Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of December 16-22, 2019. The Packers are about to break the Minnesota team's hearts this coming week, but that's not until Sunday. So spend the week with some good movies rather than nervously waiting for what's just another game for the Packers but the Super Bowl for the other team. Once again, I've used my discerning taste to select some really interesting movies, including Star of the Month Joan Blondell, and a very young Robert Mitchum. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The look at movies and their remakes continues on TCM on Monday. This week's theme is literary adaptations. Among the book-to-movie versions being shown is the 1939 version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at 4:15 PM Monday. Mickey Rooney stars in the title role of the adolescent boy who is being beaten by his father and doesn't like the widow Douglas (Elisabeth Risdon) who wants to clean him up. So he runs away from home, setting off on a raft down the Mississippi together with a fellow runaway, the slave Jim (Rex Ingram). Together, the two get into nay number of adventures, most notably with a pair of conmen calling themselves the Duke and the King (William Frawley and Walter Connolly respectively). Meanwhile Huck is thought to be dead and the authorities are pursuing Jim for the murder. The book was re-adapted in 1960 and that version will be shown at 6:00 PM Monday. Tony Randall gets top billing, playing the part of the "King", and Jim is played by then boxing champion Archie Moore.
Up against the two airings of Huckleberry Finn is Legal Eagles, at 4:52 PM Monday over on StarzEncore Classics. Robert Redford plays Tom Logan, an assistant DA in Manhattan who is thinking about running for the top job when his boss (Steven Hill) retires. But he's about to get a case that could upend all of this. Chelsea Deardon (Daryl Hannah) is a woman whose artist father died in a fire when she was a child, and who claims that one of Dad's paintings was meant as a gift to her but was erroneously sold off after Dad died. She tried to get that painting back, and of course since possession is nine-tenths of the law, she was charged with grand larceny. So Deardon's defense attorney Laura Kelly (Debra Winger), seeing a high-profile case, creates a publicity stunt to get Logan involved in the investigation. Things get much more complicated when Deardon shows up at Logan's place claiming she's being followed, and the two wind up sleeping together! This results in Logan joining the defense side of the case, and typical Hollywood courtroom shenanigans. The movie is also responsible for this memorable song:
A movie with a bit of a misleading title is Cole Younger, Gunfighter, which will be on TCM at 2:00 PM Tuesday. You'll probably recall Younger (played here by Frank Lovejoy) for his ties to Jesse James, but this movie has nothing to do with the Jameses. Younger is in Texas, which is still under a Reconstruction era governor who has brought in a new police force because the Texas Rangers are ostensibly too biased toward the South. One of Cole's friends, Kit Carswell (James Best, later of The Dukes of Hazzard), gets into a confrontation with one of those policemen and has to leave town. He winds up with Cole on a cattle drive. But Cole leaves before another guy, Frank (Jan Merlin) shows up. Frank has designs on Kit's girlfriend Lucy (Abby Dalton), and frames Kit on a charge of murdering that policemen. Cole is the guy who could get Kit off the charge, but it might reveal his outlaw nature. What's Cole going to do? Of course, in real life, Cole wasn't down in Texas as he was still with the James Gang until getting captured after the Northville MN raid in 1876.
People die all the time, as you'll know if you read the lounge section and see the threads I start with the “Cryptkeeper” tag. At any rate, TCM is honoring several of the film figures who left us in 2019 on Tuesday night into Wednesday movie. There are eight people, each of whom get one film, starting off at 8:00 PM with Julie Adams in Creature From the Black Lagoon. Tim Conway is better known for his TV roles, but there was a movie version of McHale's Navy, with the stars of the show reprising their roles for a 90-minute version of their antics. That's airing at 2:00 AM Wednesday. Music fans will probably like Monterey Pop, at 6:00 AM Wednesday, which is being shown in honor of documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker.
Last week, I mentioned Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie; this week I'm going to mention Hitchcock's I Confess, which you can see at 6:00 AM Thursday. Montgomery Clift plays Fr. Michael Logan, a Catholic priest in Quebec City when the city still had English speakers. One evening, the caretaker at the church, Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse), dons Logan's cassock and goes out and commits a murder! Keller comes back just in time to run into Fr. Logan, who's up late, at which point Keller asks Logan to go into confessional so he can confess to having committed murder! Now, you probably know the old Catholic rule about the sanctity of the confessional, so this leaves Logan in a bind once the local police inspector, Larrue (Karl Malden) starts investigating. Signs are starting to point to Fr. Logan, not just because of the cassock, but because he had a girlfriend Ruth (Anne Baxter) before becoming a priest, and the murder victim just happens to have been blackmailing Ruth with knowledge of that relationship since Ruth is married to a prominent figure now. This is one of Hitchcock's more forgotten movies, but it doesn't deserve that fate.
