Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of December 31, 2018 to January 6, 2019. We're at the end of a calendar year and also the end of the season for the Packers and Badgers. So with little in the way of sports until the resumption of the Champions League in February, why not spend the cold nights with some of the movies I've used my good taste to select for you? As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is New Year's Eve, which means that TCM is having some fun programming to ring in 2019. In the past, they've run the six Thin Man movies in prime time, since the first one is set during the holidays. This year, they have the Thin Man movies, but during the day on Monday as part of a morning and afternoon of William Powell/Myrna Loy movies. The original The Thin Man comes on at 8:45 AM, followed by the rest.
Monday night is something that TCM has mostly done before on New Year's Eve, which is a marathon of the whole That's Entertainment! Series. MGM, for its 50th anniversary in 1974, got some of its old stars to show off the backlot just before MGM sold it off, with the actors talking about their memories while showing clips from some of the great MGM musicals. The movie (airing at 8:00 PM Monday) was such a success that a second (10:30 PM Monday) went into production, with a third done 20 years later. The night also includes That's Dancing, and finally, It's Showtime at 5:00 AM. This last one is a look at some of the animal stars throughout Hollywood history, although the clips are more or less presented without context, making the movie a bit of a slog if you don't recognize the clips.
If you want something different on New Year's Eve, you can try Backdraft over on Showtime Extreme at 10:25 AM Monday. William Baldwin plays Brian McCaffrey, younger son in a line of firefighters in Chicago. He was raised by older brother Stephen (Kurt Russell), also a firefighter, after their father was killed in the line of duty. Unfortunately, there's a lot of tension between the two brothers for all the standