Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of April 11-17, 2016. We're well into April, so we've got the same Star of the Month I've mentioned the past few weeks, as well as more Barrymore movies, this week featuring Lionel. But there's a new spotlight coming up as well, and there are also some interesting movies on other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
It's been quite a few years since I've recommended Death of a Cyclist before, but it's showing up as this week's TCM Import at 3:00 AM Monday. Lucia Bosé plays María José, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to Miguel. To deal with that, she's taken up a lover, the math professor Juan (Alberto Closas), who only has his position at university thanks to his brother-in-law. Anyhow, one day the two illicit lovers are returning from one of their trysts when... they hit a bicyclist. Juan gets out of the car to check on the cyclist, who happens to be alive, which causes a problem. If they save him, their affair will come to light. So they drive off, leaving the cyclist to die. As in American movies like Double Indemnity, the new secret that they're keeping starts to drive a wedge between them, especially when somebody comes out an implies that he knows there's something going on.
Fritz Lang made some really interesting movies in his career. And then he made some westerns, such as Rancho Notorious, which you can see at 1:45 PM Monday on TCM. Arthur Kennedy plays Vern, a rancher in Wyoming who's due to be married to a nice woman. However, two gues come in to the local gold assayer's and, in robbing the place, also shoot Vern's fiancée dead. Needless to say, Vern is pissed to no end, and chases the men, finding one having been shot by the other. The dying man mentions the name "Altar Keane", so Vern sets off to find this person or thing, which eventually leads him to look for a ranch in the Arizona territory run by a woman named Altar Kean, where apparently outlaws can go to stay away from the law. On the way, he meets up with condemned criminal Frenchy (Mel Ferrer) and helps him escape to Altar's ranch. There, he tries to find his fiancée's killer, while also falling for Altar (Marlene Dietrich). The problem is, Frenchy thinks Altar is his girl.
For those who like football movies, Too Many Girls is back on TCM, at 10:45 AM Tuesday as part of a daytime salute to Ann Miller. The female lead, however, is played by Lucille Ball. She's a willful socialite daughter of a rich man who, to keep her away from her writer boyfriend, sends her to a cow college out in New Mexico. Dad then hires four college football players (Richard Carlson, Eddie Bracken, Hal LeRoy, and, amazingly, Desi Arnaz) to follow her to the cow college and basically spy on her and keep her out of trouble. Richard Carlson's character falls in love with Lucy, while the other guys fall in love with various co-eds. And then the guys learn the school's football team is terrible, so they sign up to join the team and turn its fortunes around. That is, until Lucy decides she wants to go home and the four, being in her Dad's pay, have to follow her. That threatens to put the kibosh on the whole football season. (No comparisons to Aaron Rodgers and Olivia Munn, please.) This one has no resemblance to college football as we know it, but is still a fun movie.
I might have recommended Tulsa back in September when Susan Hayward was TCM Star of the Month, but if not, it's showing up on Encore Westerns this week at 7:45 AM Tuesday and 6:00 AM Friday. Hayward plays Cherokee, the daughter of a rancher in Oklahoma. Oil is discovered, and there's a boom, which spells doom for her father as he gets killed in an accident with an oil rig when he goes to complain after the oil company polluted the water on his land. So Cherokee vows revenge. She hires a geologist (Robert Preston) and her childhood friend (Pedro Armendáriz) and together the three of them prospect for oil on her land. Of course they strike, and it makes her very wealthy, but she gets greedy to the point of wanting more and more, which frightens her friends/business partners. It all results in the oil wells set on fire, and an exciting climax, helped by the fact that the movie was done in Technicolor.
For the next three Wednesday nights, TCM is having a series called From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Weimar Era. They'll be looking, as you can guess, at the output from Germany during the roughly 15-year period up until Hitler came to power in 1933. Stuff like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (8:00 PM Wednesday) is already famous; other stuff not quite so much. The title for the series came from the title of a 2014 documentary on the subject, and that documentary will be showing up at 9:30 PM Wednesday.
A movie returning to FXM Retro after a long absence is The Story on Page One, airing at 1:00 PM Thursday and 9:15 AM Friday. In the opening scene, one Mrs. Brown (Katherine Squire) goes to the Los Angeles storefront law office of Victor Santini (Anthony Franciosa). He's down on his luck, seemingly living there, but Mrs. Brown needs a lawyer and this is the best she can do. It turns out Brown's daughter Josephine (Rita Hayworth) has been implicated in the killing of her policeman husband. So the lawyer does some investigating, and discovers that Josephine had an unhappy relationship with her husband, to the point that she decided to seek love elsewhere, from northern California accountant Larry Ellis (Gig Young), who visited LA for work on a regular basis but back home was under his mother's (Mildred Dunnock) thumb. He's implicated in the killing too, although he claims it was in a struggle for the husband's service gun while the husband was goign to shoot him. His mom is wealthy enough to hire better defense attorneys, and she works on getting those defense attorneys to work on putting the blame on Josephine, but her son will have none of it. Low-budget, but actually pretty good courtroom drama.
