Welcome to another edition of Fedya's Movies to Tvio thread, for the week of April 3-9. 2017. Baseball season begins this week, but of course nobody cares about baseball so why not spend the time doing something more worthwhile like watching good movies? I've used my good taste once again to select a bunch of movies I know you'll all like, as well as the premiere of an interview with an actress who was back in the news in an unfortunate way earlier this year.
Since I know you all like silent films, I'll recommend this week's Silent Sunday Nights feature on TCM: The Circle, at 12:30 AM Monday. Young Lady Catherine (a very young Joan Crawford) leaves her husband for a dashing young man. Thirty years later, the young son Catherine left behind is all grown up (Creighton Hale) and married to beautiful Elizabeth (Eleanor Boardman). However, Elizabeth finds her husband stuffy and is thinking about running off with a handsome man (Malcolm McGregor) herself. Butbefore she makes up her mind, she decides to meet with Lady Catherine (the elder Lady Catherine is played by Eugenie Besserer) to see if “runaway love” can last after 30 years. Needless to say, Elizabeth's husband isn't happy about it. And then, the first husband Lady Catherine left shows up. But it's he who gets Elizabeth's husband to man up and try to keep Elizabeth from running off with another man.
For you philistines who want something more recent, tune in to StarzEncore Classics: at 1:10 PM Monday they're running The Dead Zone. Based on the novel by Steven King, the movie stars Christopher Walken as Johnny, a man engaged to Sarah (Amy Adams). Except that poor Johnny gets in a car accident and winds up in a coma for five years. He awakens and finds that everything has changed, including his fiancée being married to another man. Most frightening of all the changes is that he now has disturbing visions that occur every time he touches somebody. He's able to use some of those for good effect, such as helping the local sheriff (Tom Skerritt) solve a murder case. But then he touches politician Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), and gets a vision of the world ending, as Stillson apparently plans to start a nuclear war in the name of God. Johnny of course decides he needs to stop Stillson, but how? And what if the only way to stop Stillson means he'll die, too?
On Monday evening, TCM is putting the spotlight on Faye Dunaway, who is now known for completely ****ing up awarding the Best Picture Oscar. But back in the day Dunaway was quite the actress. The night starts off with an interview Dunaway did at last year's TCM Film Festival, at 8:00; the interview will be repeated at 11:15 PM for the benefit of viewers on the west coast. In between will be one feature, Bonnie and Clyde (9:15 PM), which costars Warren Beatty, the man who helped Dunaway screw up that Oscar presentation. To be fair, however, Dunaway was quite the actress back in the day, and even won a Best Actress Oscar for Network, which will be on at 12:30 AM Tuesday. The night will conclude with two lesser-known movies, The Arrangement at 2:45 AM, and the 1979 version of The Champ (Jon Voight as the washed-up boxer and Ricky Schroder as the son) at 5:00 AM Tuesday.
I thought I'd recommended Shock Treatment recently, but apparently not. (Either that, or x4's search is acting up.) Anyhow, it will be on FXM Retro this week at 10:00 AM Monday and 8:40 AM Tuesday. Stuart Whitman plays Dale, an actor who is hired for an interesting acting job: pretend to be criminally insane, so that he'll get committed to the state mental asylum! The reason for this is that one of the inmates there is Martin (Roddy McDowall), a gardener who beheaded his boss. It's thought that Martin took the murder victim's $1 million and hid it somewhere, and Dale's job is to go into the mental hospital and find out where that money has been hidden. Complicating matters is one of the hospital's doctors, Dr. Beighley (Lauren Bacall). She's cottoned on to the idea that Martin may have hidden the money, and she's looking for it, too. And she's got psychotropic drugs and all sorts of other techniques to extract that information. Oh, and she can use them to harm anybody who might get in the way of her plans, too. It's reminiscent of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor from a year earlier, and it's still entertaining even if it isn't as good.
TCM doesn't have a normal “Star of the Month” this month. Rather, they're presenting a salute to character actors. Every Tuesday and Thursday this month, they'll be spotlighting various character actors, 32 in all with one movie each. It'll be the gents on Tuesdays and the ladies on Thursdays. Among the men this week is Walter Connolly, who played the wealthy father in a bunch of movies, such as Fifth Avenue Girl, which will be on TCM at midnight Wednesday (ie. 11:00 PM Tuesday LFT). In this one, Connolly plays Mr. Borden, a rich industrialist who unfortunately doesn't have a happy life at home. Mrs. Borden (Verree Teasdale) prefers to be in the society pages, while his son Tim (Tim Holt) and daughter Katherine (Kathryn Adams) ignore him, the daughter carrying on an affair with the chauffeur. One day in the park, Mr. Borden meets unemployed Mary (Ginger Rogers), and decides to offer her a job: he'll pay her handsomely to pretend she's his mistress. Needless to say, this throws a cat among the canaries of his family. Things get complicated, however, when Tim finds himself falling in love with Mary.
