Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of August 11-17, 2014. Now that the Packers have played a preseason game and you're all loing for things to get uptight over, why not stop doing that for a bit and watch some good movies instead? It's still "Summer Under the Stars" on TCM, so we've got seven more stars this week. There are some interesting movies on other channels, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday's star on TCM is one of my least favorite, Marlon Brando. So I'll point out a movie in which he's the star, but in which the supporting characters walk away with the story: Sayonara, at 12:30 PM Monday. Brando plays an Maj. Gruver, an Air Force officer during the Korean War who has a girlfriend more or less in a general's daughter (Patricia Owens) when he gets transferred to Japan. Maj. Gruver agrees with the policy that military men getting involved with the local girls is a bad idea, until he meets one himself (Miko Taka). Complicating matters is that one of his subordinates (Red Buttons) has taken a Japanese wife (Miyoshi Umeki). Both of them are excellent in their roles and it's unfortunate that theirs isn't the main story and that we stuck with a lot of Brando instead. Oh, and then there's the casting of the kabuki actor character, which is given to Mexico's own Ricardo Montalban.
Tuesday on TCM sees a star from the 1940s and 1950s who's been largely forgotten today: Alexis Smith. She appeared in a wide range of movies, such as the western Montana, at 6:30 PM. Alexis plays Maria, a catle rancher in Montana who's about to get married to Rodney (Douglas Kennedy), because merging their two cattle ranches would be a good thing. And then Morgan Lane (Errol Flynn) shows up. He's an Australian man (one of the only times Aussie-born Flynn played an Australian in a Hollywood movie) looking to homestead himself some government land for him and his sheep. Oh dear, he wants to raise sheep. The cattle ranchers aren't going to like that, because sheep can survive on worse land than cattle, and the cattle raisers fear what bringing in sheep is going to do to their livelihoods. Of course, with Errol Flynn in the cast, you know Smith isn't going to be with Kennedy in the last reel!
An actress who started in the 1950s is Joan Collins, whom you'll probably remember best from TV's Dynasty in the 1980s. But showed up in all sorts of period pieces in the 1950s, such as Esther and the King, which is on FXM Retro at 8:00 AM Wednesday. Collins plays Esther, who is the main character of the Old Testament book of Esther which tells the story of what is the Jewish observance of Purim. Richard Egan plays the Persian king Ahaseurus, who wants a new bride since he finds that the old one has been unfaithful to him. So he picks Esther despite the fact that she's already engaged to another man. However, her uncle (Dennis O'Dea), who is one of the king's advisors, realizes that there's a lot of intrigue going on in the Persian palace, and if Esther spurns the king's advances. So Esther eventually has to decide whether doing the thing that will keep lots of people from being harmed is better than having the man she loves.
Cary Grant is your star for Wednesday on TCM, but I'll mention a movie in which it's somebody else who's really the star: Hot Saturday, at 8:00 PM Wednesday. The star here is Nancy Carroll, playing a small-town bank clerk. Cary Grant plays the town playboy, a notorious man who just paid off another woman for the staggering by 1932 standards of $10,000. One Saturday night, when the town's twentysomethings go out and do their courting, Grant invites Carroll and her friends -- including her boyfriend -- over to his house for a party. Things go wrong, however, and Carroll's boyfriend decides to try to get some revenge on Grant and Carroll by spreading rumors about them. Gossip spreads fast in a small town. Meanwhile, Caroll's mom (Jane Darwell) decides that neither of these men is right for her daughter, and ought to go off with geologist Randolph Scott instead.
Thursday is devoted to Charlie Chaplin. The day starts off with one of the first feature-length comedies ever made: Tillie's Punctured Romance, at 6:00 AM. This is a movie more for its cast than for its plot: in addition to Chaplin, there's a relatively young Marie Dressler, 15 years before she became a movie star with the advent of talkies, and Fatty Arbuckle's girldfriend Mabel Normand. The plot, such as it is, has Chaplin trying to hoodwink Tillie (Dressler) out of her money by marrying her for it. First up is an attempt to get her father's money, after which Chaplin plans to dump her for Mabel (actress Mabel plays a character named Mabel); later, he tries to get the money of Tillie's late uncle. The only problem is, Tillie's uncle isn't quite dead, so he sics the Keystone Kops on everybody who's trying to get his money.
