Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, week of August 18-24, 2014

Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, or the week of August 18-24, 2014.  We're geting to the dog days of August, but still a couple of weeks away from meaningful football.  In the meantime, TCM has seven more stars for Summer Under the Stars, while some of the other channels have good movies as well.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

Monday in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is devoted to Claudette Colbert, and I'll start off like TCM with one of her later movies: Parrish, at 6:00 AM.  Parris is played by Troy Donahue, with Claudette Colbert playing his mother.  She's just taken a job as a sort of governess to the doughter of a tobacco farmer in the Connecticut River valley, and Parrish follows along, deciding that he likes the work and wants to make it his career.  Of course, there are a lot of problems, such as the fact that their employer (Dean Jagger) is a small farmer, and there's a much bigger farmer in the area (Karl Malden) who's trying to buy out all the small farmers.  And then there are the romantic liaisons that Parrish gets involved in as a young man, which includes relationships with both Jagger's and Malden's daughters!  This is one of those sprawling color soap-opera type movies that were fairly popular from the mid-1950s throught mid-1960s, although most of them aren't quite so good looking back on them.

Up against Parrish over on FXM Retro is I Wake Up Screaming, at 7:40 AM Monday.  But don't worry if you're more interested in Parrish; I Wake Up Screaming will be on again at 8:00 AM Thursday.  Carole Landis plays Vicky, a waitress in a New York diner who gets discovered by Frankie, a publicist played by Victor Mature, who proceeds to make her the star of the city's gossip pages, much in the same way that Cliftom Webb does for Gene Tierney in Laura.  Fame proves to be too much Vicky, however, and she winds up murdered.  Star detective Laird Cregar is put on the case, and he immediately begins to hone in his suspicion on Frankie, to the point that he's making Frankie's life a living hell.  Vicky's sister Jill (Betty Grable), however, just wants justice to be done, although that's complicated by the fact that she seems to be falling in love with Frankie, and the feeling is mutual.

On Tuesday on TCM, you can watch 24 hours of Paul Newman movies, which is soemthing I'm sure the ladies will like.  One of his lesser-known films that's airing on Tuesday is Until They Sail, at 7:45 AM.  The theme of this one is World War II, specifically New Zealand during that war, and how the New Zealanders dealt with the Amreican servicemen who were stationed there during the war.  All of this is against the backdrop of one family of four sisters.  Anne (Joan Fontaine) is the oldest, a spinster who had to take care of her younger siblings after her parents died; she falls for a navy captain played by Charles Drake.  Second-oldest Barbara (Jean Simmons) is a widow who gets to have the relationship with Newman; Delia (Piper Laurie) married quickly and doesn't love her husband, who's a POW.  So she goes out with a string of US servicemen.  And then there's Evelyn (Sandra Dee), the youngest, who's about 15 here; she's beginning to grow up and fall for men.

Then on Wednesday we get character actress Thelma Ritter, who made a whole bunch of entertaining movies.  In The Second Time Around, she's second banana to Debbie Reynolds.  Reynolds plays Lucretia, a young woman who's just become widowed circa 1910.  Her husband had a good friend out in the Arizona Territory who owns a general store, so she should go out there and get a job from him since he'll certainly help her.  Except that he dies just as she gets there, so now with no prospects she winds up working on the ranch run by Aggie (Thelma Ritter).  Lucretia finds ranch life difficult, but things are about to change for the even more bizarre when she starts complaining about the lack of law and order and winds up becoming sheriff!  Meanwhile, she also has to deal with two men vying for her affections: gambler Steve Forrest, and rancher Andy Griffith.

A Ritter movie that I've recommended a couple of times before but I'll recommend again because it's so darn good is The Mating Season, at 8:00 PM.  John Lund plays Val, an engineer from humble beginnings: his mother Ellen (Ritter) and late father ran a hamburger stand.  Val meets Maggie (Gene Tierney), daughter of a diplomat, and it's love at first sight and a quick marriage.  Ellen comes out part for the marriage and part because the hamburger stand has gone belly up, but due to a comedy of errors, she gets mistaken for a maid by Maggie, who's never seen her before, and Ellen doesn't have time to tell her the truth.  So Maggie hires Ellen as a full time maid.  It's bad enough having a mother-in-law living with you, but the young couple winds up with both mothers-in-law when Maggie's mother (Miriam Hopkins) moves in too.  Meanwhile, the son of Val's boss is waiting for the marriage to fail....  Thelma Ritter deftly handles comedy as she delivers a slew of one-liners, such as when she teaches Val's boss about check-kiting.

