Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of December 19-25, 2016. It's Christmas this week, but of course there are a lot of good non-Christmas movies on the schedule. I've used my good taste to select a bunch of movies that I know all of you will like. In addition to TCM's Star of the Month Myrna Loy and a Christmas movie or two, we get this month's Guest Programmer, and some silents and animation. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
People who want comedy with their westerns may enjoy The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 8:50 AM Monday. Goldie Hawn plays the Duchess, except of course that she's not a real duchess. She's Amanda a saloon singer in 1880s San Francisco who wants an easier life, which she thinks she can get by becoming a Mormon's plural wife; after all there are other wives to take up the slack. So Amanda steals a bag of money from the “Dirtwater Fox”, Charlie (played by George Segal). He's a card sharp and has swindled some conmen out of a large sum of money, not that Amanda knows how much money is in that bag when she takes it. But she heads for Utah with that bag, with Charlie not far behind, on his faithful if not very competent horse Blackjack. Although Amanda thinks she may still want to marry into the Mormons, Charlie has some other ideas about what to do.
If you like either the Jeanne Eagels or Bette Davis versions of The Letter, you may be interested in The Unfaithful, airing at 2:30 PM Monday. (In fact, it's airing right after the Bette Davis version.) Ann Sheridan plays Chris, a woman who kills an intruder in her house, claiming it was in self defense. The only thing is, it turns out she knew the guy. He was a sculptor, and she had a fling with him a few years back during the war when her husband Bob (Zachary Scott) was off fighting in that war. Chris obviously doesn't want her husband to know she was less than faithful during those long years. A bigger problem is that during the war, she posed for a bust the sculptor did, and the sculptor's widow still has that bust; obviously, if knowledge of that bust becomes public, Bob will put two and two together. Lew Ayres plays the Hunters' lawyer, trying to help Chris without giving too much away to Bob, while Eve Arden gets another juicy role as a gossipy cousin.
Monday night sees this month's TCM Guest Programmer Amy Heckerling, the writer-director probably best known for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She's selected four of her favorite movies, and sat down with Ben Mankiewicz to talk about those movies, which will run on Monday night. Those selections are:
The James Cagney gangster movie The Roaring Twenties at 8:00 PM;
James Cagney trying to put on a show in Footlight Parade at 10:00 PM;
Marcelo Mastroianni trying to make a movie in Fellini's 8-1/2 at midnight Tuesday; and
the classic German expressionist silent movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at 2:30 AM.
TCM's monthly spotlight, looking this month at the elderly, continues on Tuesday night. One of this week's films is the great comedy The Sunshine Boys, at 2:00 AM Wednesday. Walther Matthau plays Willy, an actor who probably should have retired years ago. In fact, when he was young he was part of a vaudeville comedy team with Al, and they were legends. But Al retired when his wife died. Still, the team is well enough remembered that a TV director doing a special on American comedy wants to reunite Willy and Al (George Burns) to do one of their classic routines for the show. There's a catch. It turns out that Willy has always had a thing against Al, despite the team's success, and that enmity threatens to scupper the whole reunion. Matthau is very good playing somebody much older than he was in real life, while Burns walked off with an Oscar for his deadpan delivery of one-liners that passively enrages Willy. (The role was originally supposed to go to Jack Benny, but Benny died before the film went into production.) Richard Benjamin plays Willy's nephew and agent.
Wednesday night on TCM brings us another night of Treasures from the Disney Vault, with this installment dealing with a bunch of animal actors. Not just the animated shorts, which of course always had animal characters, but the live-action features. Best known among them is Old Yeller (9:30 PM), with a boy on the frontier getting too emotionally attached to a stray dog.
A movie on FXM Retro that I don't think I've recommended before is Meet Me After the Show, which you can seet at 8:50 AM Sunday. Betty Grable, toward the end of her career, plays Delilah, a dancer who married Jeff (Macdonald Carey) several years ago, but it seems as though the spark has gone out of the marriage. At least for Jeff; he sees her more as a meal ticket. So when his latest show starring Delilah is backed financially by a woman, Delilah gets the idea that Jeff is more interested in that woman than in her. Delilah would actually like to win Jeff back, however. So when she gets into a car accident, she comes up with a brilliant idea, to fake amnesia and run off to Miami and go back to the nightclub scene which is where Jeff discovered her. It's typically screwed up for a musical plot, and this one doesn't have quite the songs that some of Grable's other musicals did, but she certainly shows she could dance.
