With Christmas being on Tuesday, it's not surprising that there are a bunch of Christmas movies on TV at the beginning of the week. Among them is Babes in Toyland (also known as March of the Wooden Soldiers), at 11:00 AM Monday on TCM. Set in a Mother Goose world, the plot involves the widow Peep as the poor lady who lives in a shoe, which she's about to lose if she can't pay the mortgage on it. However, Barnaby (Henry Brandon), who holds the mortgage, is willing to drop the matter in exchange for marrying the world's daughter, Little Bo (Charlotte Henry). She, however, loves Tom-Tom, the piper's son (Felix Knight). Subletting in the shoe are Stan Dum (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Oliver Hardy), who try to help, al6hough they don't have the money to do it, which leads to their resorting to other means. It invokes cross-dressing, and the life-sized toy soldiers their mistakenly made for Santa.
I don't know if anybody has the cable package that include MGM HD, but if you do, you'll have a chance to watch Valmont, at 5:05 PM Monday. Colin Firth plays the Vicomte de Valmont, a man in the France just before the Revolution who seems to have a way with women. His former lover Merteuil (Annette Bening) is now seeing Gercourt (Jeffrey Jones), and when she learns that he's enganged in an arranged marriage to 15-year-old Cécile (Fairuza Balk), Merteuil tries to get Valmont to seduce Cécile. Cécile, meanwhile, is in love with her music teacher Danceny (Henry Thomas), while Valmont seems intent on seducing Mme. de Tourvel (Meg Tilly), which becomes the subject of a wager between him and Merteuil. Meanwhile, Valmont helps Cécile carry on her relationship with Danceny. It all leads to a bunch of back-stabbing and, ultimately, tragedy, when Valmont's machinations are discovered by Cécile's mother. Danceny is none too happy either. The film is visually lovely to look at, although the plot gets a bit too complex at times. Based on the same source material as Dangerous Liaisons.
If you want a non-Christmas movie on Christmas Day, you could do a lot worse than to watch Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, on FXM at 4:00 AM Tuesday. Mr. Allison is a corporal in the US Marines whom we first see passed out on a life raft floating ashore on an island in the South Pacific: this is obviously World War II. Allison sees that there are signs of life in the church on the island, and discovers a nun, Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr). He's distressed because with the war on, he I owe the Japanese are going to be back, especially if they spot Sr. Angela's activity. The priest has died, leaving her alone until Allison showed up, and she's naive enough not to worry about the Japanese. Allison starts to build a boat to get them off the island, and the two begin to develop a friendship. But then Allison sees the Japanese on the horizon, threatening both of them. For the vast majority of the movie, these are the only two characters, but the movie works extremely well thanks to a good script and the acting of the two stars. Kerr got another Oscar nomination; Mitchum deserved one but didn't get it.
Another movie not having anything to do with Christmas is Some Like It Hot, which TCM is running at 8:00 PM Christmas night. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play Joe and Jerry respectively, a saxophonist and bassist for a jazz band in 1929 Chicago. They get a job out of town that requires them to borrow a car, and at the garage they accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, so to save their lives they have to beat a hasty retreat, and hopefully get a job too to make ends meet. They find a job, but it turns out to be for two members of an all-girls' band. So, as you can guess, Joe and Jerry become Josephine and Daphne, and go down to Florida for the job. Joe falls in love with the band's singer, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), although she only knows him as Josephine, leading him to fake being a millionaire in Florida to woo Sugar. Jerry, meanwhile, has the misfortune of getting noticed by the millionaire Osgood (Joe E. Brown) while dressed as Daphne. Osgood pursues Daphne, not realizing the truth. And of course Spats (George Raft) and the other gangsters are still looking for Joe and Jerry.
Burt Reynolds died earlier this year. TCM is honoring Reynolds with a night of his movies on Wednesday in prime time, continuing into the early hours of Thursday morning with six of his movies. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with one of his better-remembered comedies, Smokey and the Bandit, starring Reynolds as a trucker up against a corrupt sheriff in Jackie Gleason. The sequel, Smokey and the Bandit II, will be on at 4:15 AM Thursday. In between there's Deliverance at 10:00 PM, which showed that Reynolds really could act. Here, he plays a man who wants to take his city-slicker friends on a canoe trip down a river that's about to disappear under a dam, only for the trip to go bad when they're accosted by the local hillbillies.
Henry commented in another thread this week about my propensity to mention cheesy 80s music. I can also mention cheesy 80s films, and note that Red Dawn is airing several times this week, including at 10:23 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. The premise is that the Soviets, aided by Cubans and Nicaraguans, decide to invade the United States, sending a group of paratroopers who land on the football field of a Colorado high school. You'd think there's not much the average American could do in the face of a Soviet invasion, but as in occupied countries everywhere, some of the people become partisans, fighting the invaders in guerrilla war; in this case it's a bunch of teenage high school students who head off to the mountains while the town has a Cuban colonel leading the occupation government. Not particularly realistic, but then Hollywood's World War II movies about the partisans weren't either.
