Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of April 20-May 6, 2018. The NFL Draft is over, and there's only so much we can say about our new GM's failure to adress the Packers' glaring need at punter. So why not settle down and relax with some good old movies? Once again, I've used my good taste to select movies I know will interest all of you. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I can't recall whether I've mentioned Having Wonderful Time before. It's going to be on TCM at 12:15 PM Monday. Ginger Rogers plays Teddy, a secretary living in the Bronx with her parents and kid sister. It's a dead-end life and a dead-end job, so she's happy to have two weeks off which she takes vacationing at a resort up in the Catskills back in the days when Catskills resorts were a thing. (Of course, they were also a Jewish thing, which isn't mentioned in the movie.) She's trying to be well-read so she can meet a guy from the smart set, but instead she meets resort waiter Chick (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). Chick is actually a college man, having gone to law school but working at the resort because he can't find a job as a lawyer. It's obvious that the two wil be right for each other, but poor Chick keeps making a mess of things. So when rich Buzzy (Lee Bowman) shows in interest in Teddy, Teddy thinks about spurning Chick for him. Buzzy, meanwhile, already has a girlfriend in Miriam (Lucille Ball), so when she finds out about Teddy, boy is she pissed.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns, there's Seminole, at 8:10 PM Monday. College football fans of course recognize that name from Florida State, but the movie is set before Florida actually became a state. Rock Hudson plays Lt. Caldwell, fresh out of West Point. He's stationed at a fort in the Florida Territory, where the Army has a problem on its hands in the Seminoles, led by mixed-race Osceola (Anthony Quinn). The Seminoles are irritated, and well they should be, since Andrew Jackson has been forcing Florida's other tribes to go west to Oklahoma. Osceola had been a friend of Caldwell's before dropping out to become chief of the Seminoles. Heck, the two even had a romantic rivalry over the lovely Revere (Barbara Hale). Meanwhile, the fort's commander, Major Degan (Richard Carlson) doesn't like the Seminoles at all and is willing to do whatever it takes to stop their hostility. This even if it means going on a fool's errand in the Everglades.
This Monday marks the last night of William Holden's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of this movies that I think I haven't recommended before is The Earthling, at 4:30 AM Tuesday. Holden plays Patrick, an older man who is dying of cancer. He's made up his mind that he's going to go back to the place in the Australian outback where he grew up so that he can die there in peace. Along the way, he runs across a family who are on a vacation in a camper; parents and a youngish son. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes the family when the camper goes over a cliff with the parents inside, killing both of them and leaving the son Shawn (Ricky Schroeder) all alone. Patrick is left with a dilemma. He can either go off to die as he had planned, which would probably doom Shawn to death, or he can try to take Shawn back to civilization, which will play havoc with his plan to die in peace. So he comes up with a compromise, which is to try to teach Shawn how to survive in the wilderness while making his way to where he's planned to die. The two form a bond together, and apparently did in real life too, as Schroeder named one of his children Holden in William Holden's honor.
Tuesday is the first day in a new month, which means that we're going to be getting a new monthly Spotlight on TCM. This time, instead of Michael Curtiz movies, we get a bunch of different film series, starting on Tuesday nights and continuing through to the end of Thursday afternoon each week, which means there's time for quite a few series, and quite a few films in each series. This first Tuesday in May brings a bunch of Blondie movies, which started with the 1938 entry Blondie, at 8:00 PM Tuesday. Arthur Lake plays Dagwood Bumstead and Penny Singleton his wife Blondie, as Dagwood deals with domestic strife and trouble at work with his boss J.C. Dithers (Jonathan Hale). In this case, Dagwood has written a check that he can't cover unless he brings in a big contract for Dithers. But in trying to win that contract, he meets with the daughter of the intended client, leading Blondie and her side of the family to think that Dagwood is having an affair. The series continued for 28 films until 1950, but TCM is showing just six films from the beginning of the series.
For those of you who like more recent movies Thriller Max will be running The Eiger Sanction at 8:45 AM Thursday. Clint Eastwood (who also directed) stars as John Hemlock, an art professor who had a past of climbing mountains. Well, that's only part of his past; he also worked for a shady government agency run by the “Dragon” (Thayer David) as an assassin. He'd like to retire from that business, but there was just an agent killed in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Dragon knows that the killing has a personal connection for John. So he uses that and some more underhanded persuasion to get John to agree to find the two guys who killed the agent. The first one is easy; the second one, not so much. But it turns out the second guy is going to be part of an international expedition to climb the north face of the Eiger, which is where John comes back in as the only person who can find and kill the second guy. George Kennedy plays a mountaineering mentor to Eastwood's character.
