Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of April 8-14, 2013. TCM is continuing with their salute to Laurence Olivier on Wednesday night, as well as Cher sitting down with Robert Osborne to present some more defining images of women on film on Friday night. But there are some other good movies the rest of the week as well. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll kick things off with this week's Silent Sunday Nights selection: Blackmail, which is airing tonight at midnight on TCM. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the movie tells the story of a young woman (Anny Ondra) in love with a London policeman (John Longden) but who one night after an argument with him goes up to an artisit's studio. He goes a lot further than she wants, and when she tries to defend herself, she accidentally stabs and kills the artist. It's self-defense, but will the police believe it? She thinks she makes an escape; however, somebody sees it and decides to blackmail our heroine.... The movie was originally conceived as a silent, but when the technology to make talking pictures reached the UK, much of it was reshot to make a talkie. Many of Britian's theaters, however, were still not equipped for sound, so two versions of the movie were released, with the sound version being several minutes longer. Presumably TCM is showing the silent version tonight.
MGM was a much glitzer studio than something like Warner Bros. While WB gave us things like the Dead End Kids in They Made Me a Criminal, MGM was making movies that play more like a morality tale, as in The Penalty, airing at 1:30 PM Monday on TCM. Edward Arnold stars as a bank robber using stooges for his job. He loves his son (Gene Reynolds) but is also teaching the son to grow up to be a criminal, so when Arnold is finally caught, Reynolds is sent to a farm in the country for rehabilitation. There, he meets the owner (Lionel Barrymore) and hsi daughter (Marsha Hunt), the local schoolteacher who is in love with cop Robert Sterling. Reynolds of course, is vowing to help his father escape from prison, but when he meets the salth-of-the-earth farmers and starts doing work on the farm, will it change his way of life? If it weren't for the heavy hand of MGM's moralizing, this would be an even better movie than it is; as is, it's not even bad; just predictable.
If you like ballet, you might like the next movie: Dr. Coppelius, at 8:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. Based on the ballet Coppélia by Léo Delibes, the story if of a town where all the locals have a heppy peaceful existence except for the preence of the mysterious Dr. Coppelius (played by Walter Slezak). Everybody wonders what he's doing in his big house, and he tries to prevent them from entering. Eventually a woman enters the house and finds that Coppelius has been producing lifelike dolls, one of which has been wooing a the woman's boyfriend. Two versions of the movie were made, the first in the late 1960s being a more or less straight-up ballet, and the second several years later adding narration as well as a couple of animated dream sequences. TCM's schedule is listing the 1960s version, but the last time the movie showed it was the 1970s version.
Robert Ryan shows up for a morning and afternoon of his movies on Wednesday, even though his birthday is in November. One of the movies I don't think I've recommended before is The Woman on the Beach, at 8:45 AM Wednesday on TCM. Ryan stars as a man who, having suffered some sort of psychological damage in World War II, has been stationed at a low-traffic Coast Guard station where life should in theory be less stressful for him. While patrolling the beach one day, he meets Joan Bennett, who invites him back to the cottage where she lives wiht her husband, artist Charles Bickford, who has gone blind, a victim of domestic violence. Ryan finds himself falling for Bennett, which is a problem in part because he's engaged and in part because it's sure to make Bickford jealous. And then Ryan begins to wonder whether Bickford has in fact gone blind at all....
Laurence Olivier returns on Wednesday evening for his second week as TCM's Star of the Month. This week sees films from later in Olivier's career, starting at 8:00 PM with Sleuth. Laurence Olivier plays Andrew Wyke, a successful mystery writer with an estranged wife (Eve Channing). Into his life comes the hairdresser Milo (Michael Caine), who would like to marry the wife, something Andrew wouldn't mind if it didn't mean a divorce and having to pay alimony. So Andrew gets the idea of having Milo rob him: Milo can sell off the robbed jewels, while Andrew can claim on his insurance, leaving both of them ahead of the game. Or, perhaps each of them has some ulterior motive trying to get the other to run afoul of the law. Things get complicated as we try to figure out who's trying to screw over whom.....
