We're going to start with a birthday salute to Una Merkel, who was born December 10, 1903. TCM is running a bunch of her movies on Monday morning and afternoon. Merkel plays a southern girl in Huddle (6:00 AM), a strange little movie I've recommended before in which Ramon Novarro plays a working-class football player who gets a scholarship to Yale and tries to take on the snooty upper classes. So this week, I'd like to mention Beauty For Sale at 8:00 PM. Madge Evans is actually the star, playing a working girl in New York who gets a job at a posh beauty salon through the help of friend Merkel. Evans proves popular, and she meets wealthy Otto Krueger (whom you'll recall as one of the bad guys in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur), who is the husband of one of her clients. She falls in love with him, which is of course a problem. In fact, all of the beauticians are falling in love with rich guys, which brings problems for all of them. May Robson shows up as Merkel's mother, and Hedda Hopper plays the owner of the salon..
Next up is the psychological drama The Guilt of Janet Ames, at 4:30 AM Tuesday on TCM. Rosalind Russell plays the titular Ames, a widow of World War II who became a widow wher her husband heroically died saving five of his fellow soldiers. As with Gary Merrill in the later Phone Call From a Stranger, Ames wants to meet the men her husband saved, but she gets waylaid by a car accident that leaves her with a nervous breakdown. One of the men Mr. Ames saved is Smitty, an alcoholic ex-journalist (Melvyn Douglas), and he takes it upon himself to help the hypochondriac nutjob Janet Ames, in part because in doing so, he might be able to help himself, too. Instead of actually meeting the people she helped as Gary Merrill did, though, the movie sort of combines 1940s psychology with Clarence the Angel in It's a Wonderful Life, with Smitty having Ames imagine how her husband changed the lives of the people he saved.
Two actors who were good at romantic comedy show up in And So They Were Married, which TCM is showing at 8:00 AM Wednesday. Top-billed is Melvyn Douglas, playing a single father taking his son for a Christmas vacation at a mountain resort. Also there for Christmas is divorcée Mary Astor, along with her daughter. The two adults eventually fall in love, but there's a problem, which is that the kids don't like the idea of their parents remarrying. At least, not at first. After they return home, they think that maybe they were wrong, and hatch a plot to hitch their parents by faking their kidnappings, only for the plot to backfire when it gets their parents arrested! This isn't the greatest comedy ever made, but Astor and Douglas were both always quite good with this sort of material, and it's also nice to be able to watch a movie without a bunch of sex jokes. If you want to put a name to a face, that's veteran bald character actor Donald Meek playing the hotel manager.
Barbara Stanwyck's second week as TCM's Star of the month begins at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Wednesday night sees several of her more comedic roles. I think I've recommended all of these before, but they're worth watching again.
The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Banjo on My Knee, Joel McCrea plays a man living in one of those small towns along the lower Mississippi who marries Stanwyck, only for the two to keep getting separated;
at 9:45 PM, shoplifter Stanwyck falls in love with her prosecutor, Fred MacMurray, in Remember the Night.
Stanwyck plays another shady character in The Lady Eve, at 11:30 PM, this time a con artist wooing beer heir Henry Fonda
And in Ball of Fire at 1:15 AM, Stanwyck is a gangster's moll who hides out with a bunch of bachelor professors working on an encycolpedia, teaching them about slang while falling in love with professor Gary Cooper. (Nowadays, she and Cooper would just have a Wikipedia edit war.)
By the time Thursday rolls around, however, the movies are rather less comedies, such as Illicit, which is airing at 5:45 PM Thursday. Barbara Stanwyck here plays a young woman who believes in love, but not in marriage. She's in love with James Rennie, but fears that marriage will ruin the romance. He, on the other hand, wants to get married because he worries about his reputation and place in high society! So he gets his father to convince Stanwyck to marry him. Sure enough, the marriage starts out blissful, but doesn't stay that way. It doesn't help when Stanwyck's ex-boyfriend (Ricardo Cortez) and Rennie's ex-girlfriend show up trying to throw a further spanner into the works. An interesting premise with a lot of fun early 1930s fashion and set design, although being an early talkie, it does get creaky at times.
You've probably seen more then enough commercials for the movie Les Misérables, which is being released in the US on Christmas Day. This new movie is based on the musical which was written in the 1980s from Victor Hugo's original epic novel of convict Jean Valjean, who got 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and then trying to escape from prison, and his attempts to reform and then help a young man and woman find love; all while trying to escape from heartless police officer Javert. It's a popular story, and it shouldn't be a surprise that a whole bunch of movie versions have been made. TCM will be running three of them on Thursday in prime time:
First up, at 8:00 PM, is the 1935 version which stars Fredric March as Valjean.
