Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of April 29-May 5, 2013. I know that you were all on pins and needles over whom Ted Thompson was going to draft, and now that the excitement of the draft is over, relax with some good films. This week is one of those weird weeks where there isn't a "Star of the Month" on TCM: Laurence Olivier was spotlighted on Wednesdays in April, while the "Star" for May will show up Tuesdays. Of course, there are a lot of good movies otherwise. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's first selection is a favorite B movie of mine: Kid Glove Killer, airing at 7:15 AM Monday on TCM. Van Heflin stars as a forensic investigator in what could be a 1942 version of CSI, assisted by Marsha Hunt. The Mob is menacing the city, and prosecutor Lee Bowman crusades against them while secretly being on the payroll. Somebody knows about the corruption, and Bowman tries to head it off by rigging up a car bomb. When that bomb goes off, it's up to Heflin to investigate, using the newfangled scientific procedures of 1942. (The movie isn't really a mystery, since we know in advance who committed the deed.) Heflin is a treat as always; while the science is part fact (spectrographs to determine the chemical composition of the explosive; something which must have seemed futuristic to audiences of 1942), and at times humorous (who's got bomb residue on their scalp?). While it's firmly a B movie, it's a heck of a lot of fun.
Monday night's lineup on TCM is a night of those silly 1950s science fiction movies. One that I don't think I've recommended before is The Magnetic Monster, at 9:30 PM Monday. Richard Carlson plays a government scientist wh is sent in to investigate a site where unusually high levels of radioactivity and magnetism have been discovered. The investigation of this "magnetic monster" eventually yields not a monster, but a physicist working with radioactive isotopes who has inadvertently invented a particularly dangerous one: it gains energy from electric appliances around it, growing in size as it does so. (The fact that this would completely violate the laws of thermodynamics is beside the point of the movie.) It's a race against time as the good guys try to find a way to destroy the stuff (by electrocuting it, apparently) before it can take over the world. Ludicrous science, but fairly good entertainment for a 50s scifi movie.
May 1 is Glenn Ford's birtdhay. TCM is celebrating with 24 hours of his movies, starting Tuesday night with several films Ford made in the 1940s. Wednesday continues with movies Ford made in the 1950s, such as Young Man With Ideas, at 9:45 AM Wednesday. Ford plays a lawyer in small-town Montana who sees his career aspirations stymied. So, with some prodding from wife Ruth Roman, he moves the family to California where he hopes to pass the state's notoriously difficult bar exam. To pay the rent while studying for the bar exam, Ford works at a shady debt collection agency with Nina Foch, setting up some romantic tension. The other tension has to do with the bungalow Ford and family rent previously having been used to run a gambling racket; some people want money from the racket they were duped out of. The ending doesn't fit -- Ford does something that would probably be an ethics violation, not getting him admitted to the bar -- but Ford is always entertaining to watch.
TCM moves from Glenn Ford to Priscilla Lane on Wednesday night. One of Lane's lesser-known films is Silver Queen, which is being shown at 11:30 PM Wednesday. Lane plays the daugher of a wealthy businessman in the 1870s (Eugene Pallette) and at the beginning of the movie is engaged to Bruce Cabot. She meets professional gambler George Brent, and falls in love with him although he wins Dad's silver mine in a poker game. When the stock market crashes, Dad dies penniless, so Brent, who's in love with Lane, gives the mine to her as a wedding present but only gives the deed to Cabot. Cabot then proceeds to steal the mine out from under Lane who doesn't realize she owns it. Instead, she's got a knack for gambling, so she goes out west and becomes a casino owner. You know that wooden George Brent and genial Priscilla Lane are going to wind up together at the end of the movie, but the plot makes a mess of the way there.
If you want purely escapist movies, watch somebody like Sonja Henie. The Fox Movie Channel is showing another of her movies this week: Wintertime, at 6:00 AM Thursday with a repeat at 4:35 AM Saturday. Henie once again plays a young woman from Norway, this time traveling in Quebec with her wealthy uncle, SZ Sakall. (Sakall was Hungarian in real life, not Norwegian.) They stop at a run-down hotel, and the hotelier (Cornel Wilde, two years before Leave Her to Heaven) promptly falls in love with Henie, so she suggests to her uncle that he buy the hotel. Cesar Romero plays a big-band singer for Woody Herman (playing himself), while Carole Landis plays the woman providing the romantic conflict. But people watched these movies for Henie and her figure skating routines, not for the plots that make no sense.
