Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of January 20-26, 2014. This week I show you that I listen to your concerns by responding to a reader. Since you all want lots of great old movies, I continue to provide that valuable service; for those who want more recent stuff this month's TCM Guest Programmer presents one from the 1970s. There's also more Joan Crawford, and stuff going back as far as the late 1920s. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is Martin Luther King Day, so TCM is once again showing another day's worth of movies looking at racial prejudice with the same small set of black actors who got leading roles in Hollywood back in the 1950s and 1960s. Since there aren't too many such films, I've recommended most of them before, but I don't think I've mentioned Duel at Diablo, which is on at 2:30 PM. Sidney Poitier plays a former buffalo soldier who is part of a group helping soem raw recruits transport weapons through Apache country, the group being led by scout James Garner, who is really looking for the murderers of his Native American wife. Also there is a white woman (Bibi Andersson) who has escaped from the natives, but her having been a captive is a problem for her husband (Dennis Weaver) since she mothered a child by the Apache. And, of course, you know that the Apache are out there, just waiting to attack....
To help fund those lush musicals MGM was making in the 1950s, they made a lot of moralizing B stuff in black and white with the remnants of their backlot and actors under contract. A good example of this is Bannerline, at 2:30 PM Tuesday. Keefe Brasselle plays a young reporter who wants the big story, and when he gets the chance to interview dying high school teacher Lionel Barrymore (in one of his final films), Brasselle makes the story bigger than it is. Barrymore's character is one of the only people in town who wanted to stand up to the local gangsters, headed by J. Carroll Naish. So to try to make Barrymore happy, the paper prints up a few dummy copies of a paper saying they're going after the gangsters. And then they really do, albeit with throroughly bogus stories. (Shades of whichever TV news channel you want to demonize here.) This of course gets the actual gangsters angry. Looking at MGM's remnants, there's not just Barrymore, but Lewis Stone (formerly Judge Hardy) as the head of the newspaper's morgue, and Spring Byington as the mothe rof Brasselle's love interest.
You'll probably recognize the name Judith Sheindlin as TV's Judge Judy, a nasty little harridan who thinks the idea of justice and the rule of law involves shouting down anybody who disagrees with her. (Iowacheese probably wishes he could treat people this way on the job.) Sheindlin gets to show a softer side of herself when she sits down with Robert Osborne on Tuesday night to discuss three of her favorite movies as this month's TCM Guest Programmer.
First up, at 8:00 PM is The Goodbye Girl, in which Marsha Mason plays a divorcÉe whose boyfriend has sublet his half of the apartment to struggling actor Richard Dreyfus; you know the two are going to fall in love.
Then, at 10:00 PM is Elmer Gantry, in which Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons play 1920s evanglists who, being big blowhard phonies, probably remind Sheindlin of herself; and
At 12:30 AM Wednesday you can see The Good Earth, MGM's adaptation of Pearl Buck's novel about rural Chinese peasants and the struggles they face.
The Good Earth won Luise Rainer an Oscar, and when she turned 100 back in 2010 (she's still alive and turned 104 last week) she visited the TCM Film Festival, doing an interview with Robert Osborne. That interview follows The Good Earth, at 3:00 AM.
If you want a relatively predictable western with some interesting casting, you could do worse than to watch Taza, Son of Cochise, Wednesday at 12:35 PM over on Encore Westerns. Jeff Chandler plays Cochise, the Apache chief who negotiatted peace with the federal government back in the 1870s. But Cochise didn't live all that long after negotiating the peace, so it's up to his son Taza to try to maintain the peace. Taza is played by... Rock Hudson! Seriously. The problem is that Taza has a half brother Naiche who wants to fight for what he feels the Apache lost. And when Geronimo shows up, why there's somebody who can help the rest of the Apache fight. There's also a romantic rivalry involving the two half-brothers and high-rankin Apache girl Oona (Barbara Rush). All of this was directed by... Douglas Sirk, who gave you such memorable melodramas as Imitation of Life.
Speaking of Imitation of Life, it was written by Fannie Hurst, who also wrote the play that our next movie is based on: The Younger Generation, Thursday at 7:45 AM on TCM. Jean Hersholt, who is being honored all morning and afternoon Thursday even though his birthday is in Juy, plays the patriarch of a Jewish immigrant family in New York who runs a push-cart to help his young family survive. A generation passes, and son Morris (Ricardo Cortez) has worked and worked to make the family business succeed. It does, enough to enable Morris to move to the much tonier spot of Fifth Avenue. Unfortunately, he also worries about what all his new neighbors will think of him, so he moves his family in with him and tries to have them act less Jewish, and even tries to control his sister's relationships, all of which brings a lot of conflict. Frank Capra directed this movie that's part talkie, part silent.
