Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of April 19-25, 2021. I see a lot of you are bickering over the Milwaukee Basketball Team's (can't mention the name since it's offensive to the Cervid-American community) struggles at the end of the regular season. So why not watch some good movies instead? There are a lot this week, spanning some 70 years and featuring people as diverse as Greta Garbo and Spike Lee. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
In 31 Days of Oscar, we're up to the letter O at the start of the week, with movies like Of Mice and Men at 2:30 PM Monday. Based on the story by John Steinbeck, the movie stars Burgess Meredith as George Milton, a farmhand who goes from place to place in California with his friend, Lennie Small (Lon Chaney Jr.). Lennie's a big guy, but intellectually limited, and that combination has consistently gotten him into all sorts of trouble, with George pulling his nuts out of the fire, which is part of why they can't stay in one place too long. George, for his part, dreams of having a farm of his own so they can settle down. But the place they're currently at is owned by Jackson, whose son Curley (Bob Steele) is insanely jealous of his wife Mae (Betty Field), and who's incredibly mean to Lennie, which as you can probably guess is going to get poor Lennie in trouble later. Can George ever get that rabbit farm of his own and help Lennie find some peace in life?
If you want a documentary this week, you could do worse than to watch something like When We Were Kings, at 2:00 AM Monday on SHOxBET. Muhammad Ali, after spending several years in prison for refusing to serve in Vietnam when drafted, had to fight his way back to getting a shot at the title. This would happen in 1974, against a young George Foreman. Don King got an option with each of them that if he could secure a $10 million purse, Ali and Foreman would fight. The only person who would put up the money was Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of Zaïre, who was looking for some positive publicity for his country. So off everybody goes to Kinshasa to prepare for the fight, along with a bunch of Black America's top musicians, who would perform in a concert in conjunction with the fight. Ali, ever the charismatic one, immediately won over all the Africans, while Foreman hadn't yet become the loveable guy he'd be by the time the movie was made in 1996 (however, we don't get any latter-day thoughts from any of the participants).
If you like musicals, then you'll probably enjoy Pal Joey, which is running on TCM at 6:00 PM Tuesday. Frank Sinatra plays Joey Evans, returning to San Francisco after an enforced absence. He shows up at a Barbary Coast nightclub where an old friend leads the band, and immediately worms his way into becoming the new MC of the floor show, in part because he's spotted lovely chorus girl Linda English (Kim Novak). Joey immediately starts pursuing her. Meanwhile, the band gets a bit at a party hosted by Vera Simpson (Rita Hayworth), a wealthy widow who had been a stage performer herself before marrying up. Vera has the money to make Joey's dream of owning his own nightclub come true, and even makes Joey a me of man. But Vera doesn't care for Linda, doesn't want Joey to have a relationship with Linda, and threatens to remove her financial backing if Joey doesn't fire Linda. The movie has several memorable songs, such as "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" and "The Lady is a Tramp", although they're not all originally from the stage version of the show.
There have been a lot of movies looking at Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral. One that I don't think I've mentioned before is Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die, which you can see at 11:54 PM Tuesday on StarzEncore Westerns. Richard Dix plays Wyatt, who gets drafted to be the sheriff of Tombstone, AZ because of the violence there. This violence isn't because of the Clantons, led by Ike (Victor Jory); that comes later. Instead, Curly Bill (Edgar Buchanan) is a fount of corruptitude running the town. Bill brings in a hired gun to try to kill Wyatt, but said hired gun has a crisis of morals and doesn't know what to do. Eventually we do get to Doc Holliday (Kent Taylor), not looking particularly consumptive here, as well as the Clantons and the gunfight, which thankfully is relatively brief – most movies make it much longer than it was in real life. Add in the requisite romantic subplot. It's not particularly accurate, but I don't think any of the Hollywood versions of the events in Tombstone are.
If you want an intelligent comedy, you'll probably like The Philadelphia Story, airing at 4:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. Katharine Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a socialite who's about to get married for the second time, to George Kittredge (John Howard). However, her first husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) has heard about the wedding. So he goes to one of those scandal-sheet magazines with an idea. The magazine is about to do a story on Tracy's father who has his own infidelity problems, and perhaps Dex can get a couple of reporters in to see the wedding and take pictures. So he brings reporter Macaulay Connors (James Stewart) and photographer Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) to the Lord estate where the wedding is to be held, and all hell breaks loose. Macaulay thinks he's falling in love with Tracy even though Elizabeth would be right for him. And Tracy and Dex find that the passionate love they had for each other during the marriage – even though they had good reasons for gtting a divorce – is still there.
