Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of December 2-8, 2019. Depending upon what part of the country you're in, you may be getting snowed under. So if you can afford taking a day off work, why not do so with some great old movies? This being the start of a new month, we've also got some new spotlights for the month that I'll be mentioning, including the Star of the Month on TCM. It's not just TCM, however; there's good stuff on several of the other movie channels that I've used my good taste to select. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
One of the spotlights on TCM this month is remakes. Every Monday in December, TCM is going to run double features of the original version of a movie followed by its remake (although on December 30 it's going to be movies with multiple remakes, so we get to see three versions of each movie). This first Monday in the month sees silent movies that got a remake at some point in the sound era. Although, to be fair in one case it's two movies that share a title: the silent version of The Sea Hawk (2:45 AM Tuesday) bears little plot similarity to Errol Flynn's 1940 The Sea Hawk (5:00 AM).
It may be hard to believe, but it's been a third of a century since the release of the original Crocodile Dundee. The movie is going to be on this week, at 7:29 PM Monday on StarzEncore Classics. American reporter Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) hears a story about a man in the Australian outback who survived a hellacious crocodile attack, so her paper sends her to the Australian outback to get the story. She goes to the town of Walkabout Creek and meets Mick Dundee (Paul Hogan), the owner of a safari park and the survivor of the aforementioned attack. As part of getting the story, she wants him to take her into the outback, even though he says that's no place for a "Sheila". Sure enough, he has to save her life in the outback, and she relays him by offering to bring him to America. "Crocodile" Dundee, of course, turns out to be a complete fish (or should we say crocodile) out of water, with the culture clash providing much of the film's humor. But Dundee finds himself falling in love with Sue along the way.
It's time for another airing of To Be or Not to Be, which will be on TCM at 12:45 PM Tuesday. Josef and Maria Tura (Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, in her final film before her tragic death) are Poland's most prominent stage actors on either side of the Nazi invasion of September 1939. One of Maria's biggest fans is Polish airman Stanislav Sobinski (a young Robert Stack), who gets up during Josef's recitation of Hamlet's soliloquy to see Maria, who's playing Queen Gertrude. Meanwhile, Josef just knows somebody is seeing Maria, but not who. With the Nazi invasion, Sobinski goes off to London to be with the Free Polish air corps. But when he hears that a “Polish” professor about to go on a secret mission knows nothing about Maria Tura, he knows there's a traitor in his midst. So he has to parachute into occupied Poland to stop the professor, with the Turas who support the resistance being part of this plot – meaning that Sobinski is going to see Maria again, and Josef is going to find out who's been seeing his wife. Very funny now, the movie was sadly a box office failure at the time in part because of Lombard's untimely death and in part because audiences weren't ready for this sort of comedy in the early days of World War II.
You'd be surprised how many relatively recent movies I've got listed this week. In fact, one of the oldest I'm recommending is Wild Boys of the Road, on TCM at 3:00 PM Wednesday. Eddie (Frankie Darro) and Tommy (Edwin Phillips) are two high-school students living relatively middle-class lives, although that's about to change. There's a depression on, and Tommy's father has died. Meanwhile, Eddie's father is about to get laid off, meaning both families are going to be entering poverty. So Eddie and Tommy get the idea to hop a train and run off… somewhere, in search of work, leaving their respective families with one fewer mouth to feed. On the train, they run into fellow hobo Sally (Dorothy Coonan, who would soon marry the movie's director William Wellman), who has an aunt in Chicago who might be able to help her out. The aunt can't, so it's back to the trains with all the other hobos and concomitant violence. Tommy loses his legs in an accident, while Tommy gets a job that's actually part of an illegal Mob operation that's going to bring Tommy in contact with the law. Another of Warner Bros.' excellent social commentary movies from the era.
A movie that a search of the site claims I haven't recommended in a couple of years is The Proud Ones, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 11:05 PM Wednesday. Robert Ryan plays Cass Silver, who is the marshal of a Kansas town with a whole bunch of the standard western tropes. The railroad has recently come, so it's a terminus for all the cattlemen driving their cattle to the meat markets. Among the cowboys is Thad Anderson (Jeffrey Hunter), who has a past with Cass in that Cass shot Thad's father many years ago. That has understandably held a grudge, but perhaps the marshal was right when it came to the shooting. Cass is also that stereotype of the aging lawman who might not be able to do the job much longer and has a woman in his wife, fiancée Sally (Virginia Mayo), who wants him to settle down. There's also the saloon owner, John Barrett (Robert Middleton), who wants the town to remain “open”, so he's got good reason to want to get rid of Cass. Despite treading well-worn territory, it does what it does quite well.
