Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, week of September 15-21, 2014

Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread ,for the week of September 15-21, 2014.  The Milwaukee Brewers' season has been spiralling downwards the past few weeks, so instead of watching it crash and burn, why not watch some good movies instead?  There's more Melvin Douglas, more pre-Codes, and more stuff worth watching on some of the other channels, too.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

We'll start off with a gangster movie based on a true story: The Finger Points, at 6:00 AM Monday on TCM.  Richard Barthelmess plays Breck, a southerner who goes north to the big city and lands a job at one of the big city papers.  When he writes a story about the mob, they respond by beating him up.  That sucks, but even worse is the fact that the newspaper which assigned him the story couldn't be bothered to pay his hospital bills.  So Breck gets a bright idea: he could make more money by not writing stories.  That is, have the gangsters pay him to keep the stories out of the paper and keep the cops from coming after them!  Fay Wray plays the newspaper's advice columnist and girlfriend to Breck, while a young Clark Gable plays the gangster and unsurprisingly steals the scenes he's in.  This is based on the story of Jake Lingle, although you may not want to read that before watching the movie.

Lauren Bacall would have turned 90 on Tuesday if she hadn't died last month.  TCM already had a morning and afternoon of her movies planned, but they added a few more and shuffled the order of them all to come up with a 24-hour salute which begins in prime time on Monday evening with a Private Screenings interview she did in 2005.  It airs at 8:00, so up against the MNF game, but you'll have another chance to catch it at 2:45 AM Tuesday.  Following the first airing of the Private Screenings interview, at 9:00 PM Monday, is Bacall's feature film debut, in To Have and Have Not.  Humphrey Bogart is the star here, playing an American in Martinique which, being in the middle of World War II, is controlled by the Vichy regime, although since it's so far away from France itself, there's a substantial Underground presence.  Bogart ends up working with the Underground, as he's the captain of a fishing boat who gets hired to smuggle in a member of the Free French.  As for Bacall, she plays the hotel singer, trying to work her way back to the United States as she sings to the piano playing of Hoagy Carmichael.  Of course, you know all about the relationship between Bogart and Bacall.

FXM is getting in on the Bacall movies too, although in their case it was probably purely coincidental.  They're showing Bacall's film The Gift of Love, at 1:00 PM Monday.  Bacall plays Julie, who is the wife of physicist Bill, played by Robert Stack.  The marriage is going along fine, except that Julie gets diagnosed with a heart condition which has a fatal prognosis.  Julie doesn't want to leave Bill alone after she dies, so since they didn't have any children together, she adopts an orphan named Hitty (Evelyn Rudie), for Bill to love after Julie dies.  You'd think they'd have a long discussion about something like this.  Hitty likes her new mom, but she and her new dad don't hit it off that well.  Will they be able to have a good relationship after Mom dies?  Well, you have to expect that a movie like this will have a reasonably happy ending.

On Tuesday night on TCM, we get the third night of movies in the series "The Projected Image: the Jewish Experience on Film".  This week sees a bunch of movies about the founding of the State of Israel in the late 1940s.  The only one of the four I've seen is Exodus, at 2:00 AM Thursday, which deals with the British (who held the Israel/Jordan region as a protectorate) trying to keep the European Jews who survived the Holocause from getting to Palestine because fo the delicate political situation there.  Paul Newman stars as a Jew who's already made it to Palestine and is trying to smuggle other Jews in, on boat from Cyprus.  The film that I'm looking forward to seeing because it piques my curiosity is one called Hill 24 Doesn't Answer at 8:00 PM.  One of the first films made in the independent state of Israel, this production deals with the war of independence in 1947-8 and one group of soldiers fighting that war.

A British movie that I think I've recommended before, but that is worth watching again, is Postmark for Danger, at 2:30 PM Wednesday on TCM.  Robert Beatty plays Tim, an artist living in London who has two brothers: pilot David and newspaperman Lewis.  Lewis and his girlfriend, an actress named Alison, die when their car goes over a cliff in Italy.  The police discover that Lewis was about to expose a ring of jewel smugglers, and sent a postcard to that effect, so the police are looking for that postcard.  Meanwhile, a model Tim was painting winds up murdered in his flat, and he is naturally suspected.  And then to make things even stranger, Alison shows up in the flat (played by Terry Moore)!  It turns out that she had gotten out of the car before it went over the cliff, and Lewis must have picked up a hitchhiker or something.  What do all these events have in common?  You'll have to watch the rest of the movie to find out.

