Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 3-9, 2012. It's the first full week of a new month, so we get a new Star of the Month on TCM. And with it being December, we start to get Christmas movies, if those are your thing. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We're going to start off with this week's Silent Sunday Night movie on TCM, which actually begins at 12:15 AM Monday (overnight tonight): Bardelys the Magnificent. John Gilbert stars as Bardelys, a dashing courtier in the era of French King Louis XIII. He could have any woman he wants, except that he's a bit of a free-range a-hole, so he just seduces them and dumps them. That is, until fellow courtier Roy D'Arcy, having been dumped himself by Eleanor Boardman, D'Arcy decides to play a trick on both of them by daring Gilbert to seduce Boardman, whom he doesn't know. Either way at least one of them is going to get dumped. Gilbert woos Boardman and finds his phony lies lead her to profess her love, only for him to find that in this case, he actually does love the woman, and sees how mean he's been to all the other women in the past. But you nkow events are going to conspire to keep the two from winding up together until the last reel, if at all. There's a lot of swashbuckling here, but be warned as well that the film was considered lost for decades and there's still one reel that hasn't been found.
What's in your wallet? TCM doesn't have the former Captial One Peggy, but Baby Peggy on Monday night. Baby Peggy (still alive at 94) was a child star in the silent era who, like Jackie Coogan, suffered from her parents screwing up the money she earned playing child characters. All of this is mentioned in the documentary Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room, which will be airing at 8:00 PM, with a repeat at 11:30 PM for those of you out on the west coast, or who would rather watch the football game first. Most of the short films Baby Peggy made were lost (in part because the first studio she worked for burned down in 1926), but a couple of features survive. These include the original version of Captain January, which is airing at 9:00 PM. Peggy plays the title role, an orphan who was found by the keeper of a lighthouse (Hobart Bosworth). Needless to say, there are pepole who think this isn't the best upbringing for a little girl, and they try to gain custody of her. There's a happy ending, though, when long-lost relatives of the girl find her. The movie was remade in the 1930s with Shirley Temple playing the Baby Peggy role.
TCM is honoring director William Seiter with several of his films on Tuesday morning and afternoon, even though it's not his birthday (Seiter was born in June). One that I've recommended before, but is a lot of fun, is If You Could Only Cook, at noon on Tuesday. In this Depression-era comedy, Jean Arthur plays an unemployed woman whom we first see reading the want ads on a park bench. She's met by Herbert Marshall, who is actually an automobile executive on the run from a board that doesn't want him and a fiancée who's a jerk. So just for the fun of it, Marshall decides to play along with Arthur's sincere attempt to get a job, pretends to be married to her, and gets the two a job as butler and cook. Unfortunately, that job happens to be for prominent gangster. The two have to keep their ruse from being discovered, and foil some crime along the way....
The TCM spotlight on Tuesday night goes to director George Roy Hill. Probably his best-known picture is The Sting, which is airing at 10:00 PM Tuesday. However, the one I'd like to recommend is Toys in the Attic, which is on at 2:15 AM Wednesday. Dean Martin plays a Southern man who has made his living, such as it is, through shady business schemes that haven't exactly worked out well. So he's moving back home with a new bride in tow (Yvette Mimieux, who at least is lovely to look at). She's slightly nuts, and she's going to a family that has a few nutty secrets of its own. It turns out that Martin has two sisters (Geraldine Page and Wendy Hiller), with Page having an unhealthy obsession with her brother, and Hiller realizing just what the secrets are. Rounding out the cast in a small role is Gene Tierney (who in real life suffered from mental illness) as Mimieux's mother.
This being the first week in December, we have a new Star of the Month on TCM: Barbara Stanwyck. Her films appear every Wednesday night in prime time, and because she made so many movies, her films will continue well into Thursday afternoon each week. In fact, this Thursday afternoon ends at 7:00 PM with a documentary about Stanwyck, Barbara Stanwyck: Fire and Desire. As for Stanwyck's movies, this week I'll recommend The Miracle Woman, which comes on at 5:00 AM Thursday. Stanwyck plays the daughter of a preacher who, having seen religion up close, doesn't like it. (Too bad being the child of missionaries didn't have the same effect on Tim Tebow.) So she decides to use religion to con the gullible by joining up with conman Sam Hardy to set up a phony church where she plays the part of a faith healer. There are two problems, though. First is that the guy is enough of a conman that he's managed to implicate Stanwyck should anything go wrong and leave himself in the clear, with one of the ways to implicate Stanwyck being a murder! Worse, she falls in love with a blind ex-pilot (David Manners) who really believes she can heal her.
