Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of April 4-10, 2016. The Champions League resumes this week with quarterfinal matches, but that's only two afternoons, leaving a lot of time to watch some interesting movies. And this week there is certainly a whole selection of interesting films out there. Especially for people who think I recommend movies that are too recent and want me to recommend more silents. But there are other interesting things out there, including a film from the 80s and a couple of documentaries from the 90s. (Too recent for you?) As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's Silent Sunday Nights on TCM looks at a pair of films by director Oscar Micheaux. I've mentioned Micheaux a couple of times in the past; he was a pioneering black filmmaker making what were known as "race films" -- movies that had entirely black casts (well, except for where a character had to be white for the plot to make sense) and blacks working behind the cameras, working on a shoestring budget. The first film is Within Our Gates at midnight Monday (ie. 11:00 PM tonight LFT), which deals with a black woman who has founded a school in the south, but has to go north to try to secure funding for the school, only to confront racism at every turn, especially because of her past, a past that's only explained in the final reel.
A movie with a more straighforward plot is The Symbol of the Unconquered, at 1:30 AM Monday. This one deals with a black woman who travels north to claim her inheritance, and finds herself neighbors with another black guy who, it turns out, has valuable land. Unfortunately, the white people find out that her neighbor's land is valuable, and try to run him off, by force if necessary. Unfortunately, the movie is missing a few reels (at least most of it survives), and the climax where the man faces down the Klan is part of one of the missing reels.
There's going to be a silent in prime time this week, too. That's because the TCM spotlight is on the Barrymore family, with a different Barrymore being spotlighted each of the first three Monday nights in April. It's John's turn this Monday, which starts at 8:00 PM with the 1926 version of Don Juan. John Barrymore plays the famed lover who winds up in Renaissance Rome ostensibly to study, but in fact he's studying the women! The place is run by the Borgias, with Warner Oland playing Cesare and Estelle Taylor as Lucretia, and they've got a cousin Donati (Montagu Love) who, like Don Juan, is a womanizer. Don Juan is interested in young Adriana (Mary Astor at the beginning of her career), but Donati wants her too, so he and Don Juan wind up in a duel, which of course Don Juan wins, although this understandably ticks off the Borgias, who put both him and Adriana in prison with the intent of executing them. Don Juan breaks out with Adriana in the climax.... This movie, though a silent, had the first synchronized music score (along with some sound effects).
One of the more underrated silent comedies of all time is Buster Keaton's Seven Chances, which is airing at 8:15 AM Saturday on TCM. Buster plays a man whose business is failing, but there's a chance to save it -- he stands to inherit millions from a deceased grandfather if he gets married by 7PM of his 27th birthday. There's just one problem: today is his 27th birthday! Poor Buster botches the proposal to his sweetheart (Ruth Dwyer) and then botches proposals to a bunch of women at the country club, so his business partner hits on the bright idea of taking out an ad in the paper to get a bride to marry him for the money. While Buster naps in the front pew of the church, the other pews slowly fill up with potential brides -- hundreds of them. And Buster realizes if he just apologizes to his girl she'll take him. But Buster has to escape all these jilted would-be brides first.... The climax, which involves Buster running around town with those hundreds of brides chasing after him, is a comedy classic and hilarious even 90 years after it was made.
And now on to the talkies. Tuesday is the 100th anniversary of the birth of actor Gregory Peck. So TCM will be spending 24 hours with Peck's movies. Well, not quite 24, since they're showing a worthwhile documentary called A Conversation with Gregory Peck at 12:15 AM Wednesday. I know one of our posters likes The Guns of Navarone; that will be on at 2:00 AM Wednesday following the documentary. But the movie I'd like to mention this week is one that hasn't been on in quite some time: Man With a Million. Peck plays an American sailor who gets stranded in London at the turn of the last century without any money. But he's in luck. There are two wealthy brothers who decide to have a bet about human nature, and they decide to employ Peck as part of that wager. To that end, they give him a banknote... for £1,000,000 and tell him he can't change it for smaller bills. The bet the brothers have is over how people will treat him. Obviously people know he's good for the money, but nobody can ever make change for him. Still everybody treats him well. Until the banknote goes missing.
Since we've started a new month, we've got some movies showing up on FXM that haven't been on in some time. One of them is Destination Gobi, which you can catch multiple times, including Friday at 9:15 AM and Saturday at 6:00 AM. This is apparently based loosely on a true story from World War II. The Navy, in order to plan its attacks on the Home Islands of Japan, needed accurate weather forecasts, so since weather goes from west to east, they sent a Navy weather outfit west -- to the middle of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia! Richard Widmark runs the base such as it is, and makes friends with the local nomadic Mongols (led by Murvyn Vye). However, Japanese aircraft eventually attack the place, and the Mongols skedaddle, returning to their nomadic ways. This leaves Widmark with a dilemma of how to get his men to safety. The only way seems to be a march east to the coast, through several hundred miles of desert and Japanese-controlled territory.
