Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 28, 2015-January 3, 2016. We're reaching the end of the NFL regular season, so with the Packers already in the playoffs, we're just waiting for when Jeff Janis! screws up the playoffs for the Packers. In the meantime, why not watch some good movies? As always, my discerning taste has selected several interesting movies across a variety of genres. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with this week's TCM Import: Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, at 2:45 AM Monday. The two title characters are children in turn of the last century Sweden who live happily with their actor parents. They also have an interesting extended family in which Grandma is having a dalliance with a Jewish puppet maker, while one of the uncles is carrying on with the maid. But everything changes when Dad dies. Mom meets Lutheran Bishop Vergerus when he officiates at the funeral, and she begins to fall for him, thinking that the children need a good father figure. However, when she marries him, she finds that the bishop is fairly strict in his religiosity, which makes life difficult for her and the children, who were obviously used to a more permissive lifestyle. It's especially hard for poor Alexander as the three of them practically become prisoners and the bishop won't grant Alexander's mom a divorce.
TCM's monthly spotlight, looking at movies with gal pals, concludes this Monday. One of the better movies airing Monday night, that I've recommended before but is always worth another airing, is The Children's Hour, at 8:00 PM. Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn play Martha and Karen respectively, a pair of best friends who run a boarding school for girls together, although that friendship is under strain as Karen is engaged to Dr. Joe (James Garner). Things are about to get a whole lot worse for the three of them, however, when Mary, one of the students, tells her grandmother (Fay Bainter) that she saw the two women do... well something. Auntie spreads the rumor, which results in the town turning their backs on these women whom the townsfolk now consider to be horrible people. Can everything be made right again when the vicious rumor is revealed to be a lie? This is based on a Lillian Hellman play which had already been made into a movie called These Three, which follows at 10:00 PM. In These Three, the rumor is different for reasons you'll understand. Also, Miriam Hopkins, who played one of the two teachers in These Three, shows up here as Martha's aunt.
TCM is spending Tuesday night looking back at some of the people who left us in 2015. Among them is Lizabeth Scott who was good at playing femmes fatales in the late 1940s. One of her films I don't think I've recommended before is Too Late for Tears at 10:15 PM. Scott plays Jane, who's not particularly happily married to Alan (Arthur Kennedy). One day while they're going to a party, somebody throws a suitcase into their car. They open it up, and find that it's got $60,000 in it! Alan immediately thinks they should turn it over to the cops, but Jane isn't so sure. Apparently she grew up poor, and could really use the money; who cares if she didn't come by it honestly. Unsurprisingly, the people who threw it into their car did so far a reason, and they'd like it back, so first Danny (Dan Duryea) shows up -- and Jane convinces him to murder her husband! Don (Don DeFore) also shows up, as does Alan's sister. But Jane is still insistent on not giving up that money.
Over on FXM Retro, you have another chance to catch The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, at 9:00 AM Wednesday. Betty Grable plays Freddie, a young woman and saloon owner who was taught by her granddad to be a crack shot because that's the only way she'd survive in the tough old west. Well, she falls in love with Blackie (Cesar Romero) but he's always eyeing other women, so Freddie tries to shoot him for it, instead accidentally hitting Judge Alfalfa O'Toole (Porter Hall) in the posterior (a running gag). So Freddie jumps town with her maid, eventually winding up in another old west town where she becomes a schoolmarm teaching overaged delinquents like Sterling Holloway, and falling in love with Rudy Vallee. Of course her old boyfriend shows up, leading to a gunfight involving the entire town. The film was a box-office flop and effectively ended director Preston Sturges' career.
Frank Sinatra returns for one more night, including movies like The Joker Is Wild at 11:30 PM. Sinatra plays real-life Joe E. Lewis, a man who was a 1920s nightclub singer (and later real-life friend of Sinatra). This being the 20s, it was the era of Prohibition and the Mob running the nightclubs, and when Lewis refused a mobster's offer he couldn't refuse, the mobster was none too happy. The result was an attack on Lewis that left him with a slashed throat and tongue, making him obviously unable ever to sing again the way he did in those nightclubs. Lewis was found again years later by an old friend (Jackie Coogan) who put him in a number with Sophie Tucker (playing herself) and learned that while Lewis couldn't sing, he had developed a vicious wit. This gave him his second career as a nightclub comedian, although it seems Lewis can only tell his jokes best after a couple of drinks. Eddie Albert plays Lewis' pianist; Mitzi Gaynor his wife, a chorus girl and minor Hollywood actress named Martha Stewart.