Married detective couples were a popular thing in the 1930s, starting with The Thin Man. MGM couldn't produce Thin Man movies fast enough, so they also put another series in production, starting with Fast Company at noon Wednesday on TCM. This series is about Joel (played here by Melvyn Douglas) and Garda (played by Florence Rice) Sloane, a pair of married bookstore owners dealing in rare books. (Each of the characters was actually played by a different person in each of the three movies.) In this first entry in the series, shady book dealer Otto (George Zucco) gets bumped off, and the insurance company. One of Joel's friends Ned (Shepperd Strudwick) was sent to jail by Otto on suspicion of stealing a rare book, but Ned claims he was framed, and his girlfriend Leah (Mary Howard) believes him. Both of them have the reason to be prime suspects in Otto's murder, but as Joel investigates, he finds that a whole bunch of other people make for obvious suspects, too. There's Louis Calhern and character actor Douglass Dumbrille. Nat Pendleton plays a hired hit man.
A western I think I haven't recommended before is Lawman, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 8:10 PM Wednesday and 2:45 AM Thursday. Burt Lancaster plays Maddox, the marshal of Bannock, whose town is shot up in the opening sequence. One of the guys doing the shooting up gets shot himself, and Maddox returns that body to the town of Sabbath, where all the men came from. Maddox informs Sabbath's marshal Ryan (Robert Ryan) that he wants to extradite a bunch of men to Bannock to stand trial, at which point Ryan informs him that Sabbath has been built out of nothing by cattleman Bronson (Lee J. Cobb) and that since all the people owe their lives to Bronson who pretty much owns the town, there's no way those men will be extradited. Still, honest lawman Maddox tries, and sure enough the men who had been in Bannock come in ones and twos to try to deal with the threat that Maddox has created for them. This even more so after one of them tries to draw a gun on Maddox and gets shot.
Walter Huston's birth anniversary is on Wednesday, but TCM is marking it on Thursday morning and afternoon with a bunch of movies. Perhaps the most interesting because it doesn't show up often is Report from the Aleutians, at 3:00 PM. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they also moved north and captured a couple of the Aleutian islands off the southwest coast of Alaska. Meanwhile, the War Department was recruiting movie directors to make propaganda and training movies. Director John Huston was part of the Signal Corps, and when given the task to do a movie about the Aleutian Islands, it was only natural that he would ask his father to do some of the narration – to wit, providing the voices of the military men we see on screen, since they couldn't do the voiceovers themselves. (Son John provides the regular narration.) This movie looks at the Americans who were stationed on the islands, partly to defend from further Japanese invasion and partly in preparation for the eventual attack on the Japanese Home Islands. (Charlton Heston, not seen here, was also stationed on the Aleutians and was convinced he would have been sent to his death in an invasion of the Home Islands if it hadn't been for the atomic bombs.)
Some of you might think eight is enough, but you'd be wrong, as you can see from the movie Nine Lives are Not Enough, at 6:00 AM Friday on TCM. Ronald Reagan plays Matt Sawyer, spending his days like bright and shiny new dimes as the star reporter for the big city newspaper. Except that he has a knack for getting the story wrong, so his editor (Howard Da Silva) puts him on a beat with two cops (James Gleason and Edward Brophy). Never troubled by the changing times, Matt takes to his new role with gusto, especially when the police get called to a boarding house where there's a dead body inside. That body is the lifeless corpse of missing millionaire Abbott. The inquest determines that it was a suicide, but of course Matt is convinced it was murder, and dammit, he's going to prove it and get his old job back in the process. Of course, along the way, more people wind up getting bumped off. And Matt falls in love with the millionaire's daughter (Joan Perry).
The TCM Spotlight for April is romantic melodramas produced after World War II, running every Friday in April. On this first Friday night in April, we get melodramas set against the backdrop of war, starting with Love Letters at 8:00 PM. Joseph Cotten stars as Quinton, a British soldier in World War II who was asked by his shy buddy Morland to write letters to Morland's girlfriend (Jennifer Jones). It works, and Morland and the girl wind up getting married, but when Quinton goes back to England on medical leave, he finds out that Morland has been killed, and goes to look up Morland's widow and find out what happened. It seems that the woman murdered her husband, but now has a severe case of amnesia and remembers none of this. And Quinton meets the young woman and falls in love with her himself. I told you this was melodramatic! It's well acted, even if the story is ridiculous at times.