Another movie that's been showing up on FXM a bunch of times over the past few months is Daddy Long Legs. It's on again a couple of times this week, at 12:50 PM Wednesday and 7:55 AM Thursday.. Fred Astaire plays Jervis, an American millionaire who visits France and stops at an orphanage on his trip. There, he meets the lovely and talented dancer Julie (Leslie Caron), and he's so taken with her ability that he decides to sponsor her to study dance at the same school where his niece Linda (Terry Moore) is attending, doing it as an anonymous benefactor. Julie holds a special place in her heart for this man she doesn't know and calls "Daddy Long Legs". Jervis never lets on who it is, but some time later at a school function Linda introduces Julie to her uncle, and the two fall in love despite the age difference and the fact that it wouldn't look good for Jervis to be having a romantic relationship with the young woman he's sponsoring. Of course you know they're going to wind up together at the end; it's the journey there that's worth watching. Oh, and the dancing of Astaire and Caron too. This one is based on a tried and true book that had already been turned into a movie twice before, including a silent version with Mary Pickford:
Joan Blondell returns for a third night of movies in her turn as Star of the Month on Thursday night. Among the movies showing is Cry 'Havoc', which airs at 9:45 PM Thursday. Capt. Marsh (Fay Bainter) and Lt. Smith (Margaret Sullavan) are Army nurses at a field hospital in Bataan, the Philippines in December 1941. One would assume you can guess what that means, namely, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor followed by the US entry in World War II and the Japanese assault on the Philippines, notably the Battle of Bataan. Malaria is a problem (indeed, Lt. Smith is affected) as is the lack of nurses. As refugees are streaming from Manila to try to get out of the country, Marsh looks for anybody she can get who might be able to do work as a nurse. One other nurse, Flo Noris (Marsha Hunt) returns, as do ten civilians, all female. Blondell plays one of those civilians, Grace; others include Ella Raines and Ann Sothern. It's extremely difficult work, as all of the male soldiers (pretty much the only male roles in the film are small roles as soldiers) are dying and the Japanese are closing in. Watch for a young Robert Mitchum as one of those dying soldiers.
If you take the Motown sound and add Brady Bunch theme composer Frank DeVol, what happens? You get the Supremes song The Happening, theme song to the movie of the same title. The movie The Happening will be on TCM at 4:00 PM Friday. A group of hippieish young people, including the recently deceased Robert Walker Jr. as Herby and a very young Faye Dunaway as Sandy, are basically fooling around when they wind up in the house of retired gangster Roc Delmonico (Anthony Quinn) and, in the confusion, wind up kidnapping Roc! The hippies figure that he's rich so they can put him up for ransom and make a lot of money off of it. Not that they know how to pull off a kidnapping and get the ransom without getting caught. More worrying for them, however, is that when they try to arrange the ransom, Roc finds that his wife Monica (Martha Hyer) has no intention of paying it, she being sick of him and having an affair. Nor does Roc's business partner Fred (Milton Berle) or old Mob boss Sam (Oskar Homolka) want to help. So Roc gets the idea to turn the tables on his “friends” and teach his captors how to pull off a true kidnapping. Unfortunately, in the movie we don't hear the Supremes singing until the closing credits.
I mentioned a young Robert Mitchum above in Cry 'Havoc'. One of his earliest roles is also on this week, a small part in The Lone Star Trail, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 3:37 AM Sunday. The stars here are a couple of your B movie cowboy stars, Johnny Mack Brown and Tex Ritter. Brown plays Blaze Barker, a man who was cheated out of his land and framed for it, so he's just spent two years in prison. Now he's gotten out and wants to clear his name and get his land back, but of course the bad guys are still there and Blaze, being a parolee, isn't allowed to carry a gun. Thankfully he finds a friend Fargo (Tex Ritter) who can carry and is willing to do the shooting for the both of them. Of course, Fargo is really an undercover US Marshal which explains why he's so willing to get to the truth. Standard B western plot points follow. Jennifer Holt, sister of actor Tim from The Magnificent Ambersons and other big stuff, plays the girl who's waited two years for Blaze, while Mitchum plays bad guy Ben Slocum.
Although I wouldn't call it a Christmas movie, a family movie that does have some scenes set at Christmas is Room for One More, which will be showing up on TCM at 8:15 PM Sunday. Cary Grant stars as George Rose, an urban planner with wife Anna (his real life wife Betsy Drake) and three children. Anna irritated George to no end by taking in stray animals, and goes one step further when she and the rest of the PTA go on a tour of the local orphanage. The administrator (Lurene Tuttle) suggests that the Rose household would be perfect for one of the orphanage's difficult foster cases, and older girl named Jane (Iris Mann). Anna accepts without even consulting George, which I'd think should be grounds for divorce, but George is so henpecked he buckles under. Somehow, though, Anna has an unrealistically easy time with Jane to the point that Jane freaks out at the idea that her time with the Roses won't be extended. And then to compound problems, Anna takes in another foster case, a young boy who had polio and spent so much time in hospitals he won't talk with people and didn't learn to read. Can the family muddle through all this? Well, it's a family-friendly movie, so yes. But it's all so damn syrupy….