Charles Laughton won a well-deserved Oscar for his performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII. You can see it at 6:00 PM Thursday on TCM. Laughton, as you can guess, played the British monarch, with the story opening at the execution of his second wife, Anne Boleyn (a young Merle Oberon), so that Henry can marry Jane Seymour (Wendy Barrie). That marriage doesn't work either, and for political reasons Henry marries Anne of Cleves (Laughton's real-life wife Elsa Lanchester). The two are thoroughly incompatible as husband and wife but could be best friends divorced, so Henry gets wife #5, Catherine Howard (Binnie Barnes). The only problem is that this Catherine is being pursued by one of Henry's courtiers, Thomas Culpeper (Robert Donat), so you know this marriage is doomed too. Henry's final wife, who outlived him, is Catherine Parr (Everley Gregg). Throughout it all, Henry is trying to sire a son to adulthood to become the next king, and trying to find some happiness in his personal life. Laughton captures both the joy and the pathos well, giving us an outsized Henry who in some ways seems never to have grown up.
Those of you who are avid poker players (or were before government panic-mongers shut down casinos and the like) can watch a movie like Rounders and see how much the movie gets wrong (or doesn't, since I'm not a poker player). It's on MoreMax at 4:03 PM Friday. Matt Damon plays Mike McDermott, a law student living with his girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol). Unfortunately, he's developed a taste for high-stakes poker, which has resulted in his losing all his savings to a man nicknamed Teddy KGB (John Malkovich), the owner of a private club. This gets Mike to stop playing temporarily. That is, until his old friend Worm (Edward Norton) gets out of prison. Worm also has a love of gambling, and ran up a high debt from prison that still hasn't been paid off. So Mike decides he's going to help Worm make back the money Worm lost. But the stress gets to them, and Mike starts getting his own debts that he's going to have to pay back, too.
Greta Garbo isn't my favorite, but I know some of you out there like her, so I'll mention one of her lesser-remembered talkies, Romance, which you can see at 3:30 AM Saturday on TCM. Young man Harry (Elliott Nugent) is set to marry an actress his family disapproves of, so he goes to his grandfather Armstrong (Gavin Gordon), now a Protestant bishop, to tell Grandpa the old folks just don't understand. Ah, but they do, as Grandpa Armstrong flashes back decades to when he was a young priest. He saw opera singer Rita (Greta Garbo) in a performance, and immediately fell in love with her, and was even planning to ask for her hand in marriage. But she, as a famous artist, has all sorts of men pursuing her, including one of his friends, the wealthy (and married) Cornelius (Lewis Stone). So Rita, not wanting to destroy young Armstrong, tries to reject him politely. If he can't have Rita as a wife, well, perhaps he can save her soul. It's the sort of stuff that's really dated today, not helped by the technical limitations of early sound film.
I love Alfred Hitchcock movies, and thankfully, we've got another one airing this week. That would be Shadow of a Doubt, at 2:15 AM Sunday on TCM. Teresa Wright plays young Charlie Newton, living with her family (parents Henry Travers and Patricia Collinge) in Santa Rosa, CA before it got too big. She's excited to hear that her beloved Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), after whom she was named, will be coming for a visit. What she doesn't know is that Uncle Charlie is suspected back east of being the Merry Widow killer, a man who romances old, lonely widows and then kills them for their wealth. Uncle Charlie proceeds to charm everybody in town, especially his sister (Charlie's Mom). But young Charlie begins to suspect that something about her secretive uncle isn't quite right. And the more she figures out, the more danger she's getting herself into. As good as the movie is, you'd think people in Santa Rosa would already have heard about the Merry Widow killer on the radio. A young Hume Cronyn shows up for dark comic relief.
Up against Shadow of a Doubt, over on StarzEncore, is Annie Hall, at 3:27 AM Sunday (three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). Woody Allen plays Alvy Singer, a neurotic comedian who wonders why his relationship with singer Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) was unsuccessful. Flash back to the past, when Alvy and Annie meet while on line to see an arthouse movie. One thing leads to another, and the two soon fall in love even though on the surface they don't seem to have much in common. While Alvy is a neurotic New York Jew, Annie is sensible midwestern through and through even though she winds up going into therapy herself. The two break up and then have a reconciliation, although we know from the start of the movie that it's not going to be permanent. Watch for a cameo from Truman Capote, Sigourney Weaver's debut, and singer Paul Simon playing a record producer.