Airing on either side of The Joker Is Wild over on Encore Westerns is The White Squaw, which you can catch at either 12:45 PM Wednesday or 2:05 AM Thursday. The title character here, played by May Wynn, is a woman who had a white father ans a Sioux mother and was raised by the Sioux, with some financial help from her father. Well, we're getting to the point where the US is driving all the tribes off their traditional lands and warehousing them on reservations, which the tribes find aren't enough for them to maintain their traditional ways of life. For the Sioux, this means having to get a hold of some cattle to start raising them. However, the white people who had owned the land the US government appropriated for the reserve are none too happy about any of this, and try to sabotage the Sioux in any way they can.
Thursday is New Year's Eve, so it's another day to celebrate, and TCM is doing so by running two comic teams. During the morning and afternoon, they're showing a whole bunch of movies from the Marx Brothers, such as the football classic Horse Feathers at 5:30 PM or their MGM classic A Night at the Opera at noon.
Then TCM will be ringing in the new year on Thursday night by showing all six of the Thin Man movies starting at 8:00 PM with the first of them. William Powell and Myrna Loy play the hard-drinking husband and wife detectives who solve murder mysteries while trading one-liners and dealing with precocious dog Asta. The second one, After the Thin Man at 9:45 PM, is interesting in part because it has a young James Stewart.
On Friday night, TCM is running a bunch of Hollywood remakes of foreign films. These include the 1951 version of M, at 10:15 PM. Now, you probably know the original Fritz Lang version of this movie in which Peter Lorre plays a child-killer who gets caught by the Berlin underground before the police can get him, and is subjected to criminals' justice. This version was updated to Los Angeles, a much brighter locale than Berlin, and uses David Wayne as the M character, something which puts a rather different spin on the movie because where Lorre has an extremely distinctive look, Wayne could be anyone from Anywhere, USA. The results are ultimately not quite as good as Fritz Lang's film, of course; not many movies could be. But it's interesting in its own right and wouldn't be overlooked if it hadn't been a remake. Plus, there's the vintage location shooting in Los Angeles before the freeways came.
The Bowery Boys shorts return after a one-week break for Christmas. The Dick Tracy series that TCM ran in November doesn't, since that reached the end. So TCM is replacing that with Adventures of Rusty at 9:15 AM Saturday, the first in a series of movies about Rusty the dog; I won't make any comparisons between him and Rusty the x4 poster. In the movie, Danny (Ted Donaldson) is a young boy whose father (Conrad Nagel) has remarried (to Margaret Lindsay). There's a lot of friction between the boy and his step-mother, so when Danny sees the unruly German Shepherd dog Rusty, he offers to take care of the dog where nobody else wants to. It turns out that Rusty had been trained by the Nazis to be a vicious service dog brought back to the States by a GI, and in teaching the Rusty to trust humans, Danny begins to learn to trust his stepmother. Along the way, Rusty helps foil a sabotage ring.
Shorts are back on the TCM online schedule, so you can see what's coming up at least for the next four or five days -- TCM doesn't schedule the shorts all that far in advance. An interesting one I haven't mentioned before, I don't think, is Kiddie Revue, at 1:44 PM Thursday, or after A Night at the Opera (noon Thursday). As you might guess, this one is a bunch of child acts -- except that it's got the conceit that it's spoofing The Hollywood Revue of 1929, an MGM test talkie which had most of its stars doing variety-show bits to show that yes, they could handle talking pictures. Indeed, the kid playing the master of ceremonies here is spoofing Jack Benny, who handled the MC duties in The Hollywood Revue.
There's also Land of the Quintuplets, at 11:50 AM Saturday. This is another one in the Traveltalks series, looking at the small town in Ontario where the Dionne quintuplets were born, and the doctor who attended at the birth. By the time this was made in 1941, the quints (the Dionnes had five children before the quints and another three after) were already wards of the province who exploited them really badly, turning them into an exhibit. This short takes a shockingly favorable view of the province's treatment of the quints.