Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 17-23, 2012. The Packers are winning the NFC North by beating the Chicago team today, so everybody here will be excited after the victory. Why not calm down a bit by watching some good movies? It's the last full week before Christmas, so there are more Christmas movies than in the previous few weeks. Heck, it might not even be the last full week, and TCM is celebrating that fact as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I'm recommending this week's Silent Sunday Night feature on TCM, because I don't think I've recommended it before. That movie is the 1925 version of The Unholy Three, airing at midnight Monday (ie. 11:00 tonight LFT). (The movie was remade as a talkie, and I believe I recommended that when Lon Chaney was part of Summer Under the Stars.) Lon Chaney stars here as a ventriloquist who is part of a carnival sideshow along with strongman Victor McLaglen; a midget, and the girl (Mae Busch). Part of the act is actually a con job, with Busch pickpocketing the unsuspecting patrons. Chaney gets a bizarre idea for a more lucrative con act, however. He'll open up a pet store, use his ventriloquism to make it look like the birds can talk, and then when the rich buyers complain the birds aren't talking, send over the help to case the joint while dealing with the non-talking birds. What could go wrong in a heist movie? You can probably figure that one out yourself. The plot is nuts, but Lon Chaney is always worth watching.
Some of the yutzes here will say I don't engage in enough hagiolatry of our military, so for those of you, here's a movie worth watching: Destination Tokyo, airing at 8:00 PM Monday on TCM. Cary Grant is an odd casting choice for a submarine commander in a straight-up drama, especially one made during the war in 1943. (Operation Petticoat is much lighter.) But there he is, leading his crew into battle against the Japanese, dealing with their Zero planes, their carriers, and a daring behind the lines raid. John Garfield and Alan Hale are also in the crew, playing some of the usual archetypes you see in submarine movies. There's a lot of stuff here that you'd see in later submarine movies, but this is one of the earlier ones, so not everything had become a cliché yet. There's a piece on TCM about Cary Grant narrated by Tony Curtis in which Crutis says this is the movie that got him to join the Navy, and ever since seeing the movie, he wanted to work with Cary Grant (which he got the opportunity to do in Operation Petticoat).
Robert Mitchum was born in August, so he doesn't normally get a birthday salute on TCM thanks to Summer Under the Stars. Still, TCM is spending a lot of time with Mitchum on Wednesday morning and afternoon. The first of those films is one of Mitchum's earlier movies, Undercurrent, at 6:00 AM Wednesday. Mitchum isn't the star here; that's Katharine Hepburn (she and Mitchum didn't get along, but that's another story). She plays the still unmarried daughter of college professor Edmund Gwenn, and since she's pushing 40, she really needs a husband. So when she meets industiralist Robert Taylor and he woos her, this immediately sweeps her off her feet. Of course, he's not quite Mr. Right, as he's got some deep dark secrets that are only going to come out as the movie progresses. He's given to rage, and dammit, that rage might actually be murderous! Mitchum plays Taylor's brother. A good enough movie, although the "Mr. Right with a dark secret" cliché is one that's been used in far too many movies.
If you don't like Robert Mitchum, you could always switch over to what's left of the Fox Movie Channel, and watch Jumpin' Jack Flash at 11:00 AM. (It'll also be on Encore at 10:50 AM Saturday.) Whoopi Goldberg plays one of her first starring roles as a bank employee in 1980s New York to whom nothing ever happens. Well, not quite; one day she gets a message on her computer at work from somebody calling himself "Jumpin' Jack Flash", who claims to be in Big Trouble. At first Goldberg doesn't know what to believe, but she eventually comes to discover that Jack is actually a British spy in the Soviet Union who can't make contact with the UK, and needs her help to get him out. She agrees to help, even though it's going to get her in trouble not only with her bosses, but even more with the various countries' spies and governments. There are a bunch of famous names in smaller roles, such as Jon Lovitz and Phil Hartman as fellow bank employees.
Whoopi Goldberg is an obvious at comedy; somebody you might not think of when it comes to comedy is Errol Flynn. Flynn got a chance to do comedy, however, in Never Say Goodbye, which is airing at 12:45 AM Friday on TCM. Flynn stars as an artist who, because he drew lots of beautiful models, ran afoul of his wife (Eleanor Parker). They're divorced with a young daughet who wants them to get back together. However, there are some problems, such as those models who keep competing for Flynn's attention, and another man in Parker's life. Further complicating things is that the daughter was writing letters to a Marine (Forrest Tucker) during the war, but the Marine thought they were from the mother (Dad suggested the daughter send a picture of Mom to the Marine), and fell in love with the mother and wants to meet her!
