movie with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor.
— 3 p.m.: “All Fall Down” (1962), with John Frankenheimer directing from a William Inge script. Saint played the older woman having an affair with Warren Beatty, 13 years her junior.
— 5 p.m.: “36 Hours” (1965), An ingenious script has Germans trying to trick James Garner into revealing D-Day plays. Saint has a smaller role in the second half of the film.
— 7 p.m.: An interview that Robert Osborne conducted with Saint during TCM’s Classic Film Festival in 2014
— 8 p.m.: “On the Waterfront” (1954).
— 10 p.m.: “North by Northwest” (1959), an Alfred Hitchcock classic that takes Cary Grant on wild chases, including to Mount Rushmore.