Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of August 19-25, 2013. This is the big week of the NFL preseason, when most teams play their starters for over half the game. I know you're all nervous with anticipation over the Packers' game, so why not relax a little bit with some good movies? TCM has seven more interesting stars, and there are some good movies on other channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Randolph Scott. Scott is best remembered for all the westerns he made in the 1950s, and TCM is showing quite a few of those. One that i don't think I've recommended before is a good one for Johnny Z: The Tall T, at 8:00 PM Monday. Scott plays a down-on-his-luck ranch foreman who, having lost his horse, is taking the stagecoach along with Maureen O'Sullivan, who is married to a wealthy copper mine owner. Wouldn't you know it, but the coach is hijacked by Richard Boone and his gang, and the three of them are held hostage. Boone doesn't like his two underlings, since he feels they're too violent, increasing the tension. Tension gets increased further when Boone learns about the copper mine, allowing him to demand a ransom for the couple's release. And if that's not enough, Scott finds himself falling in love with O'Sullivan. Director Budd Boetticher was a master of the low-budget western of the 1950s, and wraps this nice little one up in a quick 80 minutes or so.
Tuesday's "star" on TCM is Hattie McDaniel who, being black in the studio system, never really got to be a star but instead was one maid after another after another. An example of this is in The Shopworn Angel at 11:30 AM, although at least here she gets billed fourth. Top billing goes to Margaret Sullavan, playing 1910s actress Daisy. She meets Bill (James Stewart) when she nearly runs over him in her car. Bill has a private in the Army, about to go off to fight in World War I. As a favor to Bill and to repay him for nearly urnning him over, Daisy agrees to pretend to be his girlfriend since it will impress the other doughboys. You can probably guess that they wind up falling in love. This even though he's going to go off to France and possibly never return. This also because Daisy has another man who's supposed to be her boyfriend in the form of Sam (Walter Pidgeon).
Wednesday is 24 hours of William Holden on TCM, kicking off at 6:00 AM with the fun comedy Miss Grant Takes Richmond. Miss Grant is played by Lucille Ball; she's training to become a secretary, except that she's the world's most incompetent secretary. Holden is Mr. Richmond, who is opening up a real-estate agency, and hires Miss Grant. The thing is, he wants an incompetent secretary because he's not really into real estate; that's just a front for the numbers racket that he and his pals are running. Miss Grant, however, thinking she's working for a real estate agent, gets Richmond involved in a deal to build a housing development for those young families who need houses in post-WWII America. Along the way, Grant and Richmond fall for each other, so she and her friends become willing to help Richmond when he has a big bet laid off on him that he can't afford to pay out on.
Maggie Smith is in TCM's spotlight on Thursday. I've recommended several of Thursday's movies in the past, but not Nowhere to Go, airing at 8:00 PM. Made in Britain at the beginning of Smith's career, this stars George Nader as a criminal who gets sprung out of prison by James Bond's boss M (er, actually the actor who played M, Bernard Lee). Thw two had conned an elderly lady into giving up her late husband's coin collection; Nader couldn't get it from the safety-deposit box before getting caught from the police; and Lee thinks Nader is keeping it from him. They fight and Lee gets killed in the fight, and in trying to escape, Nader winds up hiding in Maggie Smith's apartment. Actually, it was one she shared with her ex-boyfriend. But she begins to fall in love with Nader, and is willing to help him evade the police....
Friday on TCM brings us a full day of Elizabeth Taylor. The day begins at 6:00 AM with the documentary Elizabeth Taylor: an Intimate Portrait. This was made for TV back in 1975, so the filmmakers could get some actors who were still alive, such as Peter Lawford hosting, although by 1975 Lawford was already well into his descent into alcoholism. The directors who show up here include Richard Brooks, who directed Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which is airing at 8:00 PM), and Vincente Minnelli, who directed Liz in both Father of the Bride (airing at 1:00 PM) and the remake, Father's Little Dividend (which follows at 2:45 PM). Liz's mom also appears. Also, if you missed the Carson on TCM interview Johnny Carson did with Taylor when it aired back in July, TCM is showing it again this Friday at 7:45 PM.
