Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 14-20, 2015. Somehow the Packers season hasn't gone down the tubes yet, so we're all on tenterhooks in anticipation of the Packers next few games that will drive them to the playoffs and hopefully wins once in the playoffs. So while you're waiting in nervous anticipation for those games, why not enjoy some good movies? I've got another tasteful selection lined up for all of you this week. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
On Monday morning and afternoon, TCM will be showing a bunch of movies with the word "Summer" in the title, because of course it's very nearly summer in the antipodean regions. The day kicks off at 6:15 AM with Summer Holiday. Mickey Rooney plays Richard Miller, a young man about to graduate high school in turn of the century small-town Connecticut. He's got nice parents (Walter Huston and Selena Royle) and a girl next door (Gloria DeHaven) who loves him. But he's full of piss and vinegar, and wants to take on the world, or so he thinks. Over the course of a couple of weeks, he learns a bit more about the big wide world out there, while his family, including spinster aunt Agnes Moorehead and kindly bur hard-drinking uncle Frank Morgan, see changes coming to their lives too. If this movie sounds familiar, it's because it's a musical version of the Eugene O'Neill play Ah, Wilderness!, with Rooney having played the part of the kid brother in the 1935 movie version of the play.
One movie looks at the past, and the next looks at the future: Men Must Fight, at 4:45 AM Tuesday on TCM. Diana Wynyard plays Laura, a nurse in the Great War (this was made in 1933, well before World War II began) who gets pregnant by a pilot who gets killed in action. So diplomat Edward Seward (Lewis Stone) marries her and raises the son as though it was his own. Fast forward to 1940, seven years in the future from the point of view of the movie. Bob (Phillips Holmes) is all grown up, with Dad having become Secretary of State. But there's war on the horizon, coming from Europe and threatening to involve America. Mom doesn't want to get involved in the war, and organizes the women of America to that effect, but once war actually does come, the people turn on her and her pacifist ways, which really puts Bob in a spot. The movie also has television and assumes that video phone calls would come much sooner than they did.
If you want something a little more recent you could do worse than to watch Ordinary People, which is on Encore Classics twice this week, at 3:20 AM Tuesday and 6:00 AM Sunday. Timothy Hutton plays Conrad, the son in a well-to-do Chicagoland family who is having nightmares. It turns out that he was in a boating accident with his older brother, who drowned. That opened up a whole bunch of rifts in the family, to which Conrad eventually responded by attempting suicide. The movie begins several months after the suicide attempt, as Conrad and his parents (Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland) are trying to put their lives back together. Conrad finally takes the step of calling a psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch) whose name he was given at the hospital, and begins to see the head shrinker twice a week. That threatens to reopen old wounds, which Dad has been covering by being ultra chipper, while Mom has been cold and unable to show any emotion. It's a difficult movie to watch at times, but ultimately rewarding in its way.
Another relatively recent movie is Kiss Me Goodbye, airing on FXM Retro at and 11:15 AM Tuesday and 3:00 AM Wednesday. Sally Field plays Kay, a woman who's been a widow for three years after the death of her first husband Jolly. She's finally ready to get married again, to Rupert (Jeff Bridges). He's convinced her not only to move on with her life, but move back in to her old home. Unfortunately, when she goes there, whom should she see but Jolly (James Caan)? It turns out that Jolly is a ghost, and only Kay can see him. He thinks that Rupert isn't right for her. Meanwhile, because Kay is talking to Jolly and nobody else can see him, everybody around her thinks she's going nuts. Rupert, for his part, thinks doing an exorcism to get rid of the ghost might be just the thing to solve Kay's problems. The cast also includes Claire Trevor as Kay's mother. This movie wasn't a success on its theatrical release, but it's really better than that.
Frank Sinatra returns for his third night as Star of the Month on Wednesday night. You could do a lot worse than to watch On the Town, which is airing at 9:00 PM Wednesday. Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin play Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie respectively. They're three sailors whose ship has pulled into port in New York City, and the sailors have a 24-hour leave. So what do they want to do with their leave? Why, see as much of the city as possible! While in New York they meet girls and end up paired with them (Kelly with Vera-Ellen, Sinatra with Betty Garrett, and Munshin with Ann Miller) and together the six of them sing and dance their way through the stereotypical New York tourist experience, having some interesting adventures along the way. Ah, but the singing and dancing is wonderful, this coming from somebody who isn't a particularly big fan of musicals.
Thursday night on TCM brings another round of "Treasures from the Disney Vault". We get another set of Disney cartoon shorts, although this time they don't come on until 9:30 PM, after the first feature, So Dear to My Heart at 8:00 PM. This one combines live action and animation as it tells the story of a young boy (Bobby Driscoll) living on a farm with his uncle (Burl Ives) and grandma (Beulah Bondi). The kid comes into possession of a little black lamb, and wants to show him in the county fair, but Grandma points out that he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Well, she doesn't quite put it this way, what with it being a Disney movie. Eventually, the kid gets visited by a bunch of animated characters, who tell him to follow his dreams and do what it takes to get to the county fair and enter his lamb.
Everybody loves a good comic duo: Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, or even Wheeler and Woolsey. The last pair isn't so well remembered today, but they were big hits at RKO in the 1930s until Woolsey (the one with the glasses) suddenly died. Among their movies is The Nitwits, which TCM is showing at 6:00 AM Friday. Wheeler and Woolsey play the owners of a cigar stand in the lobby of a big-city business building where one of the tenants is music publisher Hale Hamilton. Wheeler has a thing for the secretary (a young Betty Grable before she moved to Fox) but there are more pressing issues. Her boss has gotten an extortion letter from the notorious "Black Widow", and when he refuses to submit to the extortion, he gets murdered! Suspicion lands on our two cigar-stand operators, so they have to solve the mystery themselves, complete with slapstick finale. Watch for future fish-and-chips adman Arthur Treacher with a bunch of tennis equipment.
TCM has more Christmas movies on Friday night. Since there's a relatively limited selection of classic Christmas films, it's no surprise that TCM is airing a bunch of the ones they've aired in previous years. But you could always do worse than watch Remember the Night again at 11:30 PM Friday. Barbara Stanwyck plays Lee, a career shoplifter who's being brought into court yet again, this time just before Christmas. She doesn't have the money to make bail to stay out of prison before the trial begins in the new year, prosecuting attorney John (Fred MacMuray) offers to take her in his custody over the Christmas holidays while he goes out of state to visit his mom (Beulah Bondi) and aunt (Elizabeth Patterson) who run a farm with the help of farmhand Sterling Holloway. Unsurprisingly, along the way John falls in love with Lee and the feeling is mutual, making for some problems when they return back to the city and the trial comes up.
Finally, even though it comes up against the Packer game, I'll recommend Come to the Stable, at 3:45 PM Sunday on TCM. Loretta Young and Celeste Holm star as Sisters Margaret and Scholastica respectively, two Catholic nuns who spent World War II in France tending to all the sick orphaned children the war produced. They've come to America and, in memory of the children they couldn't save, they want to open a charity hospital for children. (Perhaps they should have talked to Danny Thomas.) They wind up in rural New England, at the old farmhouse where now lives spinster artist Amelia (Elsa Lanchester), and realize that the adjacent property would be the perfect place for the hospital. Of course there are a lot of obstacles, such as a lack of money and property owners who don't want the bustle of a children's hospital in their bucolic area, but these Catholic nuns have faith, and more importantly, spunk, which will enable them to convince people in the rightness of their cause.