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Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 21-27, 2014.  Actor James Garner died yesterday, and at the time of posting this TCM has unsurprisingly not come up with a programming tribute to him.  I won't be surprised if there's one before Summer Under the Stars begins next Friday, and if it's this week, one or more of the movies here is liable to be preËmpted.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

We'll start off with a trifling little B comedy from MGM: Free and Easy, at 12:30 PM Monday.  Nigel Bruce and Bob Cummings star as a father and son in the UK who aren't so well-to-do, so they try to marry the son up.  They meet traveling American widow Ruth Hussey, and she looks like she's rich enough for him to marry.  Things get complicated though, because she's not so wealthy, and looking for a rich guy to marry herself; she's got her eyes on one Reginald Owen.  Making the issue of getting a wealthy wife more urgent is the fact that Dad loses a fair sum gambling to try to win that wealth.  Meanwhile, Judith Anderson is the daughter of a duke (C. Aubrey Smith), and they are wealthy.  And she's falling in love with him, so it should make everything easy   Except that he doesn't love her.

Dick Powell was a musical star in the 1930s, but in 1944 took on the role of Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet to try to change his image.  It worked, and for the rest of his career he played a broad range of characters, as in Station West, airing at 10:00 AM Tuesday on TCM.  This time, Powell plays Haven, a US Army officer who sent out west because somebody murdered a couple of cavalry officers to try to get a shipment of gold.  Yes, this is actually a western.  When he gets out west, he meets saloon owner Charlie (Jane Greer), who looks impossibly beautiful for a woman of the west where everybody aged prematurely, but then this is a Hollywood western.  Haven also finds a lot of corruption in and among a cast of not-quite stars: Agnes Moorehead owns the mine; Raymond Burr is the town lawyer, Burl Ives is the singing hotel clerk, and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams gets in a nice fight with Dick Powell.

Tuesday night sees another night of Star of the Month Maureen O'Hara on TCM.  She might be best remembered for making movies with John Ford, and two of those movies show up this week, including The Long Gray Line at 5:30 AM Wednesday.  Based on a true story, it stars Tyrone Power as Marty Maher, who at the beginning of the movie is well past 65 and about to be retired from his civilian job at West Point.  Many years earlier, he had been there with a cadet named Dwight Eisenhower, and now that Ike is  high up, he pleads his case to Ike.  Cue a flashback of some 50 years of service, which has this immigrant from Ireland going to West Point as a cadet himself in the late 1890s, and then working various jobs, both military and civilian, in the athletic department, where he became a beloved figure among the cadets, while the two World Wars go on at various times.  O'Hara plays his wife.

This Month's TCM Guest Programmer is William Friedkin.  You might not recognize the name, but you'll recognize his movies: he won a Best Director Oscar for The French Connection, and was nominated a second time for The Exorcist.  Friedkin selected four movies, and those selections will be airing on Wednesday evening.  Those movies are:
Bullitt at 8:00, starring Steve McQueen  as a San Francisco police detective who has to investigate the murder of a mob witness who dies under the cops' protection;
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at 10:15 PM, in which Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt prospet for gold in Mexico, only for jealousy to tear them apart;
in Belle de jour at 12:30 AM Thursday, Catherine Deneuve plays a French housewife who engages in prostitution out of boredom; and
Blow-Up at 2:15 AM stars David Hemmings as a photographer who discovers that the background of one of his photos has a murder taking place!

Over on FXM, you can catch older Joan Blondell in For Heaven's Sake, at 10:15 AM Wednesday.  Blondell isn't the star; that honor goes to Clifton Webb, who plays an angel in heaven.  Seriously.  Fellow angel and child star Gigi Perreau wants to be born human, and has even picked a set of parents, theatrical director Bob Cummings and actress wife Joan Bennett.  However, they've got no particular desire to start a family, so Webb and fellow adult angel Edmund Gwenn go down to earth; Gwenn plans to retrieve the girl, while Webb isn't so certain.  It's at this point that things start getting complicated, as Webb likes being on earth, and disguises himself as a theatrical angel, in the form of a wealthy Texas oilman.  While in that guise, he meets playwright Joan Blondell, and if they were both fully human, they'd be a match for each other.  Except, of course, that Webb is an angel and no longer fully human.