After the Thursday showing of Wintertime, you can switch over to TCM to watch the enjoyable little movie The Mystery of Mr. X, at 7:45 AM Thursday. Robert Montgomery stars as a gentleman jewel thief in London in love with the daughter (Elizabeth Allan) of the head of Scotland Yard (Henry Stephenson). Unfortunately, while committing his latest jewel heist, a constable is murdered on the sidewalk just outside the mansion, so Montgomery knows that he'll be convicted of the murder if his thievery is found out. In fact, the murder was committed by a serial killer going by "Mr. X", and it's now up to Montgomery to figure out where Mr. X is going to strike next, and find Mr. X before the police figure out he committed the jewel robbery. Lewis Stone plays another Scotland Yard investigator.
Speaking of people named X, TCM will be showing Comrade X at 4:00 AM Friday as part of a night of movies directed by King Vidor. (As far as I know, Spike Lee's Malcome X isn't airing this week; nor are any of the several versions of Madame X.) Anyhow, Comrade X, is an alias for Clark Gable, a foreign correspondent in Moscow who is smuggling out stories that the Communist authorities don't want revealed. The valet at the hotel where the foreign correspondents are billeted (Felix Bressart) discovers this, and offers Gable a deal: get his daughter, a trolley bus driver, out of the country so she can live in freedom. The problem is, the daughter (played by Hedy Lamarr) is a committed communist, and so has no desire to leave. This is actually a comedy though, reminiscent of Ninotchka, with the final climactic scene being of Gable and Lamarr trying to cross the border in a tank.
Although there's no Star of the Month this week on TCM, there is a new Friday Night Spotlight starting on May 3. Illeana Douglas, an actress and granddaughter of Melvyn Douglas, will be presenting the movies this month, under the theme "Second Looks", which, from the titles, is presumably movies that were critically panned when they were originally released, but, with the passage of time, are seen as better than was first thought. This first Friday in May kicks off the theme with the 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland. You more or less know the story: Alice, a girl in Victorian England, dreams about what's on the other side of the mirror, and finds a whole bunch of looney characters, taken from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The interesting thing is that Paramount used most of its stars, at least those who weren't making another movie, in the smallish parts. WC Fields is Humpty Dumpty; Gary Cooper is the White Knight; Cary Grant is the Mock Turtle; and on and on. There are also a lot of character actors (eg. Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter) who show up too. Half the fun is trying to recognize everybody under all that makeup: the studio tried to remain faithful to the illustrations in the original book.
If you like musicals, TCM has quite a few of them coming up next weekend. First, on Saturday night, TCM is looking at Busby Berkeley. Specifically, they're looking at him in 1933, when he choreographed the dance sequences for a trio of Warner Bros. movies, all of which TCM will be showing on Saturday, and all of which I've recommended before.
First, at 8:00 PM Saturday, is Gold Diggers of 1933, with wealthy but incognito Dick Powell providing the words and music for a Broadway musical to save the starving artists;
At 10:00 PM is Footlight Parade, in which James Cagney plays a promoter who provides pre-show entertainment to movie theaters in the form of elaborate musical numbers;
And, at midnight Sunday (or 11:00 PM Saturday LFT), you can see 42nd Street, which has producer Warner Baxter putting on a show leading to the discovery of Ruby Keeler from the chorus line.
Sunday night sees a salute to Fanny Brice. Well, not to the movies of Brice, since she was a star on Broadway during the silent movie era. The story is more or less told, with a lot of dramatic license, in Funny Girl with Barbara Streisand as Brice; that you can see at 9:45 PM Sunday. Before that, though, at 8:00 PM, is Rose of Washington Square. Fox star Alice Faye stars not as Brice but a character clearly enough inspired by Brice that Brice sued. Faye's character is renamed Rose Sargent, a struggling singer trying to make it on Broadway in the early 1920s along with professional partner Ted Cotter (Al Jolson). She meets Bart Clinton, a World War I veteran and now conman played by Tyrone Power. Ted sees that Bart is Bad News for Rose, but Rose finds Bart so charming that she falls in love with him. It's an on-again, off-again relationship as she rises while he constantly has to stay one step ahead of the law. It's full of plot elements you've seen a dozen times before (hell, just watch Faye and Power in Alexander's Ragtime Band from a year before this one), but the audiences would have been coming to see Faye and Jolson sing, not so much for the plot.
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