Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of April 20-26, 2015. There's not much going on in the world of sports, so why not sit back and enjoy some good movies instead? As you know, I'd never lead you wrong in selecting a good movie to watch. We've got more from Star of the Month Anthony Quinn, and some other interesting things too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is spending Monday morning and afternoon with missionaries, including a movie that turned out to be director John Ford's last: 7 Women, at 1:45 PM. Anne Bancroft stars as Dr. Cartwright, a woman who has left the United States in the 1930s to work at a mission in China. This being China in the 1930s, there's a civil war going on, and unsurprisingly the war reaches the mission. Mongol bandits, led by Mike Mazurki who usually played more traditional gangsters, attack the mission, kill all of the Han Chinese, and hold the white women hostage. In among all this, there's also an outbreak of cholera and a difficult pregnancy. Further conflict ensues when the bandit tries to get what he wants from the women through sex. Bancroft's doctor, not being a missionary, is willing to use sex to help the other women; the head of the mission (Margaret Leighton) obviously is horrified by this. Can the women be saved?
Several weeks back I mentioned 13 Fighting Men, which involves Confederate banditry just after the end of the Civil War. A movie with similar themes is Hangman's Knot, on Encore Westerns at 2:05 and 8:35 AM Monday, and again at 12:15 PM Saturday. Randolph Scott plays Maj. Stewart, the Confedtorate commander who leads the raid that steals the Union gold, this time out in Nevada. However, one of the Union soldiers transporting the gold points out that the war is already over, so they're really just common criminals. A couple of bounty hunter types who would like to get the gold for themselves (including Guinn "Big Boy Williams") goes after the Confederates, and eventually everybody ends up at a stagecoach station. So we've got the Confederates, the criminals going after the confederates, and the innocent people at the station all getting mixed up with each other. One of those passengers at the station is Donna Reed, travelling with her fiancΓ, although one of Stewart's men (Lee Marvin in an early performance) takes a liking to her, complicating matters.
I mentioned John Ford earlier; you've got an opportunity to catch a movie he made 30 years before 7 Women: Four Men and a Prayer, at 11:30 AM Tuesday and 4:32 AM Wednesday on FXM Retro. C. Aubrey Smith plays Col. Leigh, who's been dishonorably discharged from the army, although in fact he's been framed. So he has his four sons (David Niven, George Sanders, Richard Greene, and William Henry) visit him so he can give them the evidence that will presumably clear his name. Unfortunately, Col. Leigh gets murdered and the paperwork that's proof of his innocence is stolen, so the four men have to go on a hunt to clear Dad's name. Adding romantic tension to the proceedings is Loretta Young, who has the role of the girlfriend of the Richard Greene character, who follows her love around the world, eventually helping him in his attempts to solve the case. There are a lot of great character actors playing the supporting roles, such as Alan Hale (Sr.) or Barry Fitzgerald.
After the second airing of Four Men and a Prayer, you could switch back over to TCM and watch Andy Hardy Comes Home at 6:00 AM. This is the last of the Andy Hardy movies, made after a gap of over a decade, during which time Lewis Stone, who played Judge Hardy, had died. In those intervening years in the film's universe, Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) has gotten married to Jane (Patricia Breslin), left town, and gone into business. Now he's returning to town with the business proposition of making the town much more properous by building a defense contractor's aircraft facory. However, Andy Hardy is surprised to find that much of the town is opposed to the idea. Unfortunately, Andy no longer has his father to ask for advice. Apparently, this movie was made with the intention of having even more nostalgia sequels, but those sequels were never made.
Anthony Quinn gets another night of his movies on TCM on Wednesday night, including Guns For San Sebastian at 9:30 PM. Quinn plays Alastray, an outlaw in late 18th century Mexico. He's accompanying a Catholic priest (Sam Jaffe) to the town of San Sebastian, having claimed sanctuary in the good Father's church, but the priest gets murdered, and the townpeople think that Alastray is actually the priest. He's not, but they have reasons for believing he is. More pressing is the fact that San Sebastian is getting attacked by the natives and then ultimately by a rebel group led by mixed-race Teclo (Charles Bronson; the mixed-race bit is supposed to cause problems for him). Alastray, by now having taken on the guise of the priest, decides that the best thing to do is to help the townsfolk defend themselves from these external threats. There's a lot of location shooting in Mexico here.
After the Anthony Quinn movies are done, TCM will be having a morning and afternoon iwhen they'll air the original version of a movie, followed immediately by the remake. An interesting one is Rio Rita, at 4:45 PM. The early RKO comedy pair of Burt Wheeler and Robert Woolsey (Woolsey is the one with the glasses) had become a hit in the Broadway version of this play,and so were snapped up for the film and became a successful team until Woolsey's death in the late 1930s. They, however, are not the stars here. Those are Bebe Daniels playing Rita, a Mexican woman who finds that the American Army man Capt. Stewart (John Boles) is falling in love with her. The problem is, she's the sister of a bandit who is the man Stewart chased across the border. Also appearing is Dorothy Lee as Wheeler's love interest, a role she'd reprise over and over again in the 1930s. The movie also has a finale in two-strip Technicolor, whcih was the case for several of Wheeler and Woolsey's early films. The remake which follows is from 1942 and stars Abbott and Costello in the Wheeler and Wooldsey roles.