A classic fairly tale is given a twist in Cinderfella, which you can catch on Thursday morning at 8:00 AM on Encore Family.  As you can guess from the title, this is more or less the Cinderella story, except with the genders of many of the characters reversed.  Cinderfella is played by Jerry Lewis, and he's got a wicked stepmother (Judith Anderson, whom you saw mentioned above in Free and Easy) and stepbrothers.  But then Cinderfella's Fairy Godfather (Ed Wynn!) comes along to tell him that he's going to have a good chance to win the heart of Princess Charming (Anna Maria Alberghetti) when she comes to a ball where she's supposed to be introduced to one of the stepbrothers -- the stepfamily is trying to nab a rich wife.  Meanwhile, there's also allegedly a buried fortune on the estate, left there by Cinderfella's father.  Whether you like this film will probably come down to whether you like Jerry Lewis.  However, there's one side benefit from this movie: Paramount wanted this to be released in the summer, but Lewis thought it would do better as a Christmas release, so to satisfy the studio, he made another movie in between, which turned out to be the excellent The Bellboy.

Encore Drama is running Carmen Jones several times this week; the last two airings, at 5:20 AM Sunday and 4:40 PM Sunday aren't up against movies I've recommended above.  Based on the opera Carmen, this adaptation stars Harry Belafonte as Joe, a US Army man stationed in Jacksonville, FL, which is where he meets Carmen Jones (Dorothy Dandridge), who works at one of the defense plants there.  He falls in love with her even though he's in love with another girl (Olga James), and you know Carmen means trouble.  Eventually it leads to Joe going AWOL to Chicago to follow Carmen.  The movie retains many of the famous arias from the opera, only with the words changed to English and to fit the plot.  None of the stars sing opera, of course.  Dorothy Dandridge's lip-synching and acting are quite good; Harry Belafonte's are lousy.  Pearl Bailey couldn't sing opera, but her musical numbers are so energetic that you don't care.

Jean Harlow died unexpectedly in 1937 while making the movie Saratoga.  The last movie she actually completed was Personal Property, which is on TCM at 5:00 PM Thursday.  Harlow plays Crystal, an American widow in London who, being heavily in debt, is looking for a rich husband.  She meets Raymond Dabney (Robert Taylor) who isn't rich; in fact, he's just gotten out of prison.  To stay close to Crystal, Raymond takes a job as a bailiff looking after Crystal's possessions, in order to make sure she doesn't fraudulently liquidate them before the law can to pay off her debts.  However, she needs to keep up the pretense of being rich, so when she has her wealthy fiancÉ and his family over for dinner, Raymond has to play butler.  And then he finds out that it's his brother (Reginald Owen) who's the fiancÉ, and his family is decidedly not wealthy!

On Thursday night, TCM will be showing several Kirk Douglas movies.  I think I've recommended most of them, but what might be more interesting is that they're showing Kirk Douglas: Before I Forget in between at 10:15 PM.  I think it's a TCM premiere, a recording of a one-man show that he did back in 2009 at the tender age of 92, in which he recounts various experiences from his long career in the movies.  I have to admit to not having seen this one yet, but I've always been a sucker for extremely elderly people telling their life stories.
Actually, looking through the night of Douglas' films, there's one I haven't seen before: The Hook at 4:00 AM Friday, which is a Korean war drama that has Douglas playing an American soldier who is given a direct order to execute an enemy soldier although nobody wants to be the one to do the actual execution.

Finally, let's mention The Journey, which you can catch on TCM at 10:00 AM Sunday.  It's set in Hungary in late 1956.  For those of you who don't know your history, there was a revolution in Hungary in October 1956, in which the people rose up against the Soviet-backed Communist government, even forcing a change of government for about a week, until the Soviets decided to put the revolution down.  Needless to say, foreigners wanted to get the hell out of Hungary, and this movie stars Deborah Kerr as an English woman trying to flee the country.  The airport has been closed, so she and the others have to go by bus.  Complicating matters is that Kerr is trying to take her ex-lover out of the country too, and he's a Hungarian dissident, so his getting caught could mean disaster for everybody.  Unsurprisingly, the bus gets stopped at a checkpoint, and Soviet military commander Yul Brynner inspects the situation.  He knows about Robards, but he's romantically interested in Kerr, even if the feeling is decidedly not mutual.
Last edited by Fedya
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