Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of April 15-21, 2013. I started writing about the movies here back in the disastrous 2005 season, as a way to get Packer fans to stop bickering at each other. Last week, I learned that you guys will bicker over the mere mention of a big pile of money. In fact, one of this week's selections does involve a man with big piles of money, so please don't get this thread locked! As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The week kicks off with that wonderful genre, the women-in-prison movie. TCM is showing three such movies, and the one I think I've never recommended before is House of Women, which is on at 9:00 AM. In this one, Shirley Knight stars as a woman who gets sent to prison because she was driving the getaway car her husband was using in the unsuccessful robbery. The car crashed; husband died, and she goes to prison a couple of months pregnant. So she has the baby in prison, which obviously can't be a permanent arrangement. Complicating matters is the warden (Andrew Duggan), who has a thing against convicts: his wife ran off with a parolee! Constance Ford appears as a fellow prisoner in this cliché-filled movie, but when it comes to a genre like the prison movie, the clichés are half the fun.
I've mentioned Doris Day and Rod Taylor in The Glass-Bottom Boat before. I don't recall having recommended Do Not Disturb before; it's airing at 11:00 AM Monday and 6:00 AM Tuesday on the Fox Movie Channel. Day and Taylor play a couple of married Americans who are sent to England because his business dealing in woolen textiles takes him there. Unfortunately, she doesn't want to live in London, and business often keeps him in town overnight, so she begins to worry that he may be having an affair with the secretary. Their landlord (Hermione Baddeley) "helpfully" suggests that Day deal with it by making Taylor believe she's having an affair, too. The writers then contrive a bunch of set pieces that lead the husband and wife to believe the other is having an affair, but it's all more worthy of a Three's Company episode. But the guys get to ogle Doris Day and the ladies get to ogle Rod Taylor, so everything's OK in the end.
TCM's Monday night schedule features westerns with guns as a key plot point. (I'm surprised I haven't heard any of our expletive-deleted politicians complain about this.) This especially when the movies involve guns being stolen, as is the case with Colt .45, at 9:45 PM Monday. Randolph Scott plays Farrell, a man who's come from the east on a mission: he's a salesman for Samuel Colt, introducing the Colt .45 revolver as a superior firearm for sheriffs and their deputies to have. Unfortunately, Zachary Scott steals the display models and sets off on a crime spree, convincing everybody it's Farrell who did it. Since the townsfolk won't believe Farrell, it's up to him to clear his own name! Alan Hale, Sr. plays a sheriff; Lloyd Bridges plays a rancher/member of Zachary Scott's gang; and Ruth Roman plays Bridges' wife who eventually falls for Randolph Scott. It's not as good as Winchester 73 which preceds it at 8:00 PM, but it's entertaining enough.
Tuesday, April 16 marks the birth anniversary of Charlie Chaplin, who was born on that day in 1889. TCM is marking the occasion with several of his movies from 6:00 AM until the beginning of the prime time lineup at 8:00 PM. What might be just as interesting, however, is that TCM will also be running three half-hour episodes of a series called Chaplin Today. Made in 2003, these are interviews with filmmakers, who are looking at various of Chaplin's films and then discuss the movies and how those films affected them. So, for example, TCM will be showing Modern Times at 10:30 PM, and following it at 12:00 by a couple of French filmmaker brothers discussing it.
Then, at 2:45 PM, TCM will be showing A King in New York, in which Chaplin plays a king who loses his fortune in the US; that's followed by Jim Jarmusch talking about the movie at 4:30.
Finally, at 5:00 PM you can see Chaplin's Limelight, with Bernardo Bertolucci talking about it at 7:00 PM.
Laurence Olivier returns for a third night of his movies this Wednesday night as TCM's Star of the Month. One of his films that I believe I haven't recommended before is Perfect Understanding, at 10:15 PM. Gloria Swanson went over to the UK to make this one that might remind you of Do Not Disturb. Swanson plays the American who falls in love with Brit Olivier, and marries him only if their marriage is a "perfect understanding". They honeymoon on the French Riviera and she returns to London to do some interior decorating work while Olivier remains in France where he's pursued by another woman. When he tells Swanson what happened, she tries to get even. Needless to say, when she tries that, complications ensue. Swanson was a big star in the silent era, and considering how great she was in Sunset Blvd., it's amazing that her early talkie career was a big flop for the most part.
