Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of August 22-28, 2016. The days are noticeably beginning to get shorter now, so with the longer nights, why not spend that time watching some good movies? I've used my good taste to select several movies I think you all will find interesting. Summer Under the Stars brings seven more interesting stars, but there are good movies on some of the other channels, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
For those of you who like more recent movies, you're in luck. This week kicks off with The Freshman, at 6:15 AM Monday on StarzEncore Classics. No, this isn't the Harold Lloyd comedy, although that's recent enough. In this 1990 movie, Matthew Broderick plays Clark, a young man from Vermont who goes off to film school in New York and finds he's woefully unprepared for life in the big city. Clark gets his stuff robbed by Clemenza (Bruno Kirby), and when Clark runs into Clemenza again, Clemenza offers to introduce him to his uncle Carmine. Carmine (Marlon Brando) is supposedly the man on whom Don Corleone in The Godfather was modeled, and Carmine similarly makes Clark an offer he can't refuse. This offer involves trafficking in endangered species, as Carmine knows a restaurateur (Maximilian Schell) who specializes in serving those endangered species as meals. (I'd guess they all taste like chicken.) What a babe in the big city to do?
TCM's star for Monday is Robert Montgomery, who always looked like a gentleman no matter the part. A good example of this is Faithless, at 9:00 AM Monday. Montgomery plays Bill, an upper-middle-class man (making $20K in 1932 dollars) engaged to Carol (Tallulah Bankhead), who's upper-upper-class. Bill wants Carol to live on his salary – the need to be the provider and all that – but Carol says no; she'd rather live on her trust fund. Except that with a depression on, she's spent all her money. At this point she's willing to live on $20K, which really isn't that bad, except that by now Bill has lost his job. Oh, that pesky depression again. He's able to find work as a scab truck driver, but it's dangerous and results in his getting injured. To what lengths will Carol go to nurse Bill back to health, and will he have her if he finds what she's been doing to support him? This was MGM's glossy look at the Depression; I can only imagine what the movie would have been like had it been made at Warners.
Twice this week, FXM Retro is running a double bill of The Rains Came, followed by The Rains of Ranchipur. The movies will run at 9:30 AM and 11:15 AM Monday, and again at 8:00 AM and 9:45 AM Tuesday. I mention this because they're both versions of the same story. Lady Esketh (Myrna Loy in the original, Lana Turner in the remake) goes to the Indian kingdom of Ranchipur with her husband (Nigel Bruce vs. Michael Rennie), where they meet a dissolute ex-pat Tom (George Sanders vs. Fred MacMurray) as well as a mixed-race doctor (Tyrone Power vs. Richard Burton). Lady Esketh falls for the doctor, which is a problem thanks to the Production Code and the fact that Lady Esketh is already married while the doctor is dedicated to his people. All sorts of natural disasters ensue, including a cholera epidemic which brings the two doomed lovers closer. The latter version was filmed in color and wide screen, but the earlier version has the better acting, I think.
On Tuesday, TCM is giving us a full day of the films of Brigitte Bardot. You could do worse than to ogle her. One of her movies that I don't think I've recommended before is The Night Heaven Fell, at 4:15 PM. Bardot plays Ursula, fresh from having been educated by the nuns at a convent school. She goes to live with Aunt Florentine (Alida Valli) and Uncle Miguel (Pepe Nieto) in rural Spain, where she finds that Lamberto (Stephen Boyd) has a problem with Uncle. He says Miguel sexually assaulted his sister, and he wants vengeance. Lamberto gets injured in the resulting duel, and Ursula nurses him back to health, falling in love with him along the way. Except that Lamberto is already in love with… Florentine! Things get even more complicated after that. This was directed by Bardot's then-husband Roger Vadim, and Bardot is as lovely as the Spanish scenery where the movie was filmed on location and in glorious color.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns, we have The Culpepper Cattle Company, at 9:10 AM Tuesday and 5:30 AM Wednesday. Gary Grimes plays Ben, an adolescent stuck on a farm out in the old west who wants to see something of the world, and who thinks cowboys are big stuff. So when Frank Culpepper's (Billy Green Bush) cattle drive comes through town, Ben does whatever he can to get himself hired on to the cattle drive. Of course, things don't turn out at all the way Ben had planned. First he gets hired not as a cowboy per se but as the cook's “Little Mary”. And then he finds that the cattle drive is a lot of tough work, and nothing glamorous at all. There's also petty crime, and the possibility of gunplay being real, not like you'd read about in an adventure story. This little movie is helped out by its strong ensemble cast and lovely cinematography.
