Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 29, 2014 to January 5, 2015. Yes, we're reaching a new year, while going through the agonizing week of seeing which team gets to come to Lambeau Field for the NFC divisional round game. So make the wait a little easier by sitting back with some good films. It's the last night of Star of the Month Cary Grant; we get a new Friday night spotlight; and there are some special movies on New Year's Eve. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with one of those French directors who spend World War II in exile in Hollywood: RenÉ Clair, who directed And Then There Were None, which is on TCM at 9:00 AM Monday. This one is based on the book by Agatha Christie. Eight people are invited to a house on an island for a weekend party held by a Mr. U. N. Own, who's going to show up later. The butler and houskeeper play a record left by Mr. Own, which says that all ten people there stand accused of murder! The story is also known as "Ten Little Indians", because there are 10 people there and like that children's song, each of the ten dies in a strange way one by one, as a set of ten figurines gets destroyed one by one. But who's doing the killing and why? That's what the ever-diminishing number of people remaining try to figure out as they also start to turn on each other. The cast includes Barry Fitzgerald ([b[Going My Way[/b]), Judith Anderson (Rebecca), Roland Young (Topper), and C. Aubrey Smith (the elderly British gentleman in a host of movies of the 1930s and 1940s).
Star of the month Cary Grant gets one final night on TCM. I'll point out that Grant's last movie, Walk, Don't Run, is on at 4:45 AM Tuesday, but I'll give a bit more attention to a film that I don't think I've mentioned before: The Grass Is Greener, at 12:15 AM Tuesday. Cary Grant plays Lord Rhyall, married of course to Lady Rhyall played by Deborah Kerr. Unfortunately, they're heavily in debt, which has led them to open their estate to guided tours to make some money. This is how they meet Delacro (Robert Mitchum). He's a Texas oil tycoon, and not only does he like the estate ,he also likes the Lady Rhyall! So the Rhyalls invite him to the estate for a weekend, and along comes Hattie Durant (Jean Simmons) as well. She and Lord Rhyall had a relationship befoer he married Lady Rhyall, but it seems as if there might be a few embers left. Needless to say, hijinks ensue, or at least try to ensue.
On Tuesday night, TCM is remembering several of the people who died in 2014, with eight movies each involving a different person who is no longer with us.
Maximilian Schell died in February, and TCM is starting off with him ni the caper comedy Topkapi, about a plot to steal from an Istanbul museum, at 8:00 PM.
Juanita Moore died at the very beginning of January. She earned an Oscar nomination for playing the housekeeper in the 1959 version of Imitation of Life, in which her daughter (Susan Kohner) insists on being white, not black;
Elaine Stritch starred in the comedy Kiss Her Goodbye at 12:30 AM Wednesday;
Robin Williams appeared in the mawkish Good Will Hunting at 2:15 AM;
Philip Seymour Hoffmann was the star of Doubt, on at 4:30 AM;
Director Alain Resnais' films include the unorthodox Mon Oncle d'AmÉrique, airing at 6:30 AM;
Cinematographer Gordon Willis was behind the camera for the law school movie The Paper Chase at 8:45 AM; and
Actor Richard Attenborough plays a small time criminal operating in a seaside resort in Brighton Rock, at 10:45 AM.
Over on FXM Retro, you have another chance to catch Betty Grable in The Farmer Takes a Wife, at 11:50 AM Wednesday. This is a remake of a 1930s comedy which starred Henry Fonda, but now with Betty Grable in the cast, we get a musical version and Technicolor. Grable plays Molly, a cook on a barge plying the Erie Canal circa 1850, captained by Jotham (John Carroll). Jotham and Molly are sort of an item, but that begins to chance when Molly meets Dan (Dale Robertson), who is only working on the canal until he earns enough money to settle down and buy a farm. He falls for Molly even though he's got a fiancÉe. And Molly begins to fall for Dan even though she absolutely doesn't want to live on a farm. Rounding out the cast re Eddie Foy Jr. as a gambler, and Thelma Ritter as Molly's friend. There are several forgettable songs in this movie that's inoffensive but nothing great.
