Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 23-29, 2013. This the week that the Green Bay Packers are going to beat the **** out of the Chicago team and in so doing win the NFC North. Before that, however, there's Christmas on Wednesday, so a lot of Christmas movies on TV this week. There's also going to be a programming salute on TCM to Joan Fontaine and Peter O'Toole, both of whom died a week ago. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The Christmas movies are a marathon over on TCM, starting at 6:00 AM Monday with All Mine to Give, about an immigrant family in Wisconsin in the 1850s, in which both the father and mother die, leaving the oldest son to find homes for all of the children on Christmas Eve. That will be followed at 8:00 AM by the first of two versions of Little Women. Based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott, the Monday morning version, from 1933, stars Katharine Hepburn as one of four daughters in a New England father who have to survive with Mother when their father goes off to fight during the Civil War. The story was made into a movie again in 1949, and that version is on at 2:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. The 1949 version stars Elizabeth Taylor and June Allyson as two of the sisters, with a young Peter Lawford playing the love interest next door. Veteran actor C. Aubrey Smith makes his final appearance as Lawford's grandfather.
There are also several Christmas-themed shorts. If you remember all those Andy Hardy movies, you can see the Hardy family offering movie goers Christmas greetings twice; at 11:32 AM Monday (after Love Finds Andy Hardy at 10:00 AM) and again at 2:25 PM Tuesday. Lewis Stone, who played Judge Hardy, returns as himself to offer more holiday greetings at 4:10 PM Tuesday.
For a short that actually has a plot, you could watch Star in the Night at 5:00 AM Wednesday; this one is a retelling of the nativity tale set at a motel in Death Valley in the present day (or at least 195 when it was made).
If you want more movies based on novels from over a century ago, you could watch The Little Princess, which is on the Fox Movie Channel at 10:15 AM Wednesday and repeated at 3:00 AM Thursday. Shirley Temple stars in the title role, as the daughter of Ian Hunter, a Captain in the British Army who leaves her at a boarding school when he's called to fight in the Boer War. Unfortunately for her, Dad is declared missing in action and presumed dead, which means no more money to pay her tuition. Since she'd be an orphan otherwise, she's allowed to stay on at school, but working to earn her keep. Still, she believes Dad is still alive, and spends her free time searching the hospitals of London for her father. Cesar Romero plays a man from India, while Shirley gets to do a song and dance with Arthur Treacher.
Getting back to the Christmas movies on TCM, we've got one that I know I recommended last Christmas, but is worth watching every year: Beyond Tomorrow, at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Three bachelor industrialists (Harry Carey, Charles Winninger, and the aforementioned C. Aubrey Smith) with nothing to do on Christmas eve, decide to try an experiment: leave wallets with nothing but $10 (a nice sum for 1940) and their address on the sidewalk, and see if anybody will return the money. Socialite Helen Vinson takes the money; cowboy singer from Texas Richard Carlson and nice girl Jean Parker return the money. You know the last two ought to fall in love, but tragedy strikes when the industrialists go off on business and get killed ina plane crash. Carlson becomes a successful singer, but is wooed by Vinson. It's up to the ghosts of the industrialists to bring our two lovers back together, but they're only in limbo, and once they get called to heaven, they won't be able to help any more. Even if the premise seems a bit dumb, it's a charming movie.
If you want more schmaltz for Christmas, you could do worse than to watch I'll Be Seeing You, at 11:45 PM Tuedsay on TCM. Ginger Rogers plays a woman who is in prison but for Christmas has been given a couple days' furlough, which she spends with kid family, Shirley Temple and her parents Spring Byington and Tom Tully. On the furlough, she meets soldier Joseph Cotten, who is on leave too, this being the WWII years. He doesn't know she's a prisoner, and at first she doesn't know his secret, which is that he suffers from "anxiety attacks" -- today they'd call it PTSD, but they ddin't have that term back in the 1940s. So they fall in love and begin what is presumably going to be a brief romance as in The Clock, and after Cotten tells Rogers his secret, Rogers tries to keep her return to prison a secret from him, thinking that he seems to be doing better with her around and telling him such a secret now will make things worse. Complications ensue when her sister accidentally spills the beans....