On Thursday, it's going to be a full day of Lee Tracy on TCM.  You might recall him best as John Barrymore's agent in Dinner at Eight (11:30 PM Thursday), but I'll mention him in the lesser-known The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, at 2:30 PM.  Molly Louvain, played by Ann Dvorak, is a small-town shop-girl loved by all the men, includin gat the beginning one of the town's richest young men, who actually wats to marry her.  But his mommy says no and takes them suddenly to Europe, leaving Molly alone, and knocked up.  So she takes up with a traveling salesmen and marries him, except that guy turns out to be a crook, so she leaves him, goes off to the big city where she meets a young man she knew from home, but due to her husband's criminality she and the boyfriend wind up on the lam, trying to get back to the lady with whom Molly left her child.  It's here that Lee Tracy comes in; he's a journalist who figures out Molly's true identity.  If you thought he was cynical in Dinner at Eight, wait until you see him here.  The traveling salesman is played by Leslie Fenton, whom Dvorak would marry after production on the movie wrapped.

Audrey Hepburn gets the TCM spotlight on Friday.  She didn't make all that many films, so TCM is starting Friday off with three smaller roles, as in Secret People, at 9:30 AM.  Valentina Cortese stars as Maria, a woman who grew up under a dictatorship in some country on the Continent with her younger sister Nora (Hepburn).  Their father is executed by the dictator, so the two sisters flee to the UK to try to live a peaceful life.  All goes as well as can be expected for several years until on a trip to Paris, Maria runs into Louis, an old flame from the old country.  He's become one of a group of anarchists trying to topple the dictator who killed Maria's father.  When it's learned the dictator is going to be visiting London, Louis wants to use Maria in his plot to get a bomb to London and to a party the dictator is going to be at.  But, of course, things don't go quite as planned.... 

Ernest Borgnine is your star on TCM for Saturday.  I could recommend quite a few of his movies, such as his role opposite Bette Davis in The Catered Affair at 9:45 AM, or as one of the bad guys keeping a secret from Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock at 1:00 PM, or even his Oscar-winning role as Marty at 8:00 PM.  However, I'd like to point out that TCM is going to be showign the Private Screenings interview that he did with Robert Osborne back in 2009.  Borgning tells the story of how his Italian mother helped get him involved in acting, as well as the story of his three failed marriages and the one that ultimately stood the test of time (he was married something like 40 years at the time of his death), And of course, there are stories about the movies he made, from a small but important role in From Here to Eternithy to Marty to the TV show McHale's Navy.  It's well worth watching. 

If you get caught between the moon and New York City, you could watch Arthur, which is up against the Private Screenings interview at 7:20 PM Saturday on Encore Love Stories, as well as earlier in the day at 11:00 AM.  Dudley Moore plays Arthur, an incredibly spoiled, incredibly wealthy playboy who at the beginning of the movie is seen cavorting with hookers on a wild bender.  His family doesn't want him doing such things, so they've given him an ultimatum: marry the suitably upper-class Susan (Jill Eikenberry), or give up his inheritance.  So of course he's going to go through with the marriage, but unhappily.  And then while shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, he sees Linda (Liza Minnelli), who's shoplifting.  He pays for the stuff she shoplifts to keep her out of jail, and sure enough, the two begin to fall in love.  Can they live happily ever after without his money, or will Arthur still go through with the marriage of convenience?  John Gielgud won an Oscar for playing Arthur's butler.

Before either brodacst of Arthur, you can watch Pigskin Parade, at 7:30 AM Saturday on Fox Retro.  The fine folks from Yale are looking to schedule an easy opponent before the big game against Harvard (back in the 1930s, pepole actually cared about Ivy League football) and plan to schedule the University of Texas.  However, they accidentally send the invite to Texas State, a school that only has a fledgling football program coached by Jack Haley (later of The Wizard of Oz) and his wife Patsky Kelly.  So they have to find enough good players to go up against Yale, and eventually find their secret weapon, a young man picking produce and throwing melons across a field (not a Hy-Vee).  But will they all be able to get to the big game in one piece?  This movie is about as realistic as the Minnesota Vikings winning a Super Bowl, but it's the sort of dopey fun audiences expected from 1930s college movies.  Watch for Betty Grable, and a young Judy Garland on loan from MGM; this was back in the days when MGM couldn't decide whether to keep her or Deanna Durbin.