Those of you who like the 1930s B movies are in luck, since TCM is airing several on Friday morning and afternoon. For example, there's Freshman Love, at 9:15 AM Friday. This is the fourth (and so far last) version of a movie made twice as a silent called College Widow, and then as a talkie called Eleven Men and a Girl. The plot is that there's a college with high academic standards ha trouble getting good athletes, in this case for the crew team. But things are about to change. The college president, Simpkins (Henry O'Neill), has a daughter Joan (Patricia Ellis) who's good looking by 1930s standards. And she decides to use her beauty to get some good rowers to transfer and join the crew team. The team obviously improves, but things hit a snag when they're about to be declared academically ineligible. So their girlfriends have to help them pass the big test. This one is a musical version of the story, contrasting with the other three. Character actor Frank McHugh plays the coach.
Another fun B movie on Friday is Love Is on the Air, at 12:45 PM. The one is also a version of a movie that was made several times. Here, Ronald Reagan, making his film debut, plays a radio commentator who's doing a whole bunch of hard-hitting reports on the local racketeers. Obviously, the racketeers don't like that, and since one of them has as his front a business that sponsors the radio station, that racketeer puts pressure on the station owner to get Reagan off the air. The owner can't just fire Reagan without a big payoff per Reagan's contract, so instead the owner shunts Reagan into hosting the station's kids' show. The previous host of that show (June Travis) isn't happy, and neither is Reagan, but he takes the attitude that he won't let this get him down, which enables him to win Travis' heart along the way. Also, in doing his kids' show, he learns some things about the racketeers from them that enables him to use his show to take down the racketeers. The movie is a trifle, but Reagan showed how well-suited he was to light material like this.
If you like Randolph Scott westerns, then one that I don't think I've recommended before is Santa Fe, airing on Encore Westerns at 8:40 AM Sunday. This one has Scott as one of four Canfield brothers who all fought for the South in the Civil War. The South lost of course, and now the brothers are trying to make a new life out west, which is where they get in a brawl with some ex-Union soldiers. One of the Union soldiers dies, and the brothers escape further west. Scott realizes that there's no use continuing to fight the war, so he goes straight and starts to work for the fledgling Santa Fe Railroad, which is building a line that will eventually stretch from Chicago to the southwest in the New Mexico and Arizona territories. The other three brothers, meanwhile, don't go straight, but help anybody who's trying to fight the railroads and the US expansion to the west, which entails fighting against their own brother as they try to sabotage the railroad building in any number of ways. Relatively standard Randolph Scott stuff (hey, he made Canadian Pacific just two years before), but he's a professional at it.
Our final feature for this week is The Year of Living Dangerously, airing at 3:15 PM Sunday on TCM. Mel Gibson plays Guy, a young Australian reporter who gets his first foreign correspondent job, in the Indonesia of 1965. This was a time of turmoil in the country, as one dictator Sukarno was ratcheting up the authoritarianism im response to protest and soon to be toppled by future dictator Suharto. In Jakarta, Guy isn't quite certain how to do his job well, what with the chaotic situation, but he's helped out by his photographer, the Australian-Chinese midget Billy (actually played by a woman, Linda Hunt). He also meets British Embassy staffer Jill (Sigourney Weaver). But the situation gets more chaotic, especially for Billy, and then Guy gets some information that he probably shouldn't be privy to. It would make a great story, but if he reveals the information, it could put a lot of people in danger. Mel Gibson really could act, and the story is an excellent one.
And now for the shorts. Judy Garland is this month's Star of the Month on TCM, and TCM is showing her films on Friday evenings in prime time. This Friday, however, they're also inserting a couple of her shorts. Or, more accurately, shorts that she happens to be in, since she wasn't a star yet. First up, at 7:38 PM Friday, is La Fiesta de Santa Barbara. This one has a bunch of MGM stars putting on a fiesta. It's in lovely Technicolor not just by 1935 standards, and it's fun to pick out all the 1930s stars.
The other two shorts are even earlier. At 9:48 PM is Bubbles, which has a bunch of children performing in the "land of make believe"; these include the Gumm sisters, one of whom would have her name changed to Judy Garland.
The Gumm sisters show up again in Starlet Revue at 3:16 AM Saturday, which is another revue of child performances.