Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of April 25-May 1, 2016. I'm sorry I missed posting last weekend, but we were finally getting the roof re-shingled, and the roofers unsurprisingly had a problem with the satellite dish for the internet, knocking it out of alignment and leaving us without internet access for two days between Saturday and Monday. I'm back, of course; did you really think I would go anywhere? I've used my discerning taste to come up with a number of interesting movies that I know you'll all like. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I don't think I've recommended the comic western A Ticket to Tomahawk before. That one is airing at 9:00 AM Monday on Encore Westerns. The Tomahawk Railway is a new line, trying to go through one of the most difficult and dangerous regions as it takes passengers between Epitah and Tomahawk, Colorado. Well, passenger singular, since nobody but the salesman Johnny (Dan Dailey) has decided to be a paying passenger. The railroad wants to get through on time because if they do, they'll win a contract; naturally, the owners of the competing stagecoach lines don't want the train to get through and try to sabotage it. Meanwhile, the railroad has sheriff's deputy Kit (Anne Baxter) protecting Johnny. She only took the job to redeem her grandfather's honor, and really doesn't like Johnny at first. Needless to say that's going to change over the course of the movie. Walter Brennan plays the train's engineer, while an unbilled Marilyn Monroe is one of the showgirls in a traveling troupe.
Normally when you think of Arthur Conan Doyle, you think of Sherlock Holmes. But he also wrote The Lost World, and the 1960 movie version of that story is airing on FXM Retro at 11:30 AM Monday. Claude Rains plays Professor Challenger, a man who's just returned from the Amazon with a startling claim: there are still live dinosaurs in a particular remote part of the Amazon basin! Of course, he doesn't have any proof, so he has to arrange another expedition to the region to get the proof. So he gets a newspaper to fund the expedition, and they send journalist David Hedison, and the boss' daughter (Jill St. John). There's also a rival scientist (Richard Haydn), and a wealthy playboy (Michael Rennie). And then they get to the Amazon, and find that Challenger's assertions really are true, but also quite dangerous. Once they've gotten in to the isolated regions, how are they going to get back out? Unfortunately, the effects aren't quite as good as they could have been, possibly because money was taken off this project to put into the Burton and Taylor Cleopatra.
On Tuesday morning and afternoon, TCM is honoring birthday boy Edgar Kennedy, who was known for his "slow burn" expressing exasperation. He was a character actor, so a lot of his roles were smaller, such as the lemonade seller in Duck Soup (airing at 9:15 AM). But in addition to Kennedy's roles in feature films, TCM is also showing some of the shorts he made. Kennedy was the star of a series at RKO called the "Average Man" films, in which he's just trying to do his job, while dealing with his obnoxious wife (Florence Lake) and her family, especially her mother (Dot Farley). Kennedy made several dozen of these shorts, and for whatever reason TCM runs the RKO shorts a lot less often than the WB or MGM shorts. But TCM is running eight of the "Average Man" shorts between 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM Tuesday.
On Tuesday night, TCM is putting a spotlight on actress Tuesday Weld. (Clever, huh?) The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with the movie Rock Rock Rock! This is one of several rock and roll movies that were made at the dawn of the rock era, most of which had little in the way of plot and instead tried to fill the movie with acts the producers thought would become popular stars. In the case of this movie, Tuesday plays a teenager who wants to go to the big dance, but wants to buy a stylish $30 dress (well, that's $30 in 1956 dollars) and doesn't have the money for it -- and her father isn't about to give it to her. Like I said, the plot is dumb. As for the music, this one actually has some fairly successfull people, like Chuck Berry, Connie Francis doing Tuesday Weld's singing voice (not that you'd consider her rock and roll) and Frankie Lymon. And there are those who aren't so well remembered today, like Cirino and the Bowties. Oh, there's also the 1950s set design.
Those of you who like John Wayne may enjoy The Comancheros, which is airing on Encore Westerns at 12:10 PM Wednesday and again at 1:45 AM Thursday. John Wayne plays Cutter, a Texas Ranger whose job it is to find Paul (Stuart Whitman). Paul had taken part in a duel in New Orleans and killed the other man, and fled because that brought a murder rap with it. Cutter does find Paul, but then circumstances get in the way. They're attacked by Comanche, and Cutter has to enlist Paul's help to find out just who it is that's supplying the Comanche with guns. (The title of the movie refers to the gang that is selling the guns as well as alcohol to the Comanche.) Lee Marvin plays an arms dealer, although he's not the real bad guy; that role is Greile, played by character actor Nehemiah Persoff (still alive at 96). Ina Balin plays Greile's daughter Pilar and becomes romantically involved with Paul. This was also the final movie directed by Michael Curtiz; John Wayne stepped in for a few scenes when Curtiz took ill.
