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TCM's lineup on Monday night is a bunch of movies about crimes set around Christmas. One of the more interesting ones is Cover Up, which will be on at 3:45 AM Tuesday. Dennis O'Keefe plays Sam Donovan, an insurance investigator who has gotten news just before Christmas that a policy holder in a small town has died. The local medical examiner calls it a suicide, but the man's policy had a double indemnity clause in case of murder, so Sam goes to investigate. On eht way there he meets Anita (Barbara Britton), daughter of the local banker Weatherby (Art Baker), and a bit of a romance develops. But when Sam gets to town, he finds that everybody seems to be stonewalling him about what happened to the dead guy, especially Sheriff Best (William Bendix). Not only that, but nobody in town liked the dead guy and they're all apparently quite happy that the guy died, and if it was murder, well, who cares. Still, justice is supposed to be done, and Sam's going to have to solve the case. An odd little movie that's interesting because of the strange plot.

 

If you want a more feel-good movie, there are a lot of those in the run-up to Christmas, such as An Affair to Remember, at 7:00 AM Monday on MovieMax (part of the Cinemax package).  Cary Grant plays Nicky, a playboy with a worldwide reputation who's making the news because he's about to get married to a rich heiress, taking a transatlantic cruise to get back to his fiancΓ©e.  Terry (Deborah Kerr) is of much more modest means, and she too is on the same cruise as Nicky.  They meet and strike up a relationship, and it's clear that she's the right woman for Nicky, especially after meeting his grandmother.  But Nicky has a lot of personal issues, so to see if their love can stand the test of time, they decide that they're going to wait six months and then meet at the observation tower of the Empire State Building.  Nicky shows up a few minutes early, and Terry is going to go, but she gets hit by a car, which Nicky can't see since he's 80-something floors up.  Terry still loves Nicky, but can Nicky love her in her wheelchair?

 

Tuesday night on TCM brings another night of Treasures from the Disney Vault, presented by Leonard Maltin.    This time out, the theme is sports, with a batch of features and animated shorts looking at various sports.  Probably the most famous of the night's movies is The Absent-Minded Professor which comes following one short at 8:00 PM.  Fred MacMurray plays the college professor who develops "flubber", a substance known for its antigravitational and comedic properties.
Kurt Russell discovers that PEDs are the key to sporting success, although it's not handled as horrible cheating, in The Strongest Man in the World at 2:00 AM Wednesday.
And, there's Gus and a football short in the 4:00 AM Wednesday slot.  Gus is a mule (Francis was unavailable) who is brought on by a college coach to be a place-kicker.  Perhaps Ron Zook could learn something about football from these movies.

 

Carole Lombard was known for all those screwball comedies, but she wanted people to see that she really could act, which is why she made movies like In Name Only, which will be on TCM at 2:00 PM Wednesday.  Lombard plays Julie, a small-town widow who one day happens to run into Alec (Cary Grant).  The two hit it off, and you could see them becoming romantically involved.  But there's one minor problem, which is that Alec is already married to Maida (Kay Francis).  However, it's an extremely unhappy marriage for Alec, and you suspect for Maida too, since she married Alec for his money and social status.  But she's convinced his parents (Charles Coburn and Nella Walker) that she's the right one for him, so there's no way she's going to grant him a divorce.  Instead, she goes off to Paris to live it up while lying about getting a divorce.  Alec has been stringing Julie along, believing there really will be a divorce, but what if Julie no longer believes it?  And then things take a melodramatic turn....

 

TCM is running a bunch of Irene Dunne movies on Thursday, including No Other Woman at 9:00 AM.  Dunne plays Anna, in love with steel mill employee Jim (Charles Bickford).  She dreams of a better life, and she saves up the couple's money by running a boarding house.  Lucky for her one of the boarders, Joe (Eric Linden), has come up with a process for turning the mill's waste into a dye.  She convinces Jim to put their savings into a dye factory and manage the factory, and it becomes a big success.  But Jim's business duties take him away from home and into contact with less than virtuous ladies like Margot (Gwili Andre).  She convinces Jim to get a divorce, but since they didn't have no-fault divorces back then and Anna refuses to grant a divorce, Jim has to frame Anna to try and get a divorce.  It results in one of those ridiculous Hollywood courtroom scenes, and since we know Irene Dunne is so perfect, the case is going to go her way.

