Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 21-27, 2015. This week sees Christmas, so we've got a lot of movies appropriate for the season. However, there are other things, such as another night of Star of the Month Frank Sinatra as well as this month's Guest Programmer. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with this week's Silent Sunday Nights selection, the 1925 version of Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ. I presume you know the story. Judah Ben-Hur (Ramon Novarro) is a Jewish man in Roman Judea who was a childhood friend of the Roman Messala (Francis X. Bushman). They're grown up now and Messala is parading the Roman legions through Judea, when an accident causes a brick to fall from Ben-Hur's house getting him arrested and made a galley slave. Ben-Hur wants to find his family, but also gain a measure of revenge on Messala, which ultimately comes in the chariot race scene. Meanwhile, his sister Esther (May McAvoy) has fallen in with a supposed Messiah who is of course Jesus although they didn't quite recognize Jesus' importance 2000 years ago. The cinematography, including the iconic chariot race, is impressive, while there's an interesting use of tinted film as well as two-strip Technicolor.
TCM is running a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock movies on Tuesday morning and afternoon even though it's not his birthday (that's in August). The day begins at 6:00 AM with perhaps Hitch's most atypical Hollywood movie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The Smiths, played by Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard, are a happily married couple with the quirk that they like the spar verbally. When she asks him if he'd marry her all over again, he says of course, never thinking he'll have to answer the question for real. But then a justice of the peace from her home town shows up to say that because of a legal technicality, the Smiths are not in fact married. (Have they ever heard of a common-law marriage?) And this time Mr. Smith hesitates before trying win back his wife, which leads her to spite him for the rest of the movie while he tries to woo her all over again. It's a straight-up screwball comedy, made by Hitchcock as a favor for Lombard who wanted to work with him.
This week we get this month's TCM Guest Programmer: Tina Fey, the comic actress who can see Russia from her house. She has selected four of her favorite movies, and will be presenting them with TCM host Robert Osborn on Tuesday in prime time.
First up, at 8:00 PM, is Desk Set, in which computer whiz Spencer Tracy brings havoc to the research library run by Katharine Hepburn while the two fall in love along the way;
At 10:00 PM you can catch My Favorite Wife with Irene Dune playing a woman presumed lost who returns from being missing all those years just as her husband (Cary Grant) is about to remarry.
Struggling actress Marsha Mason sublets half of her apartment to struggling actor Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl at 11:45 PM; and
Vintage actors present a look at the threadbare MGM studio while presenting clips from classic MGM musicals in That's Entertainment! at 1:45 AM
Frank Sinatra returns for another round of his movies as TCM's Star of the Month, with the first feature being one I haven't recommended before: Miracle of the Bells, at 8:45 PM Wednesday. Fred MacMurray plays Bill, a Hollywood press agent who discovers actress Olga (Alida Valli, billed only by surname). She gets a big part in a movie, and looks to be on the way to becoming a success. But along the way, something happens: she dies before the movie can be released, and the studio is unrurprisingly reluctant to release it. Olga wanted to be buried in her hometown, and Bill takes her body there for the burial, but makes an interesting request of his own. He asks the local parish priest (that's Sinatra) and all the other churches in town, to ring their church bells for three days to remember Olga. This, combined with a possible miracle, brings Olga's death and the town to national attention, and perhaps the movie will be released after all.
Frank Sinatra's movies don't continue into Thursday morning this week because Thursday is Christmas Eve, which means a bunch of Christmas movies on TCM. The day starts with one of the more unique Christmas movies you'll see, Bush Christmas at 5:15 AM. The "bush" here means the Australian Outback, with Christmas coming at midsummer. A group of kids riding their horses home from school run into a couple of men who don't want anybody to know about their presence. The kids inadvertently let on that the father of one of them has a nice new horse, and when that horse and her foal go missing, the kids know the two men are in fact horse thieves. So without telling their parents, the kids go off in search of the horse thieves finding adventure and danger along the way. The kids are resourceful and even though there's danger, you know they'll win out in the end. Still, it's a well-made story and an interesting look at a place and time we don't normally see in the movies.
Prime time Thursday night on TCM kicks off with one of my favorite Christmas movies, The Bishop's Wife at 8:00 PM. The (Episcopal) bishop is played by David Niven, and his wife by Loretta Young. He's trying to get a new cathedral built, but money isn't coming in. It also doesn't help that his relationship with his wife seems to be suffering somewhat, so he prays for guidance, and gets sent the angel Dudley (Cary Grant). Dudley, for his part, isn't particularly interested in getting the bishop the money for his cathedral, at least not directly. Instead, he plans to teach the bishop, and everybody else in town while he's at it, the true meaning of Christmas. And what a bunch of townsfolk we have with character actors like James Gleason, Elsa Lanchester, and Monty Woolley. Dudley finds himself a bit too interested in the bishop's wife, but he's going to get sent on another assignment soon enough.
Christmas is this week, and even FXM is getting into the Christmas spirit. On Thursday in prime time, they're having four consecutive airings of the 1951 classic version of A Christmas Carol, at 7:00 PM, 9:00 PM, 11:00 PM, and 1:00 AM Friday. However, these airings will have some commercial breaks. There's another airing on FXM Retro at 1:30 PM Friday which I think shouldn't have commercial interruptions unless FXM have edited the print. Of course you know the story; Ebenezer Scrooge (played here by Alastair Sim) treats his employees including Bob Cratchit (Mervyn Johns) like crap, not even letting them go home early on Christmas Eve. But then his business partner Jacob Marley dies, and the spirits of Christmases past, present, and future all visit Ebenezer to show him what a mess he's made of his life, which puts the Christmas spirit into him. God bless us, every one.
If you'd like another fantasy on FXM Retro, you're in luck, as they're showing The Blue Bird several times this week, including 1:35 PM Monday and 1:30 PM Thursday. Temple plays Mytyl, the daughter of a woodcutter living in some middle-of-nowhere forest cottage in Germany hundreds of years ago. Mytyl is a bit of a brat, and not happy about having been born into a life of grinding poverty. When she goes to sleep, however, she has a dream in which she's visited by the fairy Berylune (Jessie Ralph). Berylune takes Mytyl and her brother Tytyl on a voyage into the past, present, and future (sound familiar) on a search for the elusive Blue Bird of Happiness. Like Scrooge, Mytyl learns that perhaps happiness can be found right at home. In addition to elements of the Scrooge story, this film is also reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, since the Judy Garland film came out the previous year.
If you want something not quite so Christmassy, you could watch Bugsy, airing at 3:40 AM Friday on Encore Classics. The title, of course, refers to Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (Warren Beatty), the New York-born Jewish gangster who goes out to Los Angeles to check on the mob's western operations, which is how he gets into the Hollywood set and meets future mistress Virginia Hill (Annette Benning) and actor George Raft (Joe Mantegna). Part of the business of being out there involves going over to a sleepy little desert city called Las Vegas to check on the operations of a casino there. Siegel realizes that with the building of the Hoover Dam which supplies hydroelectric power, Las Vegas is going to become the place to stop in the desert, and gets the idea to build a glamorous casino, which eventually resulted in the Flamingo. But of course there's that pesky mob business that results in him being brought to trial on murder charges for carrying out a mob hit.
If the message of Christmas is about the word of God being made man, then perhaps another appropriate movie for the season might be God Told Me To, at 2:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Michael LoBianco plays Nichols, a devoutly Catholic New York City cop who is extremely troubled by a series of murders being committed in his city. No, they don't have a serial killer; instead, when they catch the suspects, all of them give the same motive for why they committed the murders: God told me to. Needless to say, this is troubling, so Nichols investigates and hears whispers about a man named Phillips and a possible immaculate conception and a cult around the guy, whom I suppose you could conclude might just be the Antichrist, or maybe not. This interesting low-budget flick includes in its cast 1930s actress Sylvia Sidney, as well as an early appearance from Andy Kauffman.