Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 24-30, 2012. Christmas is this week, as is the last full week of 2012, so it's your last chance to see some interesting Christmas movies, as well as spend an evening with the films of Barbara Stanwyck. To be honest, though, a lot of what's airing this week is repeats of one sort or another: there are only so many good Christmas movies out there.
Last week I mentioned the John Wayne movie 3 Godfathers, which is a remake of a commonly-told tale. Wayne's version was made in the late 1940s, with another well-known version around 1936. The 1936 movie wasn't the first talkie telling of the story, however. That came in 1929, with a film called Hell's Heroes. It's this 1929 version that you can catch on TCM at 4:00 AM Monday. (Even this isn't the first version of the movie, as there was a silent version made in the teens.) In this movie, Charles Bickford (later father to Johnny Belinda) plays the head of the gang that robs a bank, kills a man, and gets caught in the desert with a dying woman who's just given birth. They have to save the baby, but the only problem is that they only way to do so is to bring it back to the town whose bank they just robbed, which means certain death for them. (Well, there's a 40-mile walk through the desert, too.) This movie, being an early talkie, is stripped down a bit from the later versions, but that's not a bad thing.
Monday sees a lot of repeats of Christmas-themed movies that aired earlier in the month on TCM. One that hasn't aired yet this month is Babes in Toyland, which is on at 6:30 PM Monday on TCM. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy play a pair of toy makers in mythical Toyland who live with old lady Peep who can't pay off the mortgage. The old man who owns the mortgage wants the hand of the old lady's daughter (obviously Little Bo) in marriage, which the daughter obviously doesn't want. (Bo wants Tom Tom the piper's son.) It's up to Laurel and Hardy to save the day. To do this, they're going to have to free Tom from prison after he's framed by the old man. The movie is also known as March of the Wooden Soldiers, after its TV syndication title and the giant wooden soldiers Laurel and Hardy created which got them fired from the toy factory, but which come in handy later in the story. It's different from the rest of the Laurel and Hardy movies, but still a great movie.
On Christmas Day itself, TCM is showing a bunch of religious-themed movies, starting at 5:45 AM with Boys Town, which as you probably know is the story of Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy) and how he founded a place for orphaned boys in Nebraska; Mickey Rooney is one of the boys. That, and the dreadful Going My Way at 7:30 AM, are the two most secular movies on the day. Christmas continues with such obvious religious stuff as the 1961 version of King of Kings at 5:00 PM. Jeffrey Hunter plays a much-too-white Jesus Christ in this not-quite all-star telling of the life story of Jesus Christ, at least as the Bible would have you believe it went. Siobhan McKenna plays Mary; Robert Ryan (the actor, not the crappy defensive coördinator) plays John the Baptist, an a young Rip Torn plays Judas. The movie was produced by Samuel Bronston, known for decamping to Spain to produce epics, which included Charlton Heston in El Cid and 55 Days at Peking. Note that this means there's a fair amount of dialogue from Spanish extras that had to be redubbed.
Tuesday night's films really have little to do with Christmas: six of the Andy Hardy movies. I've recommended Love Finds Andy Hardy (8:00 PM, and the one that actually does have a Christmas scene in it) before, so this week I'll mention Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever at 9:45 PM instead. Mickey Rooney returns to play Andy Hardy once again. This time, girl next door Polly (Ann Rutherford) has fallen for a Navy man, much to Andy's chagrin, since he's always had a thing for her. (I suppose the movie would have been much more interesting if he had a thing for the Navy man, but that would never have gotten past the Code.) Andy compensates by developing a crush on his drama teacher (Helen Gilbert). This is a problem, of course, especially when the dramam club puts on a play written by Andy which you presume is a bit too personal. But a talk from good father figure Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) will set things right, and everybody gets to leave the cinema happy.
If you don't like what's on TCM on Christmas, I doubt you'll be much happer with what's over on the remains of the Fox Movie Channel. All that they're doing is showing a triple-feature, and running it twice. Home Alone 3 starts the day off at 4:00 AM, and will be repeated at 9:40 AM.
That's followed by Home Alone 2 at 6:00 AM and 11:25 AM.
You'd think the third movie would be the original Home Alone, but you'd be totally wrong. Instead, FMC is showing Jingle All the Way, in which two people fight over the year's hottest Christmas gift, at 8:05 AM and 1:28 PM.
In fact, all three movies will be airing at least once more this week after Christmas, and then several times early in January.
Wednesday night brings the last night of Barbara Stanwyck as TCM's Star of the Month. This Wednesday kicks off with several westerns that Stanwyck made in the 1950s, with Forty Guns being the first one they're showing at 8:00 PM. Stanwyck plays a rancher who has more or less treated the area where she lives as her personal fiefdom, with the help of her posse of "forty guns". Dean Jagger hasn't really been able to keep the peace as the sheriff, so in come the Bonnell brothers (loosely based on the Earps), led by Barry Sullivan, to try to bring peace by becoming the town marshall. Sullivan falls in love with Stanwyck, but the relationship goes sour, which is bound to lead to disaster. This movie was directed by Sam Fuller, who was rather idiosyncratic, so it's quite different and strange compared to a lot of other westerns that you might see.
TCM has had some luck in getting more movies from Fox over the past year, and that continues with Thursday night's lineup: six of the movies that Gene Tierney made at Fox. I'm pretty certain I've recommended all of them here before, and in fact I've blogged about most of them:
The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Black Widow, in which Tierney's husband (Van Heflin) stands accused of murdering a young actress;
The Return of Frank James at 11:30 PM, in which Tierney plays a reporter;
Where the Sidewalk Ends comes up at 1:15 am Friday, with Tierney as the love interest of violent cop Dana Andrews;
Belle Starr, in which Tierney plays the lady outlaw of the same name, at 3:00 AM Friday; and
Night and the City at 4:30 AM, with Tierney in love with tout Richard Widmark.
The only one of her movies airing Thursday night that I haven't done a full-length blog post about before is The Left Hand of God, airing at 9:45 PM on TCM. In this one, Tierney plays a nurse at a Catholic mission in 1930s China, the era when the country was being occupied by Japan, but there were still local warlords. The mission's priest has been murdered, and who shows up as the new priest? Why it's Humphrey Bogart! The fact that you've got Bogart as a Catholic priest says something, which is that he's more than he seems. It turns out that he volunteered to fight the Japanese as a pilot, was downed, and captured by one of those warlords, and has spent some time engaged in criminal activity in the service of that warlord. Taking on bogus vestments is Bogie's way of trying to atone for his sins. Complicating matters is the fact that Tierney thinks she's falling in love with him, and falling in love with a priest is a problem....
Friday marks the birth anniversary of actor Lew Ayres, who was born December 28, 1908. TCM is marking the occasion by showing nine of his movies, all of which have Ayres playing the same character: Dr. Kildare. The series ended abruptly with the outbreak of World War II, however. Ayres was a pacifist, and declared that, having studied medicine before becoming an actor, he would only serve if he could be guaranteed a place in the medical corps. The US government stupidly refused, so Ayred declared himself a conscientious objector. Eventually, the US government relented and Ayres served honorably in the medical corps in the Pacific theater.
Up until last week, TCM was showing a bunch of Saint movies at noon on Saturday. They've reached the end of that series, and so they'll be starting a new movie series: the Torchy Blane movies. The first of them, Smart Blonde, is on at noon on Saturday. Torchy was a lady reporter who had more cojones than most of the men in these movies, and she uses her moxie to solve crimes better than the police can (which isn't saying very much). To be fair, though, she does have some help from the police, in the form of boyfriend Steve (Barton MacLane). In this first installment, the mystery, such as it is, is the murder of a man who was going to buy a nightclub from the one honest club owner, who's retiring to get married. Obviously, all the dishonest crime figures have a motive for murder, but which one did it? The Torchy Blane movies are more fun for watching Glenda Farrell play bold and brassy as she solves the cases: she put a lot of energy and verve into all of her roles.
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