Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of December 26, 2016-January 1, 2017. Once again, I've used my exceedingly good taste to select a bunch of good movies I know you'll all like. There was a lot to choose from this week, so I didn't even get around to recommending any of the Myrna Loy movies. It's also hard to believe that we're at the end of another calendar year (but easier to believe we're at the end of another year of Vikings failure). As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
If you want a movie full of the Christmas spirit, well, it's debatable whether you'll find any of it in Harold and Maude, which is on StarzEncore Classics at 7:20 AM and 1:50 PM Monday. Bud Cort plays Harold, a young man living with his wealthy mother and not particularly liking it, to the point that Harold spends his time trying to tick his mother off by faking his suicide and having a generally morbid fascination with death. Harold's Mom tries to hoock him up with a series of nice girls, and if that doesn't work, have him join the army, but one day at a funeral, Harold runs into Maude (Ruth Gordon), a 79-year-old free spirit who also has interesting ideas about death. The two begin a fast friendship that could blossom into something more. But Maude is about to turn 80, and she's got those ideas about death….
Monday night's prime-time lineup on TCM is a bunch of movies looking at the end of the world as we know it. One that I haven't recommended in a while is On the Beach, which will be at midnight Tuesday (ie. 11:00 PM Monday LFT). World War III has been conducted, killing most of the earth's population, except that Australia has survived for now. Some Americans have survived, since there was a sub under water when the war came, captained by Cmdr. Towers (Gregory Peck). In Australia, he meets lovely alcoholic Moira (Ava Gardner), and starts an affair with her, even though both know it's doomed. Towers also makes the friendship of his Australian naval colleague Lt. Holmes (Anthony Perkins), who has a wife and young child. He's worried about what they'll do if he dies first. And then there's gadabout Julian (Fred Astaire in one of his first non-musical roles), who wants to win the big auto race. What are they going to do as time runs out?
French actress Michèle Morgan died last week aged 96. She's one of the many who fled to Hollywood once the Nazis came, and spent the World War II years making movies there. One of those movies, Passage to Marseille, will be on TCM at 1:00 PM Tuesday. Here, she plays Mme. Matrac, wife of Jean Matrac (Humphrey Bogart); it's Jean who is the main character. He's a journalist who opposed the French government's appeasement of Hitler, and for that he was framed for murder and sent to Devil's Island. But he escaped with a group of other prisoners, and he wants to get back to France. Except that in the meantime, the Nazis have invaded France and going there might put the prisoners at risk from the Nazis, something which would certainly be the case for Matrac. But how can they help in the fight against the Nazis? A Warner Bros. all-star cast includes Claude Rains as the ship's captain and a whole bunch of non-French actors (other than Morgan, of course). There's Sydney Greenstreet who would like to deliver the boat to the Nazis; Nazi refugees Peter Lorre and Helmut Dantine; and of course Bogart is a New Yorker playing French. At least he doesn't go for a Charles Boyer accent.
Oscar's Best Picture of 1933, Cavalcade, is back on FXM Retro this week, at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Based on a play by Noël Coward, Cavalcade tells the story of two British families between 1900 and 1933. The upper class Marryotts (Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard) have servants living downstairs in the Bridges (Una O'Connor and Herbert Mundin, who would be paired again five years later in The Adventures of Robin Hood). The husbands go off to fight the Boer War and return; the Bridges leave to start their own business; the Titanic sinks; World War I happens, and everybody seems happy in the Roaring Twenties until the Depression comes. Complicating things are the fact that the Marryotts' son Joe gets injured in the Great War, while the Bridges' daughter Fanny falls in love with Joe. And are events moving too fast for everybody to keep up? It's stagy at times and certainly a different style from a lot of fresher movies from the era, but it's still an interesting movie.
Tuesday night brings one more look at the elderly in the TCM Spotlight. This week I'll mention a movie with four senior stars: The Whales of August, at 12:15 AM Wednesday. 92-year-old Lillian Gish stars as Sarah, a woman who has been summering at the family's house on the coast of Maine with her younger sister Libbie (78-year-old Bette Davis) for decades. But Libbie has gone blind and had strokes, and Sarah is so old that perhaps it's time to close up the place. Libbie, for her part, seems to take delight in making life tough for Sarah, who takes it all with grace. Their next-door neighbor Tisha (77-year-old Ann Sothern) lives there year round, but she's beginning to lose her independence too as she's had her driver's license pulled. Into all of this comes the mysterious drifter Mr. Maranov, played by the baby of the cast in 75-year-old Vincent Price. Libbie invites him over for dinner, but does he have ulterior motives? As with The Trip to Bountiful which I recommeded a few weeks back, this is a little picture which on the face of it doesn't have much to it, but boy does it pack a wallop.