Then, at 10:00 PM, you can see the 1952 telling, which has Michael Rennie (from The Day The Earth Stood Still) in the Valjean role.
Finally, at midnight Friday (ie. 11:00 PM Thursday LFT) is a 1934 French version which probably tells the full story the best of all the versions, but that would be because it runs over four and a half hours.
Speaking of Fredric March, you can see him in one of Friday night's Ernst Lubitsch films: Design For Living, at 9:30 PM Friday on TCM. Miriam Hopkins plays a woman working for a Paris advertising agency who, on a train, meets struggling playwright Fredric March, and his friend, starving artist Gary Cooper. She's pretty and a hoot, so it's unsurprising that both of the friends fall in love with her. With two men chasing her, what's a woman to do? Why not try living with both of them! Needless to say, there are a lot of problems with this, made even more complicated by the fact that Hopkins' boss (Edward Everett Horton) has had his eye on his lovely employee as well, and doesn't like the two younger men butting in. When the rivalry between March and Cooper gets to be too much, Hopkins decides to make life better for them by marrying Horton, only to discover that this may not have been the best thing to do.... All of this is actually a comedy, based on a play by Noël Coward.
In between those, at 6:00 AM Friday over on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel, is Hell and High Water. Richard Widmark stars as Adam Jones (please don't call him "Pacman"), a retired navy submarine captain from World War II who is recruited by a group of scientists to investigate what seems like undersea nuclear testing out in the western Pacific. What they discover is that the Red Chinese (the movie was released in 1954, when Communist China was a mystery to your average American) have a plot on to develop the bomb, steal some surplus US bombers, and drop the bomb over North Korea to make it look like the US did it! The hope is that this would kick off World War III between the US and USSR and leave China standing at the end. Slightly silly, when you consider all the clichés: the mission is technically run by scientists who don't know submarines, and there's eye candy posing as a scientist (Bella Darvi).
TCM's Essential on Saturday night is The Band Wagon, which kicks off a night of movies about fading stars. One of the more fun ones is The Star, at 10:00 PM Saturday. Bette Davis plays the star, a woman who was famous in the 1930s, but now is in debt because she's been supporting her family and can't get good enough roles to pay for the bills. She's also got an ex-husband and daughter (Natalie Wood), and really wants custody of the daughter, but the daughter is writing checks with her mouth that Mom can't cash. What's a woman to do? Why, go on a bender! (Heavens is this scene fun!) She gets arrested for DWI and bailed out by Sterling Hayden, who was a handyman for her back in the 1930s groomed to be her male lead, only for the film to be a complete flop. He's a shipbuilder now, and you know there's going to wind up being something between them while she tries to work her way back into being the star she's never going to be able to be again. It's overwrought and often half-baked, but watching Bette Davis chew the scenery on this sort of material is always worth it.
Finally, on Sunday, this week's Christmas movie double header features two versions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. At 9:30 PM is the 1951 version, also known as Scrooge, which is many people's favorite movie version: it's the one with Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge.
More interesting may be the 1964 TV movie Carol For Another Christmas, which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM. This propaganda movie, which was financed in part by the UN and written by Rod Serling, stars Sterling Hayden in the Scrooge role (name changed). He lost his son in a war and doesn't want the US to get in any more wars, so it's up to the ghosts to tell Hayden why sometimes the international community is necessary. The Christmas Past segment involves Steve Lawrence (yes, Mr. Eydie Gorme) in World War I. The Christmas Present segment involves third world children in a famine (obviously, they couldn't know how badly the "do-gooders" would screw up the Ethiopian famine 20 years later, letting the Marxist government use food aid as a weapon against the people). Finally the Christmas Future segment is set in a post-nuclear apocolypse with Peter Sellers as a dictator.
Goalline has expressed his approval at recommending porn movies, so I'd like to mention one which isn't airing but would fit in with Sunday night's TCM theme: The Passions of Carol. This 1970s movie is about a woman who runs a Playgirl like magazine but treats her employees like dirt, so the ghosts tell her, with the use of hardcore sex, why she should have the Christmas spirit. This was made just before Gerald Ford told New York City to drop dead, at a time when Times Square was at its Disney-free seediest. The movie has gotten a restoration and a DVD release, so Goalline can buy a copy and enjoy it at his leisure.
Speaking of titles reminiscent of porn, TCM is also showing the short Famous Boners just after 11:00 AM Wednesday (following the feature One Sunday Afternoon which begins at 9:30 AM).