TCM's final day with Star of the Month Dick Powell has a bunch of his later movies. A personal favorite of mine is The Bad and the Beautiful, which will be on at 1:00 PM. But I'll give more mention to a movie that doesn't air so often, It Happened Tomorrow, at 4:45 PM Thursday. Dick Powell plays Larry Stevens, an obituary writer at a turn of the century newspaper who dreams of bigger things. One day an old man Pop Benson (John Philliber) gives Larry a newspaper, and Larry only discovers a bit later that this is actually a late edition of tomorrow's paper, as he and girlfriend Sylvia (Linda Darnell), a phony mentalist's assistant, witness the aftermath of a crime in that future paper. Knowing tomorrow's news before it happens could be a big help to a reporter, but there are also problems, notably when Larry gets a paper with a headline announcing his own death. Of course, since the movie is told in flashback we know what happens, but it's still a worthwhile watch.
Another movie that I have supposedly never mentioned here before is Quantez, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 11:06 PM Thursday. Quantez is not the name of a character, but a town in the desert of southern Arizona. A gang of five bank robbers led by Heller (John Larch) stops there one night because they've lost one of their horses and the others are tired from the high-speed getaway. They were hoping to get another one here, but are surprised to find that the town is deserted! The fairly obvious reason for this is that the Apache have been raiding, so if anybody comes back, they're probably going to raid again. So the gang hunker down: Heller, who is accompanied by his girlfriend Chaney (Dorothy Malone); Gentry (Fred MacMurray), who isn't quite as ruthless as Heller; greenhorn from the east Teach (John Gavin); and Gato (Sydney Chaplin), who was raised by the Apache. As the night goes on one begins to wonder whether these people will get each other first before the Apache can get them.
I can't recall if I've recommended Two Girls on Broadway before, but it's going to be on TCM at 4:30 PM Friday. George Murphy plays Eddie, a small-town songwriter who's just sold a song which entails him going to New York for the musical it's going to be used in. Eddie has a fiancée in Molly (Joan Blondell), who runs the local dance school, so Eddie sees if he can finagle a job in the show for her. That, and Molly's kid sister Pat (Lana Turner). The producers like Pat, so much that they want to team her up with Eddie. That's bad enough for Molly, but worse is that Eddie begins to fall in love with Pat, and the feeling is decidedly mutual. So how is Eddie going to break off the engagement? Further complicating matters is that, as with any good backstage musical, you've got a producer in Chad (Kent Smith) who falls for Pat and wants her for himself. Of course Chad isn't right for Pat, what with all those divorces, but he's got the money. You can probably guess how this one is going to end (maddeningly).
I mentioned a couple of movies from the 80s, and now I'll mention one from 1990: Arachnophobia, which will be on 5Star Max at 6:30 AM Sunday. Jeff Daniels plays Dr. Jennings, who is the new doctor in a small California town, one of those peaceful little towns where nothing happens until it does. In this case, that means that people just suddenly start dropping dead. Now, if you know what the title of the movie means, you already know what's killing people. But we also see that there's a group of American biologists studying in Venezuela, when one of them dies. He was bitten by a spider, and that spider makes its way into his coffin when they ship it back home, which just happens to be the small town where Jennings works. This poisonous spider takes up residence in a barn and starts to mate with the local spiders, creating a menacing superspecies of deadly spiders adapted to the American climate. They must be stopped. John Goodman plays Delbert McClintock, the town's exterminator, who's obviously going to be a part of ridding the town of these spiders.
Our last movie is one that's clearly not a cheery, upbeat Christmas movie: Lifeboat, at 2:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Tallulah Bankhead plays Connie, whom we see hogging a lifeboat all to herself at the start of the movie. She's a wealthy writer who was on board a transatlantic liner that got torpedoed by a German U-boat. One by one, other people from the liner show up on the boat: industrialist Rittenhouse (Henry Hull); socialist and obviously ethnic sailor Kovac (John Hodiak); injured sailor Gus (William Bendix); nurse Alice (Mary Anderson); Stanley (Hume Cronyn); and black steward Joe (Canada Lee). And then climbing on board is Willi (Walter Slezak) who responds to the other passengers' help by answering "Danke schön". Ooh, he's obviously German, and from the U-boat that torpedoed them; his sub was destroyed too. Unfortunately, he's the only one with any navigation skills. Without him, they're doomed, but with him, they're probably being taken toward "help" from the Germans which means an internment camp at best. Alfred Hitchcock set the whole movie on that one tiny lifeboat, but makes the movie work on the strength of an extremely uncomfortable story.