Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 30-April 5, 2015. Easter is coming up this week, the day we celebrate the undead Jesus by watching a bunch of zombie movies, or something like that. There's also the long wait before Wisconsin plays Kentucky in April Madness and possibly even wins. So enjoy the wait with a bunch of good movies. There's a new Star of the Month and a new Friday night spotlight since we're into a new month. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
She is serious, and please call her Shirley. We're talking about Anne Shirley, and the movie Sorority House, airing at 8:45 AM Monday on TCM. Shirley plays Alice, the daughter of a greengrocer who goes to one of thsoe small liberal arts colleges that are a mainstay of studio era movies. Alice arrives at school, and one of the things she wonders about are the sororities. However, it turns out that you can only get into a sorority by being invited by the current members. But then Alice is good-looking, so perhaps the sororities will wnat her to attract good-looking guys. And indeed, Alices winds up with the BMOC, Bill (James Ellison). Still, there's the issue of Alice's background. That, and the fact that when sorority rush time comes, one of Alice's roommates doesn't get invited to join the sorority she wants to. At least there aren't a bunch of racist chants here. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, who has little opportunity to inject his Communist propaganda.
Stella Stevens was born in October, but TCM is putting the spotlight on her on Tuesday with a morning and afternoon of her movies. One that I don't think I've mentioned before is The Secret of My Success, at 11:30 AM. The "my" in the title is that of one Arthur Tate (James Booth), a British constable who has risen to success on what he thinks is due to his following his mother's advice to be kind to people. In fact, he's been helped by a series of women (Shirley Jones, Stella Stevens, and Honor Blackmon), as well as his mother, who seems to be able to get the ear of people who could help her son. Stevens plays a dressmaker whose husband has gone missing; Blackmon has a husband who breeds spiders, and Jones has gotten involved in a Latin American revolution. The cast is generally good, but the movie doesn't quite live up to those expectations.
Over on Encore Westerns, you have a chance to watch Bandolero! at 7:40 AM and 8:00 PM Tuesday. James Stewart plays Mace, a man who, at the beginning of the film, waylays a hangman and goes into some western town. It turns out that Mace is there for the hanging of his brother Dee (Dean Martin -- yeah, like those two could be brothers) for robbing a bank. Except that he has no intentions of seeing Dee hang, instead orchestrating an escape from the gallows. Mace then goes and robs the bank himself to show them how it's done! So the sheriff (George Kennedy) rounds up a posse to chase the two brothers and their gang, who are trying to flee to Mexico. Complicating things is the fact that the brothers have kidnapped thw widow Stoner (Raquel Welch) whose husband was killed by Dee. Oh, and in Mexico there's an impenetrable desert, as well as bandits who will go after any gringos. Stewart is good as always, and Welch is lovely to look at in this amiable western.
Wednesday being April 1, we get a new Star of the Month on TCM: Anthony Quinn. The month kicks off with the two movies that won him Best Supporting Actor Oscars, with the first of those awards coming for Viva Zapata!, which is on at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Zapata, of course, refers to Emiliano Zapata, who led the Mexican revolution of the early 1910s, the one that would also spawn Pancho Villa (Alan Reed). Eventually, the revolution succeeds in getting rid of the old corrupt president Porfirio Diaz, and the revolutionaries think Zapata would be just the man to take over. However, the revolutionary idealism dies, and it seems that among the people harming hte revolution is Emiliano's own brother Eufemio (Quinn). Or so the movie goes; I don't remember my Mexican history well enough to know whether this is any more accurate than Viva Villa and Juarez were in the 1930s.
Before that, however, we get a lot of comedies, starting off in the morning with Joe E. Brown, he of the extremely expressive face. Among the Brown comedies is Earthworm Tractors, at 9:45 AM. Brown plays Alexander, a salesman who claims that he can sell anything. To get the girl he wants (Sally Blair) and impress her father, he's going to need to, and claims he can sell tractors, something he's never done before. So he winds up in one of those southern small towns, trying to sell a tractor to local bigwig Sam Johnson (Guy Kibbee), who never met a tractor he didn't like, but is in charge of the road-building project. Along the way, Alexander meets Sam's daughter Mabel (June Travis), and perhaps he'd be better off with her. There's a lot of broad humor in this one, and the kid in all of us will probably enjoy Brown's manic antics.
