Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of Augsut 12-18, 2013. So the Packers have played one preseason game and there's already a lot to bitch about. Why not stop worrying for a few hours by watching some good movies instead? We've got seven more stars in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, as well as some interesting movies showing up elsewhere. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday's star on TCM is Catherine Deneuve. I'm not certain if TCM has ever aired her movie Repulsion before; but it's going to be on at 7:45 AM Monday. Deneuve plays Carole, a young Belgian woman working as a manicurist in London and living with her sister Helene (Yvonne Furneaux). Helene is carrying on a relationship with a married man, which bothers Carole since she has problems with men that have made her slightly neurotic. Or, perhaps, more than just neurotic. Helene and her boyfriend go away for the weekend, and Carole starts to hear things that suggest somebody might be trying to get into the apartment. Except that those things may not be real, and Carole is just hallucinating them, which is a problem since the visions become more and more disturbing. A lot of people, especially those who are fans of the movie's director, Roman Polanksi, say this is an outstanding movie. It left me a little cold, but I'm sure you all think I'm a bit strange and will probably enjoy Repulsion tremendously.
Tuesday bring 24 hours of movies with Mickey Rooney in the cast. I should probably briefly mention Summer Holiday, which is airing at 3:15 PM. 27-year-old Rooney plays graduating high school senior Richard Miller, who graduates from his small-town New England high school circa 1905 and spends a summer learning about love, in part loving girl next door Gloria de Haven. Meanwhile, dipsomaniac Uncle Sid (Frank Morgan) and the spinster Lily from the other side of the family (Agnes Moorehead), find out that they're right for each other. This is a musical version of Eugene O'Neill's play Ah, Wilderness!. The play had already been made into a movie back in 1935, with Mickey Rooney in that one as well, although in that earlier version he played the kid brother. In fact, the 1935 version of Ah, Wilderness shows up on TCM at 4:15 PM Saturday, since Wallace Beery (who played Uncle Sid in that version) is the honoree for Saturday. But more about that later.
If you want something different from Mickey Rooney instead of that wholesome MGM stuff, you'll have to wait for the overnight hours, and watch Pulp, which is airing at 2:00 AM Wednesday. In this one, Rooney plays Preston Gilbert, a sort of parody of himself: a retired actor living a secluded life on the Mediterranean island of Malta with companion Lizabeth Scott, alost living in the past like Norma Desmond. Gilbert knows he's getting old, and has decided that he wants to write his memoirs of the old days of Hollywood. So he hires a ghost-writer, Mickey King (played by Michael Caine). King's writing specialty, however, happens to be trashy pulp-fiction detective novels, which is bound to cause complications. Further complications are caused by political events on Malta, and the fact that Gilbert thinks he's got a hit man trying to get him.
Wednesday means a day chock full of movies from Bette Davis. The day starts off with a bang, ith one of those zippy Depression-era pre-Codes from Davis early days at Warner Bros.: Parachute Jumper, at 6:00 AM. Davis isn't the real star; that honor goes to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. He plays a Marine pilot who gets booted out of the srevice and winds up in New York City looking for a job like millions of others. One of those others is Davis, playing a transplant from Alabama(!); she, Fairbanks, and Fairbanks' fellow ex-Marine Frank McHugh all move into an apartment togethre. Fairbanks eventually gets a job, only to discover that the woman he's chauffeuring is a gangster's moll, and when the gangster learns that Fairbanks used to be a Marine pilot, Fairbanks and his friends get drawn into a scheme to smuggle booze and drugs across the border with Canada.
On Thursday, we get to watch a full day of movies starring Gregory Peck. This includes The Macomber Affair at 8:00 PM. This is based upon the Ernest Hemingway short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", but it's not Peck playing Macomber. Francis Macomber is played by Robert Preston, and is a wealthy man on safari in Africa with his wife, played by Joan Bennett. Unfortunately, their marriage is no longer a happy one, and in fact are on this safari to try to patch things up. Peck plays their guide, unhappy at first that there's a woman on the safari at all. Things get worse as he finds himself taking an interest in Mrs. Macomber even though she's a jerk to Mr. Macomber. And then Mr. Macomber gets shot: was this an accident, or did Mrs. Macomber do it deliberately? There was some wildlife filming done in Africa, but like most movies of the time, the main stuff was all done on studio lots.