I know how much you all like those 1930s movies, so I'm glad to see that Wednesday's star on TCM is another 1930s star: Constance Cummings. I stuck trying to figure out which of two movies I'd like to recommend. The Guilty Generation (6:30 PM) is an interesting early talkie about the children of rival gangsters falling in love with each other, but this week I'll recommend The Mind Reader, at 9:00 AM. Warren William stars as “Chandra”, who with his assistant Frank (Allan Jenkins) does the travelling carnival circuit as a mind-reading act. In one town they meet Sylvia (Constance Cummings), who falls in love with Chandra. She joins the act, finds out that it's a scam, and becomes horrified. So she insists that Chandra go straight. By this time, he's fallen in love with her, so he's willing to try honesty, except that honesty doesn't pay the bills. Instead, he's got to go back to work as a phony psychic, this time in the big city charming the bored upper-class housewives. What will Sylvia do when she finds out?
Thursday's star on TCM is Van Johnson. One of his films I think I haven't recommended before is High Barbaree, which you can watch at 8:00 AM. Johnson plays Alec, a bomber pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II. On one mission to destroy a Japanese sub, the plane gets shot down. Alec and Lt. Moore (Cameron Mitchell) are the only two survivors, and as the two are in a part of the plane that floats, hoping to make it to land before they die of thirst, Alec tells Moore about his life. Apparently, the “High Barbaree” comes from stories that Alec's uncle Thad (Thomas Mitchell) told Alec as a boy; it's a mythical Pacific island that should have been located roughly in the area the plane was downed. Alec also had a childhood sweetheart in Nancy (June Allyson), but wound up having another woman Diana (Marilyn Maxwell) pursue him as well. Alec has a bunch of other bizarre stories to tell.
On Friday TCM puts a light on Boris Karloff, who is probably best remembered for playing the monster in the 1931 version of Frankenstein. That movie will be airing at 8:00 PM. You probably know the story; Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is doing his mad scientist work, taking parts from corpses and putting them together, using the newfangled technology of electricity to try to reanimate the corpses. Eventually, he gets one that looks amazingly like Boris Karloff reanimated, prompting the doctor to scream, “It's alive!” But things aren't easy for the new man, as the locals are understandably afraid, and the man has no concept of social skills and can't even talk. He tries to help a little girl but accidentally drowns her, leading the townsfolk to turn on the doctor and the monster. It's a beautifully shot movie, and even though special effects have advanced in the past 80 years, the story totally overcomes any special effects problems they had back in 1931.
On Saturday, we'll have 24 hours of the movies of James Garner. This time, I think I haven't recommended Skin Game, which you can catch at 2:15 AM Sunday. Garner plays Quincy, a con artist in the 1850s who, while in jail in Pennsylvania, meets Jason (Louis Gossett, Jr.), a freeborn black man. Together, the two team up, until they come up with the ultimate con, which is to pass Jason off as a slave, selling him to slaveowners and then having him escape so that the two can go to the next town and pull off the same scam. You'd figure that people would catch on to this, and one of the first to do so is lady con artist Ginger (Susan Clark), who becomes Quincy's love interest. Things take an even bigger turn for the worse when Quincy is thrown in the clink and Jason is sold for real by slave dealer Plunkett (Ed Asner) to a Texas plantation owner. There's also a scene with John Brown (Royal Dano) breaking up a slave auction. This is all played as a mix of comedy and drama.
Finally, on Sunday, it's the turn of Jean Arthur. I think I've mentioned every one of the movies airing that day before, so it's a repeat recommendation. That movie is Easy Living, at 8:00 PM. This isn't the one with Victor Mature as a quarterback, but a movie with a completely different plot. Arthur plays Mary, a New York working girl. One day she's going to work on an open-topped double-decker bus, passing an upper-class apartment building just as two of the tenants are having an argument. Mr. Ball (Edward Arnold) is yelling at his wife (Mary Nash) for spending a huge sum of money on a fur coat. So he throws the coat out the window, and it lands in Mary's lap! Eventually, Mr. Ball finds out who got the coat, and after their meeting Mary is mistakenly taken for his mistress, which leads the folks who serve high society to start treating her as part of high society. Meanwhile, she's got a boyfriend named Johnny (Ray Milland), who works at the Automat. What she doesn't know is that he's actually Mr. Ball's son, who has insisted on trying to make his own way in the world before inheriting his father's fortune.