On Thursday night, we get a night of Ann Sheridan on TCM, including the movie Honeymoon For Three at midnight Friday (ie. 11:00 PM Thursday LFT). Sheridan plays Anne, the secretary/typist to successful author Ken (George Brent). Ken isn't just successful as an author, but with the ladies, as he's had a string of flings. And yet Anne is going to marry him. And then, into his life walks Julie (Osa Massen). Julie and Ken apparently went to college together, and had a relationship there, but they went their separate ways. Now that Ken is in town, though, Julie is determined to throw herself at him, even though she's married to Harvey (Charlie Ruggles). Harvey is dragged to Ken's hotel suite by his sister-in-law Elizabeth (Jane Wyman) to beg Anne to do something about Julie. Chaos ensues. The plot really strains credulity, but the movie turns out reasonably well despite this. It's a remake of a 1933 movie called Goodbye Again (don't confuse that with the Ingrid Bergman title) which stars Joan Blondell, who always sparkles, in the Sheridan role.
Those of you who like documentaries will be pleased to see one on the life of Frances Marion coming up this Saturday at 9:45 PM. For those who don't know, Marion was a screenwriter at MGM during the silent era and the early part of the sound era, a time when there were quite a few lady screenwriters providing screenplays for some of the great movies of the era. Marion might have been the best of them all. TCM is running the documentary as part of a night of movies with screenplays by Marion, starting at 8:00 PM with the silent The Wind, starring Lillian Gish as a woman who moves out west and finds the climate forbidding. The last couple of times TCM has run this, the print has started with an introduction Gish herself did in the late 1980s for British TV, in which she talks about the difficulties making the movie; apparently the wind and heat during the real life shoot were brutal.
The second film is the excellent prison drama The Big House at 10:45 PM, starring Robert Montgomery as a playboy sent to prison for vehicular manslaughter who has difficulty adjusting to life with career criminals Wallace Beery and Chester Morris.
Finally at 12:30 AM Sunday is The Champ, in which aging boxer Wallace Beery tries to keep custody of his son (Jackie Cooper) by fighting one more bout.
Those of you who like more recent movies will be pleased to see that I'm recommending 9 To 5, at 3:15 PM Sunday on Encore Classic. Jane Fonda plays Judy, a divorcΓe who is going back to work in some faceless corporation because she needs the paycheck. What she finds is a boss, Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman) who treats all of his female employees like dirt, with the seeming exception of his chesty personal secretary Doralee (Dolly Parton). Judy and her supervisor Violet (Lily Tomlin) discover this isn't quite true, and then the three women dicover that their boss is actually embezzling from the company. But to get the information from the home office to prove this is going to take some time, so the three women wind up kidnapping their boss and holding him hostage until they can get the evidence; needless to say, the plan doesn't go quite the way they expect. This is a silly little early 80s movie that winds up being immensely entertaining. Memorable for its theme song, and watch for Sterling Hayden at the end.
Our last feature for this week is the darkly nutso What's the Matter With Helen, at 8:00 PM Sunday. Helen, played by Shelley Winters, has a relationship with Adelle (Debbie Reynolds), but it's not a normal relationship: they both know each other because their sons are Leopold and Loeb-style killers in the 1930s. Since the sons are infamous killers, the two mothers decide they want to try to escape from their past. To do so, they go out to Hollywood, and open up an acting school which is ostensibly teaching child actors how to be the next big thing in Hollywood. Adelle doesn't do too badly, even getting a boyfriend in the form of Linc (Dennis Weaver). But Helen has difficulty adjusting, and has flashback dreams about the past. There's also the nagging suspicion that somebody from their past is going to find out about them and spill the beans. Interesting, although the movie does linger over Reynolds' musical numbers a bit too long.
And now for a short. I think that even those of you who don't like the Traveltalks shorts as I do will find Night Descends on Treasure Island, at 3:21 AM Friday, interesting. Treasure Island here refers to the island out in San Francisco Bay, where an international exposition was held in 1939, overshadowed by that world's fair in New York and then the start of World War II. Two shorts were made about the exposition, one looking at the grounds by day, and this one which combines a look at some of the artworks shown with a look at the grounds at night. That's interesting because the fine folks at General Electric, who bring good things to light, provided a light show for the evenings, with colored lighting and fountains which look pretty nifty even 75 years on. With a pristine print on a big screen, and to 1940 audiences who wouldn't have seen things like this before, it must have been spectacular.
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