TCM on Monday will be showing a lot of movies based on the work of Alexandre Dumas, such as the 1939 version of The Man in the Iron Mask, at 2:00 PM. Louis Hayward stars as French King Louis XIV. He discovers that he's actually got a twin brother, and that in order to keep the brother away from the palace and have two dauphins, the twin brother was sent to grow up with the Musketeers and D'Artagnan (Warren William). Now that they're both adults, the twin brother Philippe shows up and this sends the King into a panic. The king ultimately decides to have his brother arrested and put in an iron mask, partly so that nobody will recognize him, and partly so that the beard he won't be able to shave will choke him under that mask. It's up to those Musketeers to get into the prison and rescue Philippe. Entertaining if not quite true to the book. Also in the cast is the lovely Joan Bennett as the Spanish love interest for Louis.
For those who like movies a bit more recent, you could watch Night Moves, at 12:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a retired football player turned detective who's got an unfaithful wife (Susan Clark, real-life wife of ex-football player Alex Karras) an a foundering business. Then actres Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) comes to him, looking for help in finding her runaway 16-year-old daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith in her first role). The search takes him from the underbelly of Hollywood to Florida, which is where he eventually finds the girl living with her stepfather. But then it turns out that the case is a whole lot more complicated than just a putative missing person case as there's murder and smuggling going on as well. Since Delly's boyfriend (James Woods) is a stuntman, we get a fair amount of nice stuntwork in this one.
For something rather lighter, you could try the comic western Mail Order Bride, at 9:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Buddy Ebsen plays Will, who was the long time friend of the father of young Lee (Keir Dullea). Lee's dad has died, and Will is trying to make a good man of him, which is difficult since Lee likes to carouse with the town's wild man Jace (Warren Oates). So Will has an idea on how to turn Lee into a real man: get him a wife! Not so bad, but in the old west that more or less means a mail order bride, so that means Anne Boley (Lois Nettleton), who's got a young son. Obviously neither Lee nor Anne knows each other before they first meet to get married. So will the match work out? Will Lee become a responsible man and save the family ranch? And what is Keir Dullea doing in a western? When he made Bunny Lake is Missing a year later, NoËl Coward said of him, "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow". Sure Dullea would go on to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but a movie like this shows what Coward was thinking.
The first movie over on FXM Retro we'll recommend this week is People Will Talk, at 9:30 AM Tuesday. Cary Grant plays Dr. Praetorius, who is a medical scholl professor who on the side runs a clinic. One of his students, Deborah (Jeanne Crain) faints in class, and when the good doctor examines her, he discovers that she's pregnant, and there's not a man around! The doctor is willing to marry her, but this causes problems with his colleague, Prof.Elwell (Hume Cronyn), who tries to get Praetorius's license revoked for this and other perceived "malpractice". Meanwhile, Praetorius has an assistant named Shunderson (Finlay Currie) who seems mysterious mostly because he never says anything, and Elwell thinks that makes Praetorius shady too. Grant is good as always, although the rest of the movie isn't quite as good as a lot of Grant's others.
Encore Westerns is running the film When the Legends Die at 3:15 AM Wednesday. Frederic Forrest plays Tom Black Bull, a Ute Indian who has lost his parents, and doesn't have a whole lot of aptitude or education, except that he can ride a bucking bronco. This brings him to the attention of Red Dillon (Richard Widmark), who used to ride the broncos in the rodeo himself but is too old and too much of a chronic drunk for that now. So Dillon offers to take Black Bull under his wing and be his trainer and manager. It's a white man's came, but Black Bull decides that the best thing to do is to beat the white man at his own game. Needless to say, it's not that simple when Red suggests that they can make more money by the kid not having his reputation for being an excellent bronco rider precede him, while Black Bull has a sense of honor that won't let him look bad on a bronco. Wudmark is good as always, and Forrest for whatever reason really never made it big.
Later on Wednesday, TCM is running Crime and Punishment, USA, at 3:30 PM. As you might be able to guess from the title, this is a movie based on the classic novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, with the action moved to Los Angeles circa the beatnik era of the late 1950s (the movie was made in 1959). George Hamilton, before he went perpetually tan, plays the Raskolnikov character, here named Robert. If you know the original story, Raskolnikov/Robert kills an elderly lady pawnbroker and then arrogantly tries to taunt the police into believing they won't find the murderer. Of course, Raskolnikov has a conscience that eventually drives his crime to unravel, in part because of a dogged police detective (Frank Silvera) an old friend here named Swanson (John Hardin), and a girlfriend he meets (Mary Murphy, who played the young woman Marlon Brnado seduced in The Wild One several years earlier). There's a lot of location shooting in the seedier parts of Los Angeles, or at least as seedy as you could get in LA in the late 1950s.