Elsewhere on Wednesday, you have a chance to catch A Very Brady Movie, at 4:50 PM on Encore. This film spoofs the old Brady Bunch sitcom of the 1970s. The Bradys (played here by Shelley Long and Gary Cole with the six kids) are living in Southern California tract housing, still stuck in the 70s as Mike Brady designs buildings that look like their house which is also stuck in the 1970s. The problem, of course, is that it's now 1995. Their neighbor, Mr. Dittmeyer, is a developer who wants to build a mall on the block where the Bradys live, and have bought up the rest of the land, but the Bradys refuse to move, so Dittmeyer has taken to stealing their mail, keeping them from getting their property tax bills (you'd think they'd notice this) and fall heavily in tax debt. So it's up to the Brady kids to save the day by winning a talent competition. Much of the humor has to do with the Bradys being 20 years out of time, but there are lots of homages to the original TV series, and all of the surviving cast members from the original show (Robert Reed had died a couple of years earlier) have brief cameos.
Fox was hemorrhaging money when they made the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatro. In the meantime, they distributed quite a few second-bill movies. A good example of what they were doing is The Broken Land, airing at 4:50 AM Friday on FXM Retro. Kent Taylor stars as Cogan, a sheriff who is not only no-nonsense, but a bit draconian in his law enforcement methods. He arrests person after person and puts them in jail, and eventually his deputy Flynn (Jody McCrea, son of veteran actor Joel McCrea) begins to wonder whether his boss isn't being too dictatorial. The girlfriend of one of the prisoners also has this view, but she knows something about the sheriff that might allow her to do something about it. The most interesting thing about this movie, however, is probably the presence of a very young Jack Nicholson.
Friday night brings a new spotlight to TCM. presents MGM's special effects artist A. Arnold Gillespie, which is to say this is a way for TCM to show a bunch of those MGM films that TCM has cheap access to in a way they don't normally show them. The spotlight starts off with The Wizard of Oz at 8:00 PM, which obviously has a lot of effects what with those flying monkeys and a torndao.
Then, at 10:00 PM, you can see San Francisco, a Clark Gable/Jeannette MacDonald romance set against the backdrop of the looming 1960 earthquake, which is spectacular by 1936 standards.
Tarzan and His Mate, another of the Tarzan films starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan, follows at 12:15 AM; and
The 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, with at least one major storm, is on at 2:15 AM.
Johnny Cash sang about falling into a ring of fire, but it's David Janssen who gets stuck in a Ring of Fire at 4:15 PM Saturday on TCM. Janssen, later TV's Fugitive, plays a sheriff's deputy who, at breakfast at a diner one morning, realizes that the two guys who held up a gas station are there. So he arrests them (Frank Gorshin and James Johnson) and their moll (Joyce Taylor), but he's stupid enough not to handcuff them, with the predictable result that they overpower him and take him out into the woods to hide, holding him hostage. So a posse is formed to try to find the criminals and their hostage, and in among all the mayhem, a forest fire starts, threatening to kill everybody. Will our hostage escape? The story is a bit predictable at times, but the movie was filmed more or less on location; although the movie is set in Oregon the filming was done in rural Washington west of Tacoma.
Sunday is Easter. TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with religious themed movies, but in prime time we get things like Holiday Inn at 10:00 PM. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire play a nightclub act that eventually splits up because of creative differences: Crosby doesn't want to do that much work, instead coming up with the idea of a hotel that would only be open at the holidays. How you make a profit off of this is a problem, but this is a movie so we'll ignore that. The hotel is going to have nightclub acts, too, and Crosby wants Marjorie Reynolds for the act, but Astaire wants her for his act too. However, the plot of the movie has been overshadowed in the intervening years by the music. Irving Berlin was tapped to do the music, and as always provided a bunch of new songs. One of those, "White Christmas", became a huge hit. Of course, with the winter we've had, you should be dreaming of something other than a white Christmas.
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