Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 30, 2013-January 6, 2014. Actually, this schedule is going to start a few hours early, due to TCM's programming salute to the late Peter O'Toole. But more on that in a bit. With the Packers hosting a playoff game this coming weekend, but at a time that's not known as of publication, you're going to want to Tivo stuff over the weekend. There's also a new Friday night spotlight, and a new Star of the Month. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Peter O'Toole died two weeks ago, and TCM is honoring him by devoting the entire primetime lineup tonight, December 29, to him. There aren't too many movies, in part because his iconic role as Lawrence of Arabia lasta for four hours, and you can't really salute O'Toole without showing Lawrence of Arabia, which is on tonight at 8:00 PM, or just after the Packers finish beating the crap out of the Chicago team. That's followed at midnight by an interview O'Toole did at the 2012 TCM Film Festival. O'Toole sat down with Robert Osborne in front of a large audience, and regaled them with stories about his films, as well as his life before film in the Royal Navy and I believe at acting school with Albert Finney. Unfortunately, he regaled the audience for about two and a half hours, which meant that the people creating the TV version had to edit the interview rather heavily. The other two O'Toole films on the schedule are his fourth Best Actor nomination in Goodbye, Mr. Chips at 1:00 AM, and his seventh nomination in My Favorite Year at 3:45 AM.
There are more remembrances on Monday night, as TCM spends the entire evening with movies from people who died at various points during the year, one movie per person. The night starts off honoring Deanna Durbin, who died at the end of April aged 91, and her film It Started With Eve at 8:00 PM. Charles Laughton plays a wealthy man who is unfortunately dying. His son (Robert Cummings) has recently gotten engaged, and Dad would like to meet the fiancÉe just once before he dies. But she's away and not going to be back in town for another day or two, so the son goes looking for a woman to play the part of his fiancÉe, so he can please Dad before he dies. That woman is hat check girl Durbin. However, there's a problem. She's so nice that she actually has a favorable affect on Dad's health, to the point that he's probably not going to die. Dad wants to see her again, but the son can't find her, and the actual fiancÉe is liable to show up. Oops. This is all a comedy, though.
Who else is being honored Monday night?
After Deanna Durbin, it's Annette Funicello in Bikini Beach at 9:45 PM;
Eileen Brennan in The Cheap Detective at 11:30 PM;
Jonathan Winters gets a dual role in The Loved One at 1:15 AM Tuesday;
Karen Black plays the girlfriend of Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces at 3:30 AM;
Julie Harris plays the love interest of James Dean in East of Eden at 5:15 AM; and
John Kerr (no relatoin to Deborah) has an inappropriate relationship with Deborah Kerr in Tea and Sympathy at 7:15 AM Tuesday.
Go for a dance on New Year's Eve, as TCM shows off music and dancing starting just after Tea and Sympathy, and going into the wee hours of New Year's morning. The prime time lineup is the That's Entertainment! films, starting with the first of them at 8:00 PM. They're nice, and especially in the first one you get to see the MGM lot as it was back in 1974, by which time the studio was really beginning to hit on hard times. The morning and afternoon lineup is more interesting, though, with rock-and-roll movies. There's the British entry It's Trad, Dad! at 12:15 PM, followed by a double bill of Rock Around the Clock at 1:45 PM and Twist Around the Clock at 3:15 PM. The latter two are interesting because they have almost the exact same plot and are almost a scene-for-scene remake. Both involve a promoter who finds that the "old" music he was promoting no longer brings in the crowds. But, in some small town in the middle of nowhere, he comes across a brother-and-sister combo performing a dance to great new music. The promoter vows to make them stars, falling in love with the sister along the way, but there's a conflict with the boss. In the first movie, the boss is a woman in love with the promoter; in the remake, it's the boss's daughter. Rock Around the Clock has some performers who weren't rock (the Platters) and some who never became successful, while Twist Around the Clock has the Marvelettes singing their hit "Merry Twistmas". Seriously.
You may not have heard of director Charles Brabin, since he didn't make too many well known movies and made his last in 1934. However, TCM is putting a spotlight on his work on Thursday morning and afternoon, with stuff like The Great Meadow, at 9:30 AM Thursday. This early talkie sees silent star Johnny Mack Brown as a farmre in 1770s Virginia who hears a speech from Daniel Boone about virgin land to be had over the Appalachians in what is now Kentucky. So, he decides to pick up stakes and lead his wife (Eleanor Boardman), mother (Lucille La Verne) and a group of pioneers over the mountains to that promised land. It's not quite as good as The Big Trail which had similar themes, but there are still some well-composed scenes of Indian attacks and trying to move equipment over mountains.
