Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 24-30, 2013. On Wednesday, Boris is migrating x4 to a different commenting platform, which means that the boards are going to be down for quite some time, regardless of anybody's thinking they can make a software upgrade go smoothly. Since the board is probably going to be down for days, why not spend that time without TimesFour watching some good movies instead? As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
On Monday morning and afternoon, TCM is showing several movies involving the plot device of a character who looks extemely like another person (because both characters are played by the same actor), and so one character takes the other's place. One of the movies that I've never mentioned before is The Big Mouth, at 4:00 PM Monday. Jerry Lewis plays Gerald, a clerk on an ocean fishing trip who hooks not a fish, but a man who looks exactly like him. The lookalike is Syd, a gangster who is looking for stolen jewels, and gives Gerald the map to find the hidden treasure. Well, needless to say, people start coming around and harassing Gerald thinking at first that he's Syd. This being a Jerry Lewis movie, much in the way madcap antics ensues; if you don't like that sort of humor, you probably won't like this film. On the other hand, there are a couple of sex bombs, as well as an acting appearance from composer Frank de Vol (composer of the Brady Bunch theme) who plays a gangster named Bogart.
Eleanor Parker returns for one last time as TCM's Star of the Month on Monday evening. She co-stars with Kirk Douglas in Detective Story, which kicks off Monday night at 8:00 PM. Douglas plays the tital detective, in one of the lower-class districts of New York City, who hates crime and is particularly nasty to anybody he thinks is a criminal. This has led to several complaints against him about police brutality. Much of the movie is set in the precinct house, dealing with the various small-time crooks who pass through the place; watch for Lee Grant as a shoplifter or Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) as a burglar). The main criminal story, however, involves Douglas' hatred fo abortion, and his desire to take down abortion doctor George Macready. It turns out that the reason Douglas hates abortion doctors is personal.... Eleanor Parker plays Douglas' wife; rounding out the cast is William Bendix as another of the police officers.
One of the more hilariously bad movies you'll ever see is coming up at 9:45 AM Tuesday on TCM: The Oscar. Stephen Boyd stars as Frank Fane, who at the start of the movie is at the Oscars, having been nominated as Best Actor. Flash back to the past, and Fane's long struggle to make it to the top.... The struggle is told by Fane's long time (and only true) friend, Hymie Kelly, who is played by non-actor Tony Bennett. At any rate, Fane started off small back east, working with strip-tease artist Jill St. John, who is at least nice to look at. They split up and he heads west to Hollywood, where he uses everybody on the way to the top, except that his past is going to come back to haunt him because he's made enemies by being nasty to everybody around him. The movie is filled with people who either can't act (Bennett), or people who for whatever reason are mis-acting. Star of the Month Eleanor Parker plays a talent scout; Milton Berle plays his agent; Ernest Borgnine plays a producer; and the list of stars who have small parts in this turkey goes on and one.
Wednesday evening brings this month's TCM Guest Programmer: fashion designer Joseph Abboud. He's selected four well-known films from the 1940s:
First, at 8:00 PM, is Errol Flynn as General George Custer in They Died With Their Boots On.
That's followed at 10:30 PM by Rebecca, in which Joan Fontaine discovers the truth about the death of her husband's (Laurence Olivier) first wife.
Alfred Hitchcock directed Rebecca, as he also did Abboud's third selection, Notorious at 1:00 AM Thursday, with Cary Grant as a US spymaster recruiting Ingrid Bergman to get the goods on Nazi Claude Rains.
Finally, at 3:00 AM, Rains returns to collect his gambling winnings from Humphrey Bogart, who is too busy with old flame Ingrid Bergman, in Casablanca.
If you have Cinémoi, you can watch one of Kirk Douglas' lesser-known movies: The Juggler, at 1:00 PM Wednesday and 11:00 AM Thursday. Douglas stars as the title character, a man who was a juggler in German music halls and circuses until the Nazis sent him to the concentration camps because he and his family were Jewish. He, being the only one to survive, is in newly-independent Israel, but adjusting to life in Israel is difficult. Thinking an Israeli policeman is about to arrest him, he panics and knocks the man unconscious, thinking he's actually killed the man. Because he fears he's a murderer, Douglas runs away, eventually winding up at a kibbutz, where he meets an orphan (Joseph Walsh) and a woman with him he begins to fall in love (Milly Vitale). Meanwhile, detective Paul Stewart is trying to track him down.... The Juggler was actually filmed on location in Israel.