Friday is December 7, the 71st anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. So, it's not surprising that TCM is marking the day by showing a bunch of war movies in the morning and afternoon. What they're starting off with is not a Hollywood movie, but Prelude to War, at 6:00 AM Friday. With the attack on Pearl Harbor sending America into war unwillingly, and facing a population which would have preferred to remain isolationist, the War Department felt the need to explain to drafted soldiers and civilians why the US had to fight this war. So they enlisted help from Hollywood -- in the form of director Frank Capra, narrator Walter Huston, and others -- to create a series of propaganda films, collectively titled Why We Fight, of which Prelude to War is the first.
Speaking of World War II, when all the men went off to fight, the ladies took their jobs, something which is depicted in the film It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog, which is airing over on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel at 4:45 AM Tuesday. Character actor Allyn Joslyn, in one of his few starring roles, plays a newspaper crime reporter who went off to fight in World War II, only to return home and find in the meantime his job had been taken by a woman (Jean Wallace)! What's a man to do? Why, prove he can do the job better than a woman by going out and solving crimes. There's a string of bar hold-ups going on, and Joslyn thinks he's figured it out: Carole Landis is using hre dog as a decoy to hold up the joints. Well, not so fast; she's actually a police officer and the dog is her K-9 officer. In fact, the heists are being committed by Harry Morgan, who dognaps the dog, absconds with Joslyn's distinctive necktie, and uses those to implicate Joslyn and Landis.
One more director to get a TCM spotlight is Ernst Lubitsch, who gets a three-film salute on Friday night. The one that I'm looking forward to is one I have to admit I haven't seen before: The Loves of Pharaoh, at 8:00 PM Friday. Lubitsch made this one in Germany, where he worked before coming to Hollywood, back in 1922, and the movie was considered lost for many years before first an incomplete print was made, and then last year a more complete restoration was undertaken. The plot is about an ancient Egyptain Pharaoh (Emil Jannings, the winner of the first Best Actor Oscar), who is offered the daughter of the King of Ethiopia in an attempt to bring peace between the two countries. Unfortunately, he falls in love with the woman's slave attendant, and the slave girl falls in love with the son of the King's advisor. You've probably heard of the "Lubitsch touch" of light romantic comedy, but this movie is in fact a melodramatic historical epic.
The other two Lubitsch movies are more comedic, and I think I've recommended both of them before:
The Smiling Lieutenant at 10:00 PM, with Maurice Chevalier playing a lieutenant who falls in love with a princess; and
The Shop Around the Corner at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT), the original version of the dreadful You've Got Mail in which James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan hate each other at work but fall in love as anonymous pen-pals.
Those are followed by this week's TCM Underground, which is a pair of movies about lady wrestlers.
TCM's Essential this week is Summertime, which airs at 8:00 PM Saturday. Katharine Hepburn plays a spinster teacher who, having saved and scrimped, finally has the money to take a vacation to Europe (this being the days when transatlantic travel wasn't cheap). Venice is a romantic place, and you know it's going to find Hepburn. This comes in the form of Rossano Brazzi, who takes a liking to Hepburn even though he's married and got children of his own. That, of course, is a bit of a problem. Well, there's also the problem that Hepburn is eventually going to have to go back to America, and this can really only be a fling. The plot isn't anything particularly fresh, but Hepburn is good at playing spinsters, and the movie is worht watching for the cinematography of Venice as it was in the 1950s, instead of a city which is slowly sinking into the sea.
Somebody at TCM has a sense of humor, because after Summertime, this is the rest of the Saturday prime time lineup:
Autumn Leaves at 10:00 PM, in which spinster typist Joan Crawford falls in love with mentally disturbed Cliff Robertson;
If Winter Comes at midnight Sunday (ie. 11:00 PM Saturday in Packerland), with Walter Pidgeon taking in a pregnant girl despite the scandal it will cause;
A Walk in the Spring Rain at 2:00 AM, with Ingrid Bergman as a married woman who falls in love with another man in her new small-town home; and
A Man For All Seasons at 3:45, in which Thomas More (Paul Scofield) stands up tot he tyranny of Henry VIII.
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