If you like a good mystery, you'll like the 1945 version of And Then There Were None, airing at 4:00 AM Thursday on TCM. Based on the Agatha Christie novel, the movie tells the story of ten people who were invited to a party at a house on an isolated island off the coast of Devon in southwest England. At the first dinner, they hear a recording from the man who invited them, but who is not present, Mr. U.N. Owen, accusing all of them of murder, and that they're going to pay for getting away with murder. And then one of the men, a Russian émigré played by Mischa Auer, tells the story of how he committed vehicular manslaughter – after which he does indeed drop dead! It turns out that all of them did in fact cause somebody to die, and then the various people assembled on the island start dying one by one. And since they're the only ones on the island, one of them has to be the murderer. Does that also mean the last one is going to commit suicide? Well, you'll have to stay until the end of the movie to find out whodunit and how.
Dean Martin actually made a couple of westerns in his career. He also got to be the bad guy in one of them: Rough Night in Jericho, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 12:15 PM Thursday. Martin plays Alex, an ex-lawman who is now the corrupt boss of Jericho, where he owns everything. Well, not quite everything; he doesn't own the stagecoach line, which is owned by Molly (Jean Simmons). God knows he's been trying to get control of it, to the point that he's willing to ambush stages and shoot people in them, like ex-marshal Dolan (George Peppard). Dolan winds up recovering at Molly's place, developing a bit of an attraction for her, and then deciding that Flood has to be taken on. But how many people in a place like Jericho are willing to take on the big boss? Sure, you know where the story is going to go, but sometimes the fun of a movie is seeing how it gets to its inevitable ending.
TCM is remembering several of the people who died in 2016 with its prime-time lineup on Thursday night. (They also scheduled Bullitt, with the late Robert Vaughn, at 3:45 PM Thursday). Six people who left us each get one movie to remember them by:
First, at 8:00 PM, there's George Kennedy playing a prisoner whose friend eats 50 hard boiled eggs in Cool Hand Luke;
Then, at 10:15 PM, you can watch Gloria DeHaven in Two Girls and a Sailor.
Alan Rickman has a small role as Col. Brandon in Ang Lee's rendition of Sense and Sensibility at 12:30 AM Friday.
Patty Duke screams and gesticulates as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, at 3:00 AM
You don't see Marni Nixon, but you hear her providing the singing voice for Natalie Wood, in West Side Story at 5:00 AM.
Finally, Nancy Davis (before she became Nancy Reagan) shares her concern for her alcoholic friend Ray Milland in Night Into Morning at 7:45 AM.
If you want to celebrate on New Year's Eve, you could do worse than to start with Some Like It Hot, which TCM will be showing at 4:00 PM Saturday. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play a pair of musicians in 1929 Chicago who lose their current gig since it's at a speakeasy that's raided. Unfortunately, as part of the search for a new gig, they walk right into the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and have to make a quick getaway as witnesses wanted by the mob. Luck is on their side as there are two job openings. But: the job openings are in an all-woman band. Naturally, they come up with the brilliant idea to dress as women to get the jobs and get away from Chicago to Florida, where the band is booked. They meet bandmate Marilyn Monroe and Tony falls in love with her, while in Florida, Lemmon gets seen by millionaire Joe E. Brown, who pursues him, not realizing Lemmon is actually a man in drag. Hilarity ensues. George Raft plays the gangster pursuing our two protagonists. A hilarious film filled with lots of memorable scenes.
Another interesting way to ring in the new year would be with the films of Alfred Hitchcock. TCM is showing a bunch of them Sunday morning and afternoon, including Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot, at 11:30 AM. Barbara Harris plays Blanche, a phony psychic who makes a living bilking little old ladies, especially wealthy Julia Rainbird who is looking for her heir and is offering $10,000 to find him. With the help of her cabbie boyfriend (Bruce Dern), she discovers the heir might just be a diamond dealer (William Devane). But that guy doesn't want to get involved, because he and his wife (Karen Black) have something else going on, which is that they kidnap people for the ransom money, and they're much more sophisticated in their criminal dealings than our heroic psychic and cabbie. Hitchcock made a lot of better movies, but this one really isn't that bad; it just gets looked down upon because it's not up to Hitchcock's earlier standards.