If you're not that into Gregory Peck, but are into Joan Bennett, you could switch over to the Fox Movie Channel and watch her there in Nob Hill, at 7:20 AM Thursday. Bennett plays a nice society woman who lives on San Francisco's Nob Hill, which was the nice part of town at the time the movie was set, which is the turn of the 20th century. George Raft plays a nightclub owner on the Barbary Coast, one of the lower-class districts of the city. The two in part because her brother runs for office and Raft has a lot of influence in the Barbary Coast. The other factor in bringing them together is young Peggy Ann Garner. She plays a girl emigrating from Ireland to live with her uncle, who is Raft's bartender. But he died while she was on the boat, and since she made friends with Bennett on the boat over, why not ask her for help? Meanwhile, Raft's main attraction, Vivian Blaine, isn't too happy about her boss' attempts to make it in high society.
Friday is Ann Blyth's turn in Summer Under the Stars. You'll probably best remember her getting smacked by Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, which airs at 8:00 PM. As much fun as that movie is, I've recommended it multiple times and would like to mention something else this week: Slander, which you can see at 6:30 PM Friday. Blyth plays Connie Martin, mother of young Joey and husband to Scott (Van Johnson). Scott is a puppeteer, and has become successful on an afternoon TV kids' show. However, he's got a secret in his past: he spent time in prison for armed robbery. Steve Cochran plays Manley, the publisher of a gossip magazine, and knows that Scott grew up with somebody who's now a bigger star, and wants to use Scott to get the dirt on this star. Scott doesn't want to tell, but when Manley finds out about Scott's criminal record, he threatens to release that if Scott doesn't give up the dirt on the bigger star. Marjorie Rambeau plays Manley's mother. Slander is the sort of second-tier movie in black-and-white that MGM was making to help fund those extravagant musicals of the 1950s, and is actually better than many of those tedious musicals.
I mentioned earlier that Wallace Beery is getting honored on Saturday on TCM. There are a couple of obscure movies that I haven't heard of, mixed in with a bunch of classics that I've recommended several times in the past. The classics start off at 7:30 AM with the original prison movie The Big House, which made Robert Montgomery a star as the playboy who commits vehicular manslaughter and can't handle prison life.
Beery won an Oscar for The Champ, playing the broken-down, alcoholic boxer hoping or one more payday so that he can keep custody of his son (Jackie Cooper); that's airing at 12:30 PM
8:00 PM sees this week's TCM Essential, Grand Hotel, an all-star movie that has Beery playing a business tycoon pursuing secretary Joan Crawford;
10:00 PM sees another all-star movie, the even better Dinner at Eight, this time with Beery trying to bilk Lionel Barrymore in a business deal while also dealing with straying wife Jean Harlow;
And at midnight Sunday (11:00 PM Saturday LFT) is Min and Bill, in which Beery plays a fisherman in love with rooming-house owner Marie Dressler; she won an Oscar for playing the woman who is also taking care of a teenage foster daughter whose biological mother returns to try to take custody of the girl.
Sunday on TCM brings a day of Natalie Wood movies, most of which aren't my favorites, so perhaps I'll mention stuff that's airing on some of the premium cable channels. HBO Family, of all things, is airing Airplane! and Airplane II back-to back overnight between Saturday and Sunday. You probably know the plot of the first one; the second one involves a commercial space shuttle to the moon that goes wrong. The two movies show u[ at 11:30 PM Saturday and 1:00 AM Sunday on the East coast feed, while the West coast feed gets them at 2:30 AM and 4:00 AM Sunday.
If you want another all-star movie like the ones with Wallace Beery in them, and you want to combine it with the disaster of Airplane!, you might try Earthquake, which airs at 5:40 AM Sunday on the East Coast feed of Cinemax, with another airing at 8:40 AM on the West coast feed. You should be able to guess the main theme of the movie from the title: a mega-earthquake strikes the Los Angeles area, and it affects a galaxy of stars. Chief among them are civil engineer Charlton Heston, who is married to Ava Gardner, daughter of Heston's boss Lorne Greene. Heston also has a mistress in the form of GenviÈve Bujold. George Kennedy plays a cop who gets in an incident over Zsa Zsa Gabor's hedges. Walter Matthau plays a drunk, and old Fox standby from the 1940s and on Lloyd Nolan plays a doctor.
As for the shorts, unfortunately most of what TCM has put on the schedule under "shorts" are those longer promotional pieces for films that are sort of behind-the-scenes looks. One that isn't, and which sounds interesting, is Movies on Sundays, which is airing at 8:50 AM Wednesday. IMDb doesn't have an entry for this, because this isn't really a short, but more an advertisement. Apparently, the blue laws of the 1930s extended in some states to keeping movie theaters closed on Sundays. The studios, of course, wouldn't have liked that as it would have meant losing a good chance to make money. So, the studios told moviegoers to try to convince their legislators to allow the theaters to open on Sundays. I haven't seen this one, but another fun short in this genre is The Case Against the 20% Federal Admissions Tax on Motion Picture Theaters, which you can see on Youtube.
Original Post
Excellent job!