Immediately following Postmark for Danger is the short Tanbark and Turf, made in the late stages of RKO when they were trying to produce shorts that were just as edifying as entertaining.  This one deals with harness racing and show horses, but it really needed to be in color.  At any rate, mentioning this short is a good time to stop and mention some of the other shorts on TCM this week.
Since we had one sports short, we get two more.  Bobby Jones teaches us to golf, in the series How to Break 90.  This time, it's the downswing, at about 8:49 AM Monday, following The Unholy Garden (7:30 AM, 75 min)
Alternatively, you could watch Sports Slants #218 at 7:44 PM Friday, which looks at sports circa 1931, or at least the sports that were less popular back then.
If you like to travel, you can go to West Point on the Hudson as part of the venerable Traveltalks series, at 10:03 AM Saturday.
Or you could travel under the sea in Neptune's Mysteries at 11:34 AM Monday.

After the success of The Thin Man in 1934, studios rushed to churn out comic mysteries, espeically with husbands and wives solving the mysteries more or less together.  Towards the end of the cycle was Fast Company, at 1:30 AM Thursday on TCM as part of their salute to Star of the Month Melvyn Douglas.  Douglas plays Joel Sloane, a dealer in rare books who is married to wife Garda (Florence Rice).  To make more money than just selling the rare old books, since that's not a huge money maker, Joel works for the insurance companies in recovering stolen old books, getting the reward money.  And then another book dealer is murdered, with pretty much everybody in the cast other than Joel and Garda being possible suspects.  Joel, of course, proceeds to investigate and solve the mystery.  Fast Company was successful enough that MGM made two more movies about Joel and Garda Sloane.

Following the night of Melvyn Douglas movies, TCM will be celebrating the birth anniversary of Swedish-born actress Greta Gustafsson, whom you're more likely to recognize under her stage name of Greta Garbo.  There's a documentary on her life at 3:00 PM Thursday, but TCM is also showing several of her silent movies, including Wild Orchids at 1:15 PM.  Not to be confused with any Mickey Rourke films, this movie stars Garbo as the wife of an American businessman (Lewis Stone, several years before he became Judge Hardy) who is travelling with him to Java where he's going to be working on a business deal.  On the ship there, she meets Prince de Gace (Nils Asther).  The Prince immediately falls in love with the wife, but the feeling is not mutual.  At least, not at first.  The two men have developed a cordial relationship to the point where the prince invites the couple to stay at his plantation where the two men will go on a tiger hunt.  The prince keeps seducing our heroine, and eventually she gives in.  But her husband discovers what's going on!  What's he going to do about it?

James Cagney and Joan Blondell were a great screen team in the days of the pre-Code movie, so it's not surprising that some of their movies show up in this month's TCM marathon of pre-Codes.  One of the more entertaining is Blonde Crazy, at 12:45 AM Saturday (or late Friday evening LFT and points west).  Cagney plays Bert, a hotel bellhop who meets and falls for Anne (Blondell), a chamber-maid at the hotel.  But Bert is also a small-time con artist and eventually gets Ann to agree to take part in the schemes because there's a depression going on and besides, the people they're scamming are generally scammers themselves.  One example of this is Dapper Dan (Louis Calhern).  Another character who's a romantic rival to Bert but turns out to be bad for Ann is the supposedly high-society Joe, who turns out to be an embezzler, played by a young Ray Milland.  I believe this is the Cagney/Blondell movie that has Blondell taking a bath in one scene when Cagney comes in, asking here where she put the $5,000 they scammed, and she replies that it's in her brassiere!

Jack Lemmon is often thought of as a comic actor, although he did an excellent job in dramas too, winning an Oscar for Save the Tiger for example.  Another of his dramas is Missing, which is on Encore Suspense at 1:40 PM Saturday.  Lemmon plays Ed Horman, a man whose writer son Charles goes missing in the chaos surrounding a Latin American coup in the early 1970s.  So Ed and his daughter-in-law Beth (Sissy Spacek) go down to South America to try to find Charles.  However, attempts to get information wind up yielding no results, and Ed and Beth begin to believe that the US embassy is even hiding facts from them, with the result that the truth is quite shocking to them.  The movie was directed by Costa-Gavras, who also directed the film Z of which this is reminiscent.