TCM is giving us a bunch of Ruth Roman movies on Thursday morning and afternoon, including The Window at 4:45 PM. Roman isn't the star here; that honor goes to tragic child actor Bobby Driscoll as little Tommy. Tommy is an inveterate liar, to the point that his parents (Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale) are really worried about him. Anyhow, they live in an apartment in the big city and there's a heat wave going on, so Tommy takes his mattress out onto the fire escape to escape the heat building up inside. He climbs up a floor, and looks into the window of the apartment above him, and sees – a couple (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) strangling a man to death! Tommy tells his parents what he saw, but they understandably don't believe him. And when they make him apologize to the people in the apartment above, they realize they're in danger, and the only way to deal with it is to get rid of Tommy. A really good little movie.
We get more Myrna Loy on Friday, including all six of the Thin Man movies in prime time. I've recommended the first one enough, so I'll mention the second one this week, After the Thin Man, at 9:45 PM Friday on TCM. Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) go to San Francisco to see Nora's Aunt Katherine (Jessie Ralph), which is when they find that Nora's cousin Selma (Elissa Landi) is in trouble. It seems as though her husband Robert has gone missing. Well, Robert has been seeing nightclub singer Polly (Penny Singleton of the Blondie movies, although she's credited here under her birth name of Dorothy McNulty). Robert is also trying to blackmail Selma's old boyfriend David (a very young James Stewart): pay me, and I'll leave Selma and let you have her again. Meanwhile, Polly's boss Dancer (Joseph Calleia) isn't too happy with all that's going on. Robert winds up murdered, and sure enough, everybody but Nick and Nora are suspects. Asta gets an amusing sub-plot about Mrs. Asta's puppies.
Sunday is Christmas, so it's unsurprising that cable channels are showing family-friendly programming. An example of this is the animated An American Tail, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 9:50 AM Sunday. Fievel (voiced by Phillip Glasser) is the son in the Mouskewitz family, a family of Russian mice who are just as affected by the pogroms as the Russian Jews: Russian cats come to harass them. So the Mouskewitzes join a whole bunch of other mouse families to go to America, a land that has no cats and is paved with cheese, or so the legends go. Of course when they get to America they'll find out that's not true; there's [catts] and cheeseheads but they're not edible. And even getting to America is going to be a problem. The family gets separated along the way, and Fievel has to try to find the rest of his family in a country completely alien to him. Listen for the voices of Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn, and Christopher Plummer, among others. And that horrid song “Somewhere Out There”.
As for TCM, they're showing Christmas movies on Christmas Eve, but some good family-friendly movies on Christmas Day itself, such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, at 8:00 PM Sunday. Gary Gooper plays Longfellow Deeds, a small-town poet happily living a modest life. All that is about to change, though, when he learns that an uncle he never knew died, and left him s $20 million inheritance, a sum which we'd all like to day but was that much bigger 80 years ago. Deeds doesn't particularly care for the money, but obviously the people around him do, including the executor of the estate, slimy lawyer Mr. Cedar (veteran character actor Douglas Dumbrille). Other people want the money too, but Deeds' common sense always seems to prevail. And then he meets a farmer whose family farm is failing, and decides to use the money to set up a fund to help the farmer. The lawyers don't like that, and decide to try to have Deeds declared incompetent. Jean Arthur plays Babe, the lawyer sent to cover the story, but she winds up falling in love with Deeds.
Amongst those Christmas-themed movies TCM is showing on Christmas Eve is The Man Who Came to Dinner, at 2:00 AM Sunday. Monty Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside, a famous New York critic who's giving a lecture in Ohio. While there, he has dinner at the house of the social-climbing Stanley family (parents Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke and two children). But on the way out he slips on the steps and breaks his leg, with the doctors saying he mustn't be moved. So the Stanleys set up a room for him and his secretary Maggie (Bette Davis). Sheridan proceeds to make life hell for everybody in the house, but in a very humorous way with zingers. As for poor Maggie, she meets local journalist Bert (Richard Travis) covering the story and falls in love with him, to the point that she'd be comfortable settling down, which of course Sheridan can't have since he'd be lost without her. Sheridan interferes to the point of bringing in a diva actress (Ann Sheridan again) to have her try to romance Bert.