Nobody likes the Pro Bowl. But if you want to see an even worse display of football, tune in to the Fox Movie Channel on Thursday, when they show John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, at 3:00 AM and 11:00 AM. Richard Crenna plays John Goldfarb, who got the nickname "Wrong Way" from journalist Jenny (Shirley MacLaine) when he ran the wrong way on a football field. He's had one mishap after another since, culminating on a spy plane mission over the USSR he's on going the wrong way forcing him to land in the Arabian kingdom of Fawzia. The king (Peter Ustinov) has a son who goes to Notre Dame and plays football, so the king has Goldfarb coach the Fawzia University team, with the view of ultimately playing Notre Dame. Jenny, for her part, has wound up in Fawzia doing an undercover exposÉ on the king's harem, enabling her to help Goldfarb in the climactic football game, which looks nothing like anything resembling football. (Except for the referees, played by Lance Easley.) The plot is unfunny, and Ustinov's antics are terribly unfunny and grating. Still, this is one to see just for seeing all the ways a movie can bomb.
Joan Crawford left MGM in 1943 when they didn't renew her contract. She went to Warner Bros., where she made Mildred Pierce which won her an Oscar, and is showing at 8:00 PM. By 1950 she was working at other studios too, such as when she made Harriet Craig, which you can catch at 7:15 AM Friday. Crawford plays the title character, a woman married to Wendell Corey who's working his way up the business ladder, and trying to maintain her social status, which she does by more or less controlling everything that goes on in her house. This includes henpecking her husband to the point that she sabotages his chances at a promotion, almost going nuts when her house is less than pristine, and spreading lies about her cousin to sabotage the young cousin's love life. Of course, eventually everybody is eventually going to figure out what Harriet is really like, which is where the movie really gets fun, as this is towards the beginning of Crawford's over-the-top phase of her career.
Tuna bitched and moaned last week about my selection of movies. Since I know he's one of those freaks who likes baseball more than football, I note that there are a couple of baseball movies this week, one of which is much more fictional than the other. The more factual movie is Pride of the Yankees, at noon Sunday on TCM. Gary Cooper stars as Lou Gehrig, the son of German immigrants who worked hard, got into Columbia University, and excelled at baseball to the point that the New York Yankees were interested in him and he became one of their all-time greats. He played every day for years, until of course he was diagnosed the the degenerative nerve disease that now bears his name, at which point he retired from the game by giving a memorable speech -- you know the story. Teresa Wright plays Mrs. Gehrig, and Babe Ruth played himself. Well-made, even if you know where it's going.
The unrealistic baseball movie is It Happens Every Spring, which is on at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT) as part of the TCM Friday Night Spotlight of science in the movies. Ray Milland stars as a college chemistry professor working on an experiment that goes wrong when a baseball comes crashing through the window. Or maybe not, as he discovers the chemicals, when mixed up by the baseball, exhibit the property of repelling wood! This makes it perfect for use in baseball, as a pitcher can put the stuff on the balls and batters won't be able to hit it Granted, in real life opposing managers would quickly figure something's going on, and the umpire would inspect the pitcher and figure out what's going on, leading to a lengthy suspension. But this is a movie, so the professor convinces a major league team to give him a tryout! It all strains credulity, but Milland isn't too bad here.
In between, on Saturday night TCM is showing a couple of summer blockbusters. This concludes with Rollercoaster, at 12:15 AM Sunday. A rollercoaster accidentally derails during the ride, killing passengers. And then another one does, and the amusment park owners of America realize this isn't an accident! Somebody (it turns out to by pyscho Timothy Bottoms) is deliberately putting explosives on the tracks to derail the coasters, and they guy wants $1 million in exchange for stopping this. Obviously, this is serious crime, so FBI inspector Richard Widmark is called in to help the safety inspector George Segal, who was the one to figure out these weren't accidents. Together, they race to get the bad guy before the big July 4 vacation week can come, when even bigger masses of people will be at America's amusement parks and tberefore a target for the mad saboteur. Henry Fonda also shows up, as Segal's boss.
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