If you catch the Wednesday showing of The Juggler, then there's somethig on Thursday morning over on TCM you won't have to worry about missing: Donovan't Brain, at 10:00 AM Thursday. Lew Ayres plays a scientist working on keeping monkey brains surviving outside of the monkeys' bodies. (How he's going to put the brain into a different body is another story.) He's finally successful, and the very same day, there's a crash that kills prominent citizen Donovan not far from the scientist's lab. He's able to keep Donovan's brain alive, but there's a problem: the disembodied brain has developed telepathic abilities, and uses those to take over Ayres' body! This is a problem since Donovan wasn't exactly a model citizen. And the brain is smart enough to prevent people from destroying it! Nancy Davis plays the doctor's wife, and Gene Evans the doctor's assistant.
Also on TCM on Thursday is the Traveltalks short Glimpses of Florida, which is airing a little after 3:30 PM, or just after the crime drama Miami Expose at 2:15 PM. This was released back in 1941, at a time when Florida's population was around 3 million, or before all those folks from other parts of the country like Blair Kiel moved to the state and turned it into the sh*thole it is today. Miami was still more a destination for rich tourists than Cuban refugees back then, and then we get to see some of the more rural places and some herpetologists working with Florida's reptiles. Traveltalks shorts are always interesting for their quaint time-capsule feel. But Florida may have changed even more than other places James FitzPatrick visited because of the population exposion.
TCM's Thursday night lineup is Sean Connery playing roles other than James Bond. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with the war epic A Bridge Too Far. Based on the historical book by Cornelius Ryan, the subject material here is Operation Market Garden, a World War II plan to go around the strongest part of the Nazi line by going over the Rhine in the Netherlands, in September 1944. The specific "bridge too far" is the one in Arnhem, which the Allies tried to take but were ultimately repulsed. There's an all-star cast in this one, wiht Connery playing a British Major-General; Robert Redford leading an assault across the Rhine; Gene Hackman as a Polish general; Max Schell on the German side; Laurence Olivier and Liv Ullmann as Dutch civilians, and dozens more.
Over on the Fox Movie Channel, a movie that's worth a viewing is The Revolt of Mamie Stover. Jane Russell stars as Mamie, a woman of ill repute who at the start of the movie gets kicked out of San Francisco circa 1941 for reasons not quite fully explained. She takes a steamer to Hawaii, meeting writer Richard Egan along the way. She's going to Hawaii because she's got a friend who's a hostess as a club catering to the servicemen stationed on Oahu -- think Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity. The difference is, Russell has ideas of making it big, and works hard to claw her way to the top. Egan, even though he's already got a girlfriend, falls in love with Russell. And then, of course, comes December 7, 1941.... If you think of Jane Russell in a film like this you might think a lighter musical comedy, but this is pretty much stratight drama, and Russell actually acquits herself reasonably well, and is surprisingly cold-blooded buying up properties to sell to the government after December 7. Agnes Moorhead co-stars as the head of the club. The only real problem with the movie is an ending that makes no sense.
Eddie Muller returns for one last time on Friday to discuss two more noir writers. One of them, Cornell Woolrich, wrote the original story behind the movie Deadline at Dawn, which TCM is showing at 9:30 PM Friday. The movie starts off with a blind man asking his ex-wife (Lola Lane) for $1,400 she ows him. The money has gone missing from her purse! Cut to a sailor on leave (Bill Williams), who went up to the woman's apartment earlier, and wound up with the money, except that he got so drunk that he doesn't know what happened. When he meets taxi dancer Susan Hayward and the two try to return the money, they find that Lane's been murdered! Can Williams and Hayward figure out who killed her before he has to catch the bus to Norfolk and his ship the next morning? Helping them is cabbie... Paul Lukas! This is an odd little movie, but a very interesting one that's well worth watching.
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