On Wednesday night in prime time on TCM, we get one more look at the German cinema of the Weimar era. An excellent movie that I think I haven't recommended before is Kameradschaft, airing at 3:45 AM Thursday. This one is based on a real incident that took place in 1906, but is updated for the interwar period. There's a coal mine that straddles the border between France and Germany, but because of the enmity of the two countries following World War I, the border is blocked off even deep underground and the French don't want to offer German miners any work. On the French side, there are some smoldering embers which the French mining engineers just wall off, but eventually that's not good enough, and there's a big fire that breaks out on the French side of the mine. Some of the German miners feel they can't just let their French colleagues die in the calamity, regardless of what their bosses think, so they offer to go down the French side of the mine and rescue their French comrades. The film is very well made -- the mine sequences are claustrophobic and frightening -- but the lesson was fairly quickly lost on audiences of the day since it was just a few short years before the Nazis came to power.
This week sees the start of this year's TCM Classic Film Festival out in Los Angeles. As is generally the case, TCM is taking somebody they interviewed at last year's festival, and running an edited version of that interview. This time around, that honor goes to Sophia Loren. The interview that she did is running at 8:00 PM, and will be repeated at 11:30 PM for the benefit of the people who live on the other side of the country. The rest of the night, TCM is showing several of Loren's movies, including Marriage Italian Style at 9:45 PM. Loren is teamed again with co-star Marcelo Mastroianni. This time she plays a World War II prostitute who meets him during an air raid and starts a long affair with him. However, he decides to marry a younger woman, at which point she tricks him into marriage, and then when he discovers that trick she tells him she got three sons, but only one of them is his -- and she's not saying which one!
Blair Kiel can rejoice, as TCM are showing the soundtrack of his high school years: ABBA: The Movie, at 6:00 PM. There's a plot, but it's not much worth mentioning. A small-town Australian DJ is given the job by his boss of getting an interview with the Swedish supergroup ABBA when they go Down Under for their March 1977 tour of the country. So the guy follows ABBA around as they go from city to city, always seeming to be just one step behind the group, but getting interviews with regular Australians. (The scene where two little girls start giggling because one of them says ABBA's costumes are "sexy" is charming.) In between this dopey plot is footage of ABBA, both singing their songs in concert, which is interesting enough, but also backstage, which in many ways is even better. Of course, since the movie was made in March 1977 it only has songs from the first half of ABBA's career, but there are still quite a lot of recognizable songs here.
It's been quite a long time since The Big Clock has been on TCM, but it's showing up again at 8:00 AM Sunday. Ray Milland stars as George Stroud, who at the beginning of the movie is hiding out in the titular big clock. That clock is in the lobby of Earl Janoth's (Charles Laughton) skyscraper, a building which houses a publishing empire of several magazines. Stroud is editor of Janoth's magazine Crimeways, which is what got him recruited by Janoth to help find a killer. It turns out that somebody killed Janoth's mistress and that Janoth saw a man escaping his penthouse apartment where the murder was committed; it's that man Janoth wants to find. What Stroud doesn't know is that Janoth was the killer! What Stroud does know is that he was the man leaving the apartment -- he had had too much to drink, and wound up in the apartment to sleep it off. So Stroud is trying to find the real killer to clear his name, while his boss is asking him to find himself, more or less. Maureen O'Sullivan plays Mrs. Stroud; George Macready Janoth's right hand man; and Harry Morgan Janoth's "muscle".
If you like the Fox musicals, one that I don't think I've recommended before is I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, which you can catch on FXM Retro at 8:10 AM Sunday. This one is supposed to be a biopic of Joe Howard (played by Mark Stevens), who in the Gay 90s (that being the 1890s, of course) started an entertainment career as a struggling songwriter, paid the bills by playing piano in vaudeville, and eventually became a successful songwriter on Broadway. In this movie, Joe is portrayed as having a younger adopted sister (played by June Haver) who only wants the best for him; she worries when showgirl Lulu (Martha Stewart) comes into his life. Conflicts ensue, but of course Joe winds up successful in the end. The Fox musicals of the 1940s were not as extravagant as what MGM was doing, but were generally known for their nice Technicolor and period sets, with moderately good songs. They're not quite my thing, but people who like musicals do tend to like them.