Another TCM non-birthday spotlight this week is on director Jean Negulesco, who was born in February but gets a morning and afternoon of hsi movies on Thursday. The movies include a hot young Angie Dickinson in Jessica, which is coming on at 9:00 AM Thursday. Angie play the title role, a foreigner in a small Sicilian town as the new midwife. The problem is that she's hot enough and, as a foreigner, exotic enough that the women fear their husbands are going to become sexually attracted to her instead of them. So they come up with the bizarre idea of a sex strike from their husbands: if they don't get pregnant, the midwife won't have any work, and will have to leave town. (The women in Lysistrata had a better reason for their sex strike.) Also in the cast is Maurice Chevalier, playing the town priest but seeming more like the creepy old man. (Imagine his singing "Thank Heaven For Little Girls" as he did in Gigi.)
I'm sure you know the jury movie 12 Angry Men. What happens if you get rid of five of them? Why, naturally, you're left with Seven Angry Men, which is airing at 3:30 AM Friday. Or, maybe not, since the the movies only have similar titles and are otherwise completely unrelated. Seven Angry Men is part biopic and part western, focusing on John Brown (played by Raymond Massey), the abolitionist who started out in Bleeding Kansas, where both pro-slavery and anti-slaver settlers went in the mid-1850s trying to get a majority of the settlers in the state to be on their side of the slavery issue. Eventually, Brown and his sons would lead a raid on Harper's Ferry (now in West Virginia but then still in Virginia), which led to John Brown's exectuion. A subplot in the movie involves a romantic relationship between the gorgeous Debora Paget, who is unfortunately not in color here, and one of Brown's sons, played by Jeffrey Hunter. (Watch for Dennis Weaver as another of the sons.)
On Friday evening, Cher will be sitting down again to present more movies that have defining images of women in film. This week sees women and the challenges they faced during war, especially World War II. The night shows women in a variety of different roles. First, at 8:00 PM, there's So Proudly We Hail, which looks at the women who served as nurses for the military, who were just as likely as the men to get trapped behind enemy lines.
Then, at 10:15, we go to the US homefront with Since You Went Away, in which Claudette Colbert tries to take care of her two daughters while learning her husban is missing in action;
Third, at 1:15 AM Saturday, we see Irene Dunne as an American facing World War II in the UK in The White Cliffs of Dover.
Finally, at 3:30 AM, Claudette Colbert returns as an American who with her husband (Patric Knowles) and child are held in a Japanese internment camp in Malaya in Three Came Home.
Saturday night's TCM spotlight is on Linda Darnell. She was a Fox contract player, so it's nice to see TCM getting the rights to show more movies from Fox. Anyhow, the night kicks off with the TCM Essential, which is Anna and the King of Siam, in which Darnell is only a supporting player. Instead, I'd like to recommend Unfaithfully Yours, at 10:15 PM. Darnell plays a woman married to a conductor (Rex Harrison) who travels the world and wants his brother-in-law (Rudy Vallee) to make certain she's OK while he's on tour. Unfortunately, Vallee misinterprets this, hiring a private investigator who follows Darnell around and catches her in what looks like a compromising situation with one of Harrison's assistants. Much like Franka Potente as Lola would try different possibilities for getting out of a sticky situations, Harrison thinks up several ideas in his mind of how he might handle his wife's infidelity, only to find that when he tries to carry out these ideas in real life, they don't quite work. This is one of the last great movies from writer/director Preston Sturges
The Fox Movie Channel seems to take a few movies out of its vault each month, run them for several months, and then put the films back in the vault, not be seen for years. Another film which is coming out of the vault is Dangerous Crossing, which you can catch at 10:00 AM Sunday. Fox contract player Jeanne Crain stars as a woman who's just gotten married to Carl Betz. They board a transatlantic liner to spend their honeymoon in Europe, and after getting settled in their stateroom, hubby says he has some business to attend to and she should meet him at the bar in 15 minutes. She goes to the bar... but the husband never shows up! Where is he? Worse, nobody on the boat has any recollection of ever having seen her husband, or that he even exists! Is somebody trying to drive poor Jeanne mad? And then strange clues suggest that somebody might know where the husband is.... Michael Rennie co-stars as the ships doctor and provides about as much help to Crain as anybody.
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