 

If you want something no so Christmassy, you could switch over to StarzEncore Westerns and watch The Shootist at 12:19 PM Thursday.  John Wayne, in his final film, plays JB Books, an aging gunfighter who shows up in Carson City, NV, one day around the turn of the century looking for Dr. Hostetler (James Stewart).  The good doctor has some unsurprising bad news: Books has terminal cancer, and is going to die an ugly death in the near future.  So Books looks for a place to die with dignity, picking the rooming house run by the widow Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall).  But Bond's son Gillom (Ron Howard) recognizes Books, and word gets out about the dying Levine's presence.  There are any number of people who would like to be the one to kill the great gunfighter, and others who want to make money on it, so Books may not get that chance to die with dignity.  Books has to figure out another way to go.  Watch for John Carradine as the mortician, and Harry Morgan as the sheriff, among others.

 

In between being a crooner and his foray into hard-boiled noir, Star of the Month Dick Powell made some light non-musical comedies like Christmas in July, which will be on TCM at 8:00 Thursday.  This one isn't really a Christmas movie in spite of the title.  Instead, it stars Powell as Jimmy McDonald, a clerk in the head office of a coffee company who has the idea of getting rich by entering radio contests and winning one of them.  The current contest is to come up with a slogan for a rival coffee company, headed by Mr. Maxford (Raymond Walburn).  The jury is deadlocked, and Jimmy is sure he's going to win, as he tells his fiancΓ©e Betty (Ellen Drew).  Since the deadlock is becoming national news, a couple of Jimmy's friends decide to play a practical joke on him, sending him a telegram stating that he's won the contest and the grand prize of $25,000, quite a lot of money in 1941.  The money changes not just Jimmy, who uses it to by small gifts for everybody on his block who needs the practical things he buys them, but also other people's perception of him, as he gets a big promotion at work solely for winning the contest.  Except, of course, that he hasn't won, and when Maxford finds out that the jury is still deadlocked, how will Jimmy pay the money back?

 

A movie that's going to be back on FXM Retro after a layoff is Sierra Baron, which you can catch at 4:35 AM Thursday.  The setting is California just after Mexico has surrendered in the Mexican-American War, with California becoming part of the United States but the question of what would happen to the people there still an open one.  The Delmontes are an old noble family with a lot of land, and Miguel (Rick Jason) is quite angry when he finds out that his father has been killed and there are Anglo settlers on his land.  So he returns to the estate which his sister Felicis (Rita Gam) has been holding down.  He finds that a speculator, Rufus Bynum (Steve Brodie) is busy selling land to settlers, expecting that the Mexicans there will be dispossessed by the treaty to be signed after the war.  Into all this walks gunman Jack (Brian Keith), who winds up taking the Delmontes' side on this one.  An interesting story, although history would overtake the events depicted once gold was discovered and a much larger wave of settlers came.

 

There are several Christmas movies over the course of the weekend, and one that I probably mentioned last Christmas but is always worth a mention at Christmas time is Bush Christmas, which TCM will be showing at 8:30 AM Sunday.  The setting is Australia in 1945, specifically a sleepy little valley in the Australian outback.  A group of children, riding home from school on their horses just before the Christmas break, run into a couple of men who don't want their presence known.  They're horse thieves, and one of the kids stupidly lets on that his father has a really nice horse.  So of course the thieves steal it, and the kids, who feel they can't tell their parents they screwed up, get a bunch of supplies and head out after the thieves, only telling their parents they're going camping.  Of course the kids turn out to be resourceful and eventually find the criminals in an abandoned mining town, but danger still lurks for them.  It's a rather different Christmas movie, but a good one for the whole family.

 

For those of you who want newer movies, I'll mention something that's only 20 years old: the 1998 version of Great Expectations, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 5:21 AM Friday.  This is based on the famous novel by Charles Dickens, but the action has been moved to closer to the present day and to the United States.  Ethan Hawke plays the Pip character, here renamed Finn, as an adult, and Gwyneth Paltrow plays Estella, Finn's love interest who is icy to him because she's being raised by bitter Miss Dinsmoor (not Havisham as in the book; the character is played by Anne Bancroft).  After growing up on Florida's Gulf Coast, Finn gets word that a benefactor has left him a substantial sum of money and he is to go to New York, where Estella has also wound up, she constantly playing hard to get with him.  Why is Estella treating Finn like this?  And is Dinsmoor his benefactor, and why?  Well, you probably know the story already.  Robert Dr Niro plays the escaped convict.  And a lot of the language is rather non-Dickensian.

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