I mentioned August birthday boy Robert Mitchum earlier. Another August birthday is Myrna Loy, who is getting honored all morning and afternoon Tuesday on TCM. That salute ends at 6:45 PM with the documentary Myrna Loy: So Nice to Come Home To, which is a nice introduction to Loy for those of you who don't know too much about her. Before that, however, all of the movies TCM is showing Tuesday star not only Loy, but her often leading man William Powell. They made six Thin Man movies together, and TCM is showing five of them, starting with the original 1934 The Thin Man at 6:30 AM. I also like the second one, After the Thin Man, which is airing at 8:00 AM. After the Thin Man has a young James Stewart in the cast as one of the suspects; this was in 1936 before he really became a star. It's also got the lovely Elissa Landi as the young woman who asks Nick and Nora Charles for help. She retired young from movies and died in 1949 not too far from where I live. In fact, she's got a street named after her, even though they misspelled it.
Wednesday in prime time through to Thursday at 8:00 PM is given over to TCM's Star of the Month Barbara Stanwyck. This week begins with several of her darker movies, with the first being Double Indemnity at 8:00 PM, the first showing on TCM in quite some time. One of Stanwyck's movies I don't believe I've recommended before is Cry Wolf, which you can catch at 10:45 AM Thursday. Stanwyck at the beginning of the movie finds out that her husband has died, and goes to her husband's old family house, only for his relatives not to let her see the body, since he never told them about the marriage. This, combined with some suspicions the husband had about his half-brother (Errol Flynn) trying to cheat him out of a bunch of money, leads Stanwyck to believe that maybe her husband was murdered, or even worse, is still alive but being held against his will. This latter becomes a bigger suspicion when the husband's sister starts telling secrets about the laboratory in the house.... It's kind of silly, but a whole lot of fun.
Some of you may believe that nonsense that supposedly the world is going to come to an end on December 21, 2012. TCM has decided to have a little bit of fun with that, by showing a bunch of post-apocalyptic movies all morning and afternoon on Friday December 21. I know I've mentioned Panic in Year Zero!, which is airing at 4:00 PM Friday, before, but it's another movie that's a lot of fun even if it isn't very good, and deserves another mention. Ray Milland stars as the father in a family that's about to set out on vacation one Saturday morning. They get a few miles out of town when they see some explosions, which they realize are nuclear bombs that have gone off. World War III has started! Milland realizes what's going on, and realizes that he has to get the supplies for his family to prepare them for a long, long spell in the wilderness -- before anybody else can get at all those supplies! After all, in the post-apocalypse, societal norms are bound to break down. Jean Hagen (Lina Lamont from Singin' in the Rain) plays the mother, and Frankie Avalon plays the teenaged son.
If you remember the Olivia Newton-John/John Travolta movie Two of a Kind, you'll remember the song "Twist of Fate". By a strange twist of fate, TCM is running a movie called Twist of Fate this Saturday at 9:15 AM. Ginger Rogers, working in England since her career in the US was cooling off by the mid-1950s, plays a third-rate entertainer in love with a businessman (Stanley Baker) who promises her he's in the process of getting a divorce with his wife, but is of course lying. He's also lying about the nature of his business, which is in fact criminal. So Rogers runs off and to spite Baker takes up with another man, not realizing that he too is a criminal. Into all this comes a third criminal, thief Herbert Lom. Baker vows revenge, thinking Rogers has run off with Lom, but Lom has other ideas. The Brits made a lot of B movies in the 1950s that don't show up very much on this side of the Atlantic, but some of them are quite interesting.
Finally, we have another bunch of Christmas movies on Sunday morning and afternoon. I've recommended a lot of them before, but there are quite a few Christmas movies that are worth watching every year. The day kicks off at 6:30 AM with The Great Rupert, in which a squirrel helps down-on-his-luck entertainer Jimmy Durante and his family become successful again.
At 10:00 AM, TCM is showing All Mine To Give, which I think I recommended a few weeks back and which I've definitely mentioned in previous years;
Noon sees Bundle of Joy, which is the 1950s musical remake of Bachelor Mother
Another orphan shows up in the John Wayne version of Three Godfathers, in which he plays one of three outlaws in the old west who come into possession of a baby, at 4:00 PM;
Dick Van Dyke shows his flair for comedy once again in Fitzwilly at 6:00 PM; and
Who couldn't love The Bishop's Wife at 8:00 PM?
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