In 1944, Dick Powell switched from playing light romantic leads in musical comedies to hard-boiled types and other serious drama. A good example of this is in Johnny O'Clock, airing at 1:15 PM Thursday on TCM as part of a day of film with the name "Johnny" in the title. Powell plays Johnny, the manager at a casino who's got a lot of problems. He had an affair with the owner's wife Nelle (Ellen Drew), and she wants to resume that relationship. Worse, he befriends one of the hat-check girls Harriet (Nina Foch) and she winds up murdered! Her boyfried was a crooked cop, but all the signs of the murder point to Johnny, who has to try to extricate himself amidst all the turmoil that's going on in his personal life and everybody seemingly trying to frame him. Lee J. Cobb plays the honest cop, while Evelyn Keys is the top female as Harriet's sister. It's a stylish and underrated noir mystery.
Friday is May 1, and the Friday Night Spotlight on TCM in May is Orson Welles, looking at him not just as an actor but also a director and writer. The thing showing up Friday night that looks interesting although I've never seen it before is Too Much Johnson, at 1:45 AM Saturday. This was done in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, for a play that Welles was doing with his Mercury Theater. However, the play didn't get produced and the filmed material was shelved, only to be considered lost when Welles suffered a fire at his Spanish mansion in the early 1970s. Amazingly, however, a copy of the footage was found a few years back, and restored to what we're going to see overnight between Friday and Saturday. The other amazing thing is the talent Welles was able to assemble. Joseph Cotten would go on to do a bunch of movies with Cotten; Arlene Francis didnt. Nor did future character actor Mary Wickes, who would play a nurse in both The Man Who Came to Dinner and Now, Voyager and can sometimes be seen on GSN's reruns of Match Game. For more conventional Welles stuff, watch Citizen Kane at 8:00 PM Friday.
Something completely different from the rest of the week's fare is Thunderbirds are GO, at 8:00 AM Saturday on TCM. This one is based on the 1960s British TV series Thunderbirds, which told the adventures of a family of idle rich secret agent types using a special puppetry process called "Supermarionation". Here we get that process in color and wide screen, in service of a plot, such that it is, involving a planned mission to Mars that's been sabotaged, and it's up to the Thunderbirds to figure out what happened and keep everybody from dying on the next mission to Mars! The movie at times develops slowly and there isn't that much plot here, which is all a shame since the filming process is so well done. Oh, and there's also a bizarre musical interlude with the perennially popular British artist Cliff Richard performing a song in puppet form. Goalline is getting excited.
The soundtrack to Blair Kiel's life shows up this week in TCM Underground: ABBA: The Movie, at 3:45 AM Sunday. This movie was made in early 1977, as the Swedish pop icons did a concert tour in Australia, since they were just as popular there as in the rest of the world. Obviously, a lot of the film is given over to their performing live. Some of the film shows them backstage, which is edifying when we see the group doing Swedish folk music, and humorous when we see them reading the Aussie tabloids. The framing story for the movie is an Australian disc jockey given the task of obtaining an interview with the group and follows them around the country on tour, with something always just preventing him from getting that interview. In the meantime, he gets interviews with "regular" Australians, including two little girls who break into giggles one one of them calls ABBA's outfits "sexy". There's a reason why ABBA were one of the biggest groups of the 70s, and this movie shows why.
And now for the shorts on TCM, of which I could mention a lot this week. Tuna will be happy to see Ted Williams promote the Jimmy Fund in Ted Williams and Friend at 11:41 AM Wednesday; the "friend" is none other than Bing Crosby.
For fans of a real sport, there's Football Headliners at 7:42 AM Saturday, one of those RKO sports shorts from the mid-1950s, this one looking at the important college football games of 1955. (Another RKO sports short, Four Minute Fever about prominent milers, is on at 7:50 PM Wednesday.)
And then there's the movie theater propaganda, with two of the more interesting shorts this week. First is This Theater and You at 9:35 AM Wednesday. This one looks at how movie theaters in small towns did much more for the towns than just show movies. Try to imagine your local sixtyplex doing any of these things. Even more humorously dated is Movies on Sundays, at 3:20 AM Friday. It's hard to believe, but there was a time when some municipalities didn't want movie theaters to be open on Sundays, because of the moral degradation or something. This one is a "news" report on the progress to change that, with several Hollywood stars of the mid-1930s lobbying for the value of movies on Sundays.