As for Liz Taylor's movies, the one that I'd really like to recommend this week is Conspirator, which concludes Taylor's day on TCM at 4:30 AM Saturday. Elizabeth Taylor stars as a young American woman visiting London who meets British Army Major Robert Taylor (no relation in real life). They hae a whirlwind romance and get married. And then Liz discovers that her husband has a secret: his an agent of the Communist Party, spying for the Soviets! Liz is distressed and thinks about turning her husband in, which is bad enough for him. But complicating matters for him is that the Party doesn't like his marriage, and they want him to kill his wife! The one bad thing about the movie is that you know that, because of the Production Code, the studio is constrained in how they can end the movie. Honor Blackman, who would go on to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, plays Liz's lady friend.
Saturday is a day for Iowacheese. First off, his favorite movie of all time, Beaches, is airing at 9:30 AM on TMC Extra (Channel 555 for those with DirecTV; check your box guide otherwise). Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler play two women from opposite coasts of the US who meet and start a friendship that goes on for years and years, through thick and thin and longer than all their other relatoinships. And then tragedy strikes. Mayim Bialik, who would go on to play Blossom on the TV series of the same name, plays the juvenile version of the Bette Midler character. You all probably also remember that horrible song "Wind Beneath My Wings"; I'm retching just thinking about it.
There's also a movie for Iowacheese in which a civilian saves the police department's bacon: Lured, airing at 2:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Lucille Ball plays a dime-a-dance girl working in a London dance hall. Unfortunately, there's a serial killer going around London putting personal ads in the papers looking for young women, and then killing those women. And one of Ball's friends from the dance hall goes missing after responding to a personal ad. So Scotland Yard, in the form of Charles Coburn, comes to Ball looking for help. He recruits her to answer all the suspicious-looking personal ads to try to find the guy who might try to murder her when she responds to his ad. One of the false leads is wealthy George Sanders, and she winds up falling in love with him although she has to keep the truth a secret. And then evidence begins to turn up to suggest that perhaps Sanders might not be a false lead.... If you ever thought of Lucille Ball as only a zany redhead from films like the previously mentioned Miss Grant Takes Richmond, watch this one. You're in for a treat.
On Sunday, TCM's star is Clark Gable. This week's Essentials Jr. movie is It Happened One Night, at 8:00 PM. I wonder how much of the sexual innuendo is going to go over the kiddies' heads. That having been said, I'd rather mention a movie that's from even earlier in Gable's career, and is more open in its portrayal of adult situations: Possessed, at 8:45 AM. Joan Crawford plays a woman working in a box factory in one of those midwestern mill towns, with a next-door boyfriend (Wallace Ford) with everybody wanting the two of them to get married. She doesn't like the boring life, though, and one day as the train through town is stopped, she meets some people from the big city, including Clark Gable, who gives her his address. Eventually she runs away to go to New York and meet Gable. She becomes his mistress as he rises his way up the political ladder. And then her old boyfriend shows up, having actually made a success out of life. Needless to say this complicates things....
Over on the Fox Movie Channel, you can discover what happened to poor Bud Cort after playing Harold in Harold in Maude: he got cast in stuff like The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud, which is airing at 1:15 PM Sunday. This is a completely fictitious movie about how Sigmund Freud came to invent psychotherapy, with Cort as Freud. This Freud had a distant father and a mother (Carroll Baker) who spoils him. They wanted him to be a real doctor, but he couldn't stand the sight of blood, so he wound up going into psychology and stealing ideas from his patients when he puts them under hypnosis. Carol Kane plays the nurse who pursues Freud, while veteran comic actor Dick Shawn (the mama's boy in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) plays a patient with multiple personalities. The movie feels like the writer and director were going for a Mel Brooks-style spoof, but they fail pretty spectacularly.
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