A Fox movie I don't think I've recommended before is Battle at Bloody Beach, which you can see at 6:00 AM Friday and 4:30 AM Saturday. Audie Murphy stars as a man who was living with his wife (Dolores Michaels) in the Philippines (a US colony at the time) when Japan invaded after Pearl Harbor. Audie was able to make it out of the coiuntry but his wife wasn't, and now he's spending his time running arms to the Filipino guerillas fighting the Japanese. However, he really wants to go on shore and search for his wife, since he's convinced she's still alive. He does find her, but there's a problem in that she figured he had died, and believing herself to be a widow, started a relationship with the guerilla leader (Alejandro Rey) that's more than just a working relationship trying to get the Japanese off their island! There's an awkward love triangle. Murphy tries to get his wife and the other Americans off the island, but there are those darn Japanese trying to prevent it.
James Cagney was one of Warner Bros. major stars, but some of his prestige movies don't show up on TCM as often as others. An example of this is Each Dawn I Die, airing at 4:30 PM Wednesday on TCM. This one has Cagney playing an intrepid reporter who uncovers corruption from the leading candidate for governor. Since the governor-to-be is corrupt, how does he respond? He has his henchmen frame Cagney for a DWI vehicular manslaughter and get our hero sent to prison for 20 years! In prison, Cagney meets fellow prisoner George Raft, who hatches an escape plot for himself that will require Cagney's help; in exchange, Raft will try to find who framed him on the outside. But Cagney is still trying to get help from his old reporter colleagues, and the escape plan doesn't quite go to plan, which means Cagney could wind up in prison longer. Meanwhile, this is a particularly brutal prison. Sure, the movie has elements of a lot of other stuff we've seen from earlier in the decade, but it's still a pretty darn good movie.
On Thursday night, TCM will be showing movies directed by Blake Edwards. One of the less-often seen of his movies is S.O.B., which will be on at 12:15 AM Friday. (The title doesn't refer to what you're probably thinking it does.) Richard Mulligan plays Felix, a popular Hollywood director who has made a string of hits, several with his wife Sally (Julie Andrews, the real-life wife of director Blake Edwards). Unfortunately, the latest movie he directed is a flop, savaged by the critics. This results in Felix suffering a nervous breakdown and becoming suicidal, while Sally separates from him. But then Felix gets a brilliant idea: buy the rights to the movie from the studio, and redo some some scenes to change it from a family comedy to a grown-up sex romp. However, this idea is going to require getting his wife to reconcile with him... and bare her breasts on film. Sure, that's going to work out well. This is a dark comedy that's a scathing look at the Hollywood of the day.
Friday night brings the second night of Judy Garland's films to TCM in her turn as Star of the Month. Probably the film she's most famous for is The Wizard of Oz, which will be on this Friday at 8:00 PM. You know the story of how a Kansas girl and her dog get transported by tornado to the magical land of Oz, where she and her new friends try to make their way to the Emerald City to have their wishes granted. That will be followed at 10:00 PM by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 50 Years of Magic, a documentary from 1990 looking at the making of the movie, which was in many ways a troubled production. Buddy Ebsen, for example, was originally supposed to be the Tin Man, but he had a bad reaction to the aluminum-based silver make up and wound up nearly dying in the hospital. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, in real life had been a schoolteacher before becoming an actor and loved children, and was dismayed that kiddies were frightened by her portrayal in The Wizard of Oz.
Our final selection this week is Bend of the River, which is over on the Encore Westerns Channel at 11:40 AM Sunday (as well as a couple other times). James Stewart stars as Glyn, a former raider in Kansas who, in order to escape his past, has decided to guide a group of settlers west to Oregon. Along the way, Glyn saves Emerson (Arthur Kennedy) from a lynching, and Emerson joins Glyn and the settlers. They all get to Oregon, and Glyn and Jeremy (Jay C. Flippen), the man who is basically the head of the settlers, go to Portland to get the supplies the settlers are going to need for the winter. In the meantime, however, gold is discovered in the vicinity, and there's a gold rush. Emerson realizes he can make a killing by diverting the supplies to the prospectors, although this is obviously bad news for the settlers. Another of Stewart's good dark post-WWII performances, and the movie is greatly helped by its Technicolor cinematography and location shooting.