This being the first week of the month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM, and this time out that star is Joan Blondell, who lit up a whole bunch of 1930s movies, especially when she was paired with James Cagney. Her movies are going to be on every Thursday in prime time. This first Thursday of the month looks at her early films. She and Cagney both have smaller roles in Sinners' Holiday (8:00 PM Thursday), but everybody saw the chemistry between them right away which is why they both went on to big things. In fact, the pair would soon be the stars of Blonde Crazy (11:00 PM) and The Crowd Roars (Friday at 3:30 AM).
If you like "little" movies that don't get much attention, then you'll probably be interested in Nobody's Fool, which you can see at 12:40 PM Friday on Epix. Paul Newman plays Sully, who in many ways hasn't been very successful in life. He abandoned his wife and son many years back, rents a room from his old teacher Miss Beryl (Jessica Tandy) and does gray-market construction work, currently suing fomer boss Carl Roebuck (Bruce Willis) for back wages from a work injury. Carl, for his part, isn't treating his wife Toby (Melanie Griffith) well, so Sully is more or less flirting with her. Life goes on aimlessly like this, until one day Peter (Dylan Walsh) shows up. Peter is the son that Sully abandoned all those years ago, and has a son of his own, making Sully a grandfather. Peter, unsurprisingly, is incredibly resentful towards his father, while Sully finally begins to feel that perhaps now would be a good time to start making amends for having screwed up his life so badly. Not that it's going to be easy with everything going on....
TCM is running some Richard Burton movies on Friday in prime time, including Look Back in Anger, which will be on at 10:00 PM. Burton plays Jimmy, one of the “angry young men” of late 1950s Britain, making a meager living running a stall at the local market and living with his wife Allison (Mary Ure) and best friend Cliff (Gene Raymond). Jimmy is at times abusive toward Allison, ranting about the middle class, and one of those abusive moments sends Allison to the doctor, where she learns that she's pregnant. She's terrified of what Jimmy is going to do when she tells him, but this being the late 1950s there's no way she's getting an abortion. Allison decides she needs some emotional support, calling on her actress friend Helena (Claire Bloom) to come for a visit. Helena tries to get Allison to move back in with her parents. The only woman Jimmy really loves is his childhood nanny Tanner (Edith Evans), but she's old now and likely to die soon. Very well made, even if the main character is thoroughly unlikeable.
A movie I think I've never mentioned here before is Capote, which will be on Flix at 10:00 AM Saturday. You can probably guess from the title that this is about the writer Truman Capote, who is played here by Philip Seymour Hoffman. In 1959, Capote was writing for the New Yorker when he heard about the murder of the Clutter family out in Kansas. Capote got on the story, and wrote what eventually became the book In Cold Blood, which was later turned into a movie. Of course, to write the book, he had to research the case, which required going out to Kansas, which was originally done in pursuit of an article for the New Yorker, Capote going with his friend and assistant Harper Lee (yes, that Harper Lee, played by Catherine Keener). Capote interviews the people involved with the case, most notably the two accused killers, Perry (Clifton Collins) and Dick (Mark Pellegrino), even developing a rather unorthodox emotional attachment to Perry, trying to draw out their appeals so that he can get the best material for his book.
Following Capote, at noon Saturday you can switch over to TCM and see 'Til We Meet Again. George Brent plays Dan Hardesty, a man who committed murder in the US and then fled across the Pacific. He's been caught, however, and being escorted back to the States by police detective Burke (Pat O'Brien), where he's going to face a death sentence. He plans on escaping, of course. But on board the ship he meets wealthy Joan Ames (Merle Oberon). She's got a terminal illness, and has decided to go on this one last cruise with her friend Bonny (Geraldine Fitzgerald) to have one more good time in life. The two fall in love, although each of them keeps their real back story a secret from the other. This despite the fact that Dan should have that detective as his shadow, and also has friend on the ship (Binnie Barnes and Frank McHugh) who were going to help him escape at one of the ports. If all of this sounds familiar, it's because this is a remake of an earlier movie, One Way Passage.
I think I mentioned last month that The Man Who Came to Dinner was on TCM as part of the salute to Star of the Month Bette Davis, but that I was saving it because it would be on in December as part of the Christmas movie lineup. That showing is coming on Sunday at 1:30 PM. The Stanleys (Billie Burke and Grant Mitchell) are a Midwestern couple who are a bit status-conscious. So when noted critic Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) comes to town in a lecture tour, they're thrilled at the prospect of having him to their house for dinner. Unfortunately, he slips on the ice and fractures his hip, leaving him confined to a wheelchair on the ground floor of their house. He basically takes over the house, with secretary Maggie (Bette Davis) arranging for all sorts of visits. However, she falls in love with local journalist Bert (Richard Travis), which means Whiteside might lose his factotum. So he brings in another woman (Ann Sheridan) to try to win Bert away from Maggie. Of course, he's already able to walk, but is staying in the wheelchair because reasons.