Wednesday night is New Year's Eve. Zombie Dick Clark won't be showing up for Rockin' New Year's in Times Square, but TCM will be running some vintage rockin' movies to ring in the new year. Sorry, Iowacheese, but there's no Barry Manilow or Wham! here. Instead, you can watch something a little harsher, like Gimme Shelter at 11:30 PM. The Rolling Stones were the big bady boys of rock back in 1969 when they did a tour of America. They were going to give a free concert at Golden Gate Park in the San Francicso Bay area, but at the last minute, the plans for the venue were changed to the Altamont race track, and the organizational difficulties ultimately doomed the concert A couple hundred thousand free love hippie types combined with security provided by the Hell's Angels led to violence and several people getting killed. Gimme Shelter is the story of that failed concert.
On New Year's Day itself, while Wisoconsin is playing in some bowl game for crappy teams, TCM is running a fun day of Joan Crawford versus Bette Davis, with their over-the-top late career roles. Bette Davis, for example, shows up in the lurid Where Love Has Gone, at 10:45 AM. At the start of the movie, young Joey Heatherton is about to stand trial for the stabbing death of her mother's (Susan Hayward) boyfriend. (Make whatever connection to Lana Turner, her boyfriend, and daughter you want.) Dad (Mike Connors) returns home to try to comfort his daughter and figure out how everything could have gone wrong..... Flash back many years. Hayward has a wealthy mother (that's Bette Davis), who tries to control the daughter's life and everybody around the daughter, including trying to arrange the marriage between her daughter and Connors' World War II hero. But when she can't control him as much as she likes, tries to break up the marriage, never mind what it's going to do to the couple's daughter. This one has all sorts of disastrous soap opera written all over it.
There are a couple of fun brief B comedies on TCM on Friday. I've mentioned We're Rich Again, which kicks the morning off at 6:00 AM, before. That's followed at 7:15 AM by the equally fun Big-Hearted Herbert. Herbert, played by Guy Kibbee, is the father of the family and made a success of himself from the turn of the last century through hard work, which he thinks is the key to success even in the modern 1930s. None of the fancy stuff like marrying rich or getting a college education when you can go into the family business. This is a problem since the daughter wants to marry a lawyer, and the son wants to go to college to become an engineer. This naturally causes problems, so Herbert's wife (played by Aline MacMahon) and the kids decide to get back at dad by showing the next dinner guests what Herbert's "plain" living would really be like. It all plays out like a sitcom episode stretched to 60 minutes, but Kibbee and especially MacMahon are good enough at what they do that they make the material work.
I've mentioned the movie Hide-Out several times in the past. It's not on this week, but a movie with similar themes that's worth watching is: Hideaway, at 1:30 PM Friday on TCM. J. Carrol Naish plays the gangster whois on the run with a bunch of loot in hand. Ah, but his his gang has planned for this, by having a place in the country to use as their hideout. They get there and find something they didn't expect: a family of squatters has moved into the place, what with a Depression on and nobody ever using it. So our gangsters try to hide the loot and keep these hick farmers from figuring out what's going on, as well as trying ot keep the authorities from finding them. Sure, it's not as good as Hide-Out, but then this was conceived as a B comedy and succeeds moderately well in that regard.
With the start of a new month, we get a new Friday Night Spotlight on TCM. Emmy-winning screenwriter Ken Levine will be presenting the movies of Neil Simon every Friday night in January. Simon wrote a lot of plays that were turned into movies such as The Odd Couple (kicking off Friday night at 8:00 PM), as well as original screenplays such as The Out-of-Towners at 10:00 PM. The Kellermans, George (Jack Lemmon) and Gwen (Sandy Dennis) are a married couple from small-town Ohio who go to New York City because George has a job interview there for a possible big promotion. This being a big deal, George has the trip well planned. Except, of course, that everything that can go wrong does: the plane gets diverted; their hotel reservations get cancelled; they get mugged; and on and on and on. Will George let New York City beat him down, or will he rise above all of this?
The sort of film that I can't really imagine Neil Simon writing would be something like The Sons of Katie Elder, at 3:45 AM Saturday on Encore Westerns. We never actually see Katie Elder, since she's getting buried as the movie opens. It's her death and funer that brings the four Elder sons (John Wayne, Dean Martin, Earl Holliman, and Michael Anderson) back to the old family home in Texas to pay their last respects. The only thing is, it's no longer the family home. Ma died broke because Dad was swindled out of the home and farm in a card game by Morgan Hastings (James Gregory) some time back, which also resulted in Dad getting killed in a gunfight. The sons vow to get to the bottom of this mystery, but is that what Mom would really have wanted?
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