TCM's theme for Thursday night is "requests from heaven": people making appeals to the authorities in heaven for help from the beyond down on earth. The night starts off with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel at 8:00 PM. Gordon MacRae plays Billy, a man in turn-of-the-century New England who died young, forgotten by all but a few people. He wants to make amends to people, especially Julie (Shirley Jones). They had met at the carnival, where he ran the carousel, and fell in love. But he gives her a free ride on the carousel, which gets him fired, with her getting fired too for breaking curfew. To try to support her, he turns to a life of crime, but gets killed in a botched robbery. Fifteen years later, Billy is given a chance to make those amends.... If you like musicals, you'll probably like this, since it's got some memorable songs. Goalline in particular will recognize "You'll Never Walk Alone".
On Friday morning, we get a lot of juvenile delinquency on TCM. Movies like Blackboard Jungle are well-known; movies like The Delinquents, which is on at 8:45 AM Friday, not so much. But this is one of Robert Altman's earliest movies, so fot that alone it deserves a viewing. Tom Laughlin plays Scotty, a teen in love with Janice (Rosemary Howard). Janice's parents, however, think she's too young to be in such a relationship, so they tell Scotty to pound sand. He goes to the local drive-in, where a teen gang comes rumbling in, pissed that no place will serve them beer. So Scotty winds up joining the wrong crowd. The two young lovers eventually defy her parents and sneak off to a house party, which is being held in a place the people broke into, which gets most of them in trouble with the law, and Scotty in trouble with the leader of the gang for snitching, which leads to realy big problems! It's fast and low-budget, but interesting nonethelss.
Cher returns on Friday night to sit down with Robert Osborne and talk about some more movies from the defining era of women on film. This week is women in the workplace, although none of them are earning big piles of money. The man with the big pile of money is Charles Coburn in The Devil iand Miss Jones, at 2:00 AM Saturday. Coburn plays a wealthy recluse who hears about labor unrest in one of his department stores, led by Jean Arthur and her boyfriend, Bob Cummings. When Coburn's detectives turn out to be incompetent, Coburn investigates himself by getting a job in the store. Romantic complications ensue involving Coburn and Arthur's assistant, Spring Byington. It's a delightful little comedy and Coburn is wonderful as ever.
TCM was running the Perry Mason movies of the 1930s in the 10:45 AM Saturday time slot for the past few weeks. They just aired the last of them this past Saturday, so now it's time for a new series, which is going to be the Falcon movies, starting with The Gay Falcon. George Sanders played Gay Lawrence, alias The Falcon, in the first four movies in the series before Sanders' real-life brother Tom Conway took over, playing Gay's brother. The Falcon was a detective who, in this first entry in the series has given that up to become a stockbroker because that's more respectable. That is, until he finds out from one of his girlfriend's friends that there's a string of jewel robberies going on that the police can't solve (unsurprising, considering that they're police). What ex-detective wouldn't jump at the chance to solve a mystery? Sanders, who had earlier played The Saint, injects a light touch into the proceedings, ably helped by several veteran character actors like Allan Jenkins and Edward Brophy.
Somebody who was thought of as having big piles of money were the Japanese of the 1980s, who it was feared, were going to take over the US economically. This fear was the genesis for a movie like Gung Ho, which you can see on Encore at 2:30 PM Saturday. Michael Keaton stars as the union rep for a Pennsylvania automobile plant that's closing because, well, the Chrysler of the 1980s was just as crappily run as the Chrysler of the late 2000s. The Japanese are looking to manufacture cars for the American market in the US, and here's a good place to do it. Needless to say, cultures clash in the form of Keaton and Japanese plant manager Gedde Watanabe, as Keaton doesn't want to cost any of his friends their jobs and Watanabe can'd directly say "no" to the Americans. Dated, although nowadays you could probably have a similar premise with the Chinese being the bogeymen.
Since everybody reads the obituary threads I post, you'll all know that Annette Funicello died this past week. By sheer coincidence, TCM already had Beach Blanket Bingo on its schedule, at 2:00 PM Sunday. Annette and Frankie Avalon return as the boyfriend and girlfriend who are part of the harmless beach scene but wind up arguing over the fact that other people have their eyes on them. In Frankie's case, that's a young Linda Evans playing singer Sugar Kane (they stole the name from Some Like It Hot) who was dropped in by skydiver as a publicity stunt. The other subplot involves the people who don't like the beach scene, namely biker dude Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) who also wants Sugar Kane. Further subplots involve Joel McCrea's son and a mermaid, Don Rickles as the owner of the skydiving school, and Buster Keaton as one of Rickles' assistants. It's mindless stuff, but the teens of the 1960s liked it.
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