May 3 is the birth anniversary of Robert Osborne, who was the long-time host of TCM before ill health forced him off the air and his eventual death in March 2017. TCM is marking the occasion with a night dedicated to Osborne in the form of Thursday's prime time lineup. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with the Private Screenings interview he did where he was the subject, interviewed by Alec Baldwin; that will also conclude the night at 4:30 AM Friday. In between there are some feature movies, but also a pair of Private Screenings Interviews where Robert was interviewing Hollywood legends. There's Liza Minnelli at 2:15 AM Friday, but better is the one with Ernest Borgnine at 3:15 AM. Borgnine talks about his interesting early life, as well as his marriages to Katy Jurado (there's an interesting match) and Ethel Merman (there's an even more interesting match).
I think Leave Her to Heaven came back to the FXM Retro schedule in April, but it's definitely on this week, at 11:45 AM Thursday and 7:45 AM Friday. Cornel Wilde plays author Richard Harland, who on a vacation out to New Mexico, runs into Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney). Ellen's half-sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain) and mother warn Richard that Ellen is high maintenance, but he falls in love with her. It's only after the two get married that he begins to learn how right they were. Ellen wants him only for herself. Never mind Richard's kid brother Danny (Darryl Hickman), recovering from polio. And god forbid Ellen should get pregnant. Worse, when Ruth starts to proofread Richard's new novel, the two begin to fall in love, which is really going to make Ellen angry. Angry enough to…. Well, you might be able to figure that one out since the story is told in flashback. Vincent Price, in another of his underrated pre-horror roles, plays Ellen's old boyfriend, a prosecuting attorney. The color cinematography is lovely, especially when they went to Bass Lake, CA to do the scenes of Richard's cabin in Maine.
TCM is running several Audrey Hepburn movies on Friday, starting with one of her early roles, in We Go to Monte Carlo (also known as Monte Carlo Baby) at 6:00 AM. Audrey plays Melissa, an actress who had a baby in her failed marriage to pianist Rudy (John Van Dreelen). They were going to leave the baby in day care, but thanks to a measles outbreak the day care gets closed and through a series of errors the baby winds up with the band of popular bandleader Ray Ventura (playing himself). Or at least, he was a popular bandleader on the other side of the Atlantic; I don't think I'd heard of him before this movie. The band has gone to Monte Carlo (hence the two titles), and the two parents follow looking for the child. The movie was a British/French co-production, with a French-language version (also starring Audrey who could speak French) being made at the same time. Colette, the author of Gigi, is claimed to have “discovered” Hepburn on the set of the French version and launched her career.
For escapism, try Star Trek: Generations, on StarzEncore Action at 12:05 PM Sunday. The original crew of the Enterprise – Kirk, Spock, and the others, show up for one last time after a series of feature films of their own to hand the reins over to Picard and his crew, the movie having been made just after Star Trek: The Next Generation wrapped up production in 1994. The plot revolves around an energy ribbon known as “The Nexus”. Decades earlier, Kirk and his crew led a rescue mission to the Nexus to save two ships that had gotten trapped, but Kirk saved the ships at the apparent loss of his own life. Now, it's the era of the Picard crew, and there's a Dr. Soran (Malcolm McDowell) who wants to harness the power of the Nexus. The only thing is that in trying, he's been killing a whole bunch of people. So it's up to Picard to find Picard in the Nexus, bring him back to our universe, and defeat Soran once and for all.
Finally, there's a Fox movie that I think is making its TCM premiere this week: Let's Make Love, at 8:00 PM Sunday on TCM. Yves Montand plays Jean-Marc Clement, one of France's richest men. He learns that an off-Broadway theater company in New York is going to produce a play satirizing his life, and he's not exactly happy about it. So he goes to New York to investigate the play, which is where he meets Amanda (Marilyn Monroe), an aspiring actress who is going to be the lead actress. Jean-Marc immediately falls in love with her, because who wouldn't fall in love with Marilyn Monroe, so he tries to pass himself off as a struggling actor so he can get a part in the play and get closer to Amanda. There is, of course, the question of how Amanda is going to react when she discovers her new boyfriend has been lying to her all this time. Tony Randall plays Jean-Marc's publicity agent, while Milton Berle has a cameo trying to teach Jean-Marc how to be funny. A lot of people call this one of Marilyn's worst movies, but it's not that bad.