Meanwhile, over on the Fox Movie Channel, they've got a movie that they haven't shown in ages: Treasure of the Golden Condor, at 1:15 PM Thursday and 7:10 AM Friday. Cornel Wilde stars as a man in 18th century France who has seen his rightful inheritance stolen from him by his uncle the marquis (Goerge Macready). So what's such a man to do? Why, go off to the new world and seek his own fame and fortune. In this case, that means Guatemala and the Mayan ruins. Once he makes his fortune in the new world, he'll have the resources to fight his uncle. Wilde had actually studied fencing before he was an actor so he's good at the adventure stuff, even if it's not the same sorts of moves you'd use in competitive fencing, something which distressed Wilde to no end. A young Anne Bancroft plays the Marquise.
TCM's Star of the Month for January is Joan Crawford. TCM is going to be honoring her on each of the five Thursdays in January. She made so many movies during her years at MGM that the salute will be continuing well into Friday morning. This first Thursday in January brings us quite a few of the silent films she made at the beginning of her career. One that I don't think I've ever recommended before is The Boob, at 3:00 AM Friday. The title character is Peter, played by George Arthur, a country boy or "boob" that everybody picks on. The girl he wants to be his girlfriend Amy (Gertrude Olmstead), falls in love with a big city lawyer Harry (Antonio D'Algy) and runs off to the city with him. When Peter comes to the city himself, he discovers that Harry may actually be running a speakeasy, which is of course illegal in the age of Prohitibion. As for Crawford, she plays one of the patrons at the club Harry runs, who actually turns out to be working for the Treasury.
The final Crawford film this week is 1931's Possessed, which has Crawford following Clark Gable to the big city and becoming his mistress; that's on at 6:15 PM. I'm really only mentioning it though because I want to point out the short that's following it, Women in Hiding at about 7:36 PM. This is part of the Crime Does Not Pay series, which purported to show moviegoers all sorts of scams going on around them, complete with a heavy dose of MGM moralizing. This time, the subject is shady doctors who purport to help young women who get knocked up out of wedlock, something that was still considered almost scandalous back in 1940. The doctors set up residential hospitals, with the aim of making money off of the adoption, but the film claims that these hospitals could have disastrous results for the babies and their mothers.
The Friday night spotlight this month is science in the movies. Not science fiction so, but in many cases movies that at least attempt science fact. To that end, there are going to be several biopics and historical dramas throughout the month. This first Friday in January sees two of them: A Beautiful Mind, about mathematician John Nash, at 10:15 PM; and, kicking the whole spotlight off, Madame Curie, at 8:00 PM Friday on TCM. Greer Garson plays Maria Sklodowska, a Polish student in Paris who meets Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon). You know that they're going to fall in love since she has to become the titular Madame Curie, but that's not so much what the movie is about. They get married and start doing experiments, noting that some of the rocks in one of their experiments seem to be giving off some sort of energy. But they can't find the source of that energy. That source of course turns out to be the element radium, and little did they know the deadly effects of radioactivity. At least Pierre died tragically before the radiation could get to him. Watch for Van Johnson in a brief role; he had recently suffered a car accident and had a metal plate installed in his head, and MGM put him in this small role here sort of as a screeen test.
If for some horrible reason the Packers season ends in disaster today with a loss to Chicago, well at least there's a disaster film on the TCM schedule for you this week: The Hindenburg, at 4:15 PM Saturday. You probably know the general story about the Hindenburg, a transatlantic zeppelin, and how it exploded during an attempted landing in New Jersey in 1937 -- oh, the humanity! This film covers what supposedly went on during that transatlantic voyage, with a theory that the airship actually exploded due to sabotage by anti-Nazis. George C. Scott plays the Nazi security officer on board the Hindenburg, and he unsurprisingly gets the distinct impression that there are anti-Nazi plots afoot, but he doesn't find out about the bobm until just in time for the climax, which involves him trying to defuse it. This being one of those 1970s disaster films, there's a cast of big or formerly big names, such as Anne Bancroft as a countess going to see her disabled daughter; Charles Durning as the ship's captain; and Gig Young and Burgess Meredith among the passengers.
Original Post