On Friday, you could watch 24 hours of Faye Dunaway. One of her lesser-known movies is Oklahoma Crude, at 1:30 PM. Dunaway plays Lena, a woman in Oklahoma during one of the oil booms. Everybody knows there's oil on Lena's land, and dammit, everybody's going to get it, if they have to swindle Lena out of it. Hellman, the oil company man trying to get the land is played by Jack Palance. Lena, for her part, doesn't want to give in to the big oil company, but she can't drill an oil well herself, so she has to bring in her estranged father Cleon (John Mills) for help. Cleon, for his part, brings in a drifter named Mason (George C. Scott) to help work the well. Lena doesn't like Mason very much either, and he's only here to make money for himself, not so much for the principle of the thing. But the three of them find that they all have to work together to get what they want.
Meanwhile, over on FXM on Friday, you can catch Nine Hours to Rama, at 7:45 AM. The scene is India in January 1948. The country has just won its independece thanks to Mohandas Gandhi's campaign of nonviolence. However, one of the costs is that the large Muslim minority got its own country too, leading to the partition of the country. This angered many Hindu nationalists, who felt that Gandhi was giving up too much to the Muslims, so they plotted to kill him. Horst Buchholz plays Naturam Godse, the man given the job of actually killing Gandhi, while Jose Ferrer plays the police superintendent whose job it is to ferret out the plot and keep Gandhi from being assassinated. Complicating matters is Gandhi's seeming indifference to whether he gets killed -- the guy was already in his late 70s and had achieved his life's main objective after all.
Also up against the Faye Dunaway movies is My Cousin Vinny, which is on Encore twice: at 2:10 PM and 11:30 PM Friday on the east coast feed, repeated three hours later for the people who have the west coast feed. Karate Kid Ralph Macchio plays a college student who, while traveling through Alabama with a friend, gets caught by the police when their vintage car is identified as the getaway car in a robbery. Facing serious jail time, the two call the only lawyer either of them know, which is Macchio's cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci). Except, he's never handled a criminal case, and he's technically not admitted to the bar. And he's got a girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) desperately waiting for him to win a case so she can marry him. You know that Vinny is going to win the case, of course, but the fun is seeing how he gets there, with a huge dollop of humor along the way. Fred Gwynne is quite good as the judge, who is baffled by Pesci's use of the word "utes", among other things.
Herbert Marshall shows up on Saturday, and one of the interesting things about him is that he was in both film versions of Somerset Maugham's story The Letter. So, TCM is showing both movies: the 1940 version is on at midnight Sunday (ie. 11:00 PM Saturday LFT), followed by the 1929 version at 1:45 AM Sunday. The story involves Leslie Crosbiie (Jeanne Eagles in 1929 and Bette Davis in 1940) falling in love with a man while bored beihng a wife to her rubber plantaion managing husband, a Briton in Malaya. So she takes up a lover but things go wrong and she eventually shoots the lover dead, only to have to get back a letter she wrote the lover that contains incriminating evidence. In the Bette Davis version, we see her shooting the lover at the beginning of the movie was she's retreating from her bungalow. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! It's one of the more memorable film openings. So Herbert Marshall plays the husband. But in 1929, Marshall was a lot younger, and that version shows some of the relationship between Leslie the lover before he gets bumped off, so Marshall plays the doomed lover in that one. The Davis version has the better production values -- the 1929 version's surviving print is rough at times -- but I really like Eagels' performance.
John Hodiak is the star for Sunday, and perhaps the most interesting thing about his day of movies is the film that's this week's Essentials, Jr. selection on TCM: Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, at 8:00 PM. Now, I happen to think it's an excellent movie, but its themes of mob justice, as well as scenes of a man having his leg amputated and a woman committing suicide by throwing herself overboard might be a bit problematic for children. So iinstead, I'll look at a couple of the shorts coming up on TCM this week.
For those of you who like the sarcastic narration of Pete Smith, there's a Pete Smith short on how to shoot pool called Take a Cue, overnight tonight a little after 1:00 AM, or just after Nothing Sacred (11:45 PM, 75 min). This one looks at pool back in the late 1930s, although the laws of physics regarding pool haven't changed all that much since then.
The Traveltalks shorts are always interesting, with one showing up this week being Modern New Orleans, at 7:50 PM Monday, or after Guys and Dolls (5:15 PM, 149 min). "Modern" here meaning New Orleans as it was in 1940.
For those who want a different travelogue, Warner Bros.' narrator of choice Knox Manning (no fivehead here) takes us to a couple of animal parks in the Miami area in The Birds and the Beasts Were There, at about 6:00 PM Sunday.
And Blair Kiel hires a big band to play on his yacht for a Yacht Party, a little after Hot Satruday on Wednesday night a bit after 9:15 PM.
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