Fred Astaire as Star of the Month brings an end to the Christmas programming on TCM when he shows up in prime time on Christmas night. The first Wednesday of the month had five of Astaire's ten movies with Ginger Rogers; this last Wednesday brings the other five films, including one made ten years after their previous film together, The Barkleys of Broaway, at 3:30 AM Thursday. (It's also the only one of their movies in color.) Fred and Gingre play a couple who are a big success on Broadway in musical comedies. Unfortunately, their private life isn't going quite so well: they're constantly bickering at each other, and there's a playwright (Jacques FranÇois) who thinks Ginger would make an excellent dramatic actress, and is writing a play jusr for her. Eventually, she decides to take him up on the offer, and break up the musical act. Oscar Levant plays the couple's best friend, getting to wisecrack while playing the piano. The movie also has a dance sequence in which Astaire dances with a bunch of pairs of shoes.
You might possibly have seen ads for Ben Stiller's new film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is in theaters on Christmas day. It's based on a James Thurber story that has been filmed before in 1947, and TCM is showing the 1947 version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty at 8:00 PM Thursday. Danny Kaye plays Mitty, the man with an overbearing mother (Fay Bainter) and boss, and the only way he can find to deal with them is to fantasize about being brave. And then, back in real life, he meets Virginia Mayo. She claims to be a woman on the run, with mad doctor Boris Karloff looking for her because she apparently has a piece of secret knowledge. Mitty winds up helping her and in danger himself, but learns some things about real bravery along the way. The story here is somewhat different from Thurber's original short story, and Thurber himself didn't like what they did to his story, but the movie itself is pretty good if you like Danny Kaye, who admittedly can be a bit much at times.
John Huston's directorial debut was The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart. A year later, the two teamed up again for Across the Pacific, which you can see at 2:00 PM Friday on TCM. Bogart plays Rick, who has nothing to do with the Rick he played in Casablanca but is again an American abroad: he's gotten himself court-martialed from the US Army in November 1941, and proclaims that he's going to go to Japan! So he takes a boat from New York, where he meets Mary Astor, who once again is lying to Bogart about her past. Also on the boat is Sydney Greenstreet, who this time is a sociologist very interested in Japan. As a result, you have to wonder whether Bogart is really a traitor, or on a secret mission from the US to figure out what Greenstreet is up to. After all, the ship is going to go through the Panama Canal, and the Japanese are certainly interested in the Canal....
Friday night sees one last look at costume designers on TCM, but the movie I'm recommending I'm doing so for a different reason. That film is Klute, at 2:00 AM Saturday. Klute won a Best Actress Oscar for Jane Fonda, but the title role is actually played by Donald Sutherland. Klute is a small town detective hired privately by his best friend's wife after the guy disappeared. The only clue is an obscene letter the guy sent to a prostitute in New York (that's Jane Fonda), but she doesn't remember having met the guy. Klute meets her and they eventually begin to develop a relationship, but she starts to get obscene phone calls too, and begins to believe there's somebody stalking her and possibly trying to murder her. And possibly murder other call girls as well. Or perhaps she's just beginning to lose it mentally, based on the sessions she has with her therapist.
For those of you who like more recent movies, Encore is running the first version of Back to the Future several times over the next week. The east coast feed has it at 8:00 PM Monday, and 10:30 AM and 6:00 PM Saturday, with the west coast feed having it three hours later. Of course, you know the story; Michael J. Fox plays the teen Marty McFly who's friends with mad scientist Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who has invented a time machine housed in a DeLorean. Except that the machine needs so much power that he had to get involved with shady Libyans to get the plutonium to run it, and they're after him. Marty uses the DeLorean to get away, but gets sent back to 1955 where he meets his parents before they got married, which is a problem since if he does anything to prevent their getting married, he'll never be born! And how is he going to get back to 1985 anyway?
Joan Fontaine died on December 16. TCM is finally getting around to honoring her with seven of her movies during the morning and afternoon. The last of these is the one that earned her her first Oscar nomination: Rebecca, at 5:45 PM Sunday. Fontaine plays a young woman travelling in the south of France as the lady's companion of an older lady, where she meets Max de Winter (Laurence Olivier). He's a widower, and she immediately falls in love with him, to the point that she impuslively marries him and goes to live with him at his estate, Mandalay. However, she finds that the staff at Mandalay all loved the first Mrs. de Winter, who died under mysterious circumstances; especially her personal made Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson, who is wonderfully creepy in the role). In fact, they dislike the second Mrs. de Winter to the point that she starts questioning her sanity. George Sanders, meanwhile, plays another of his great villains, as a man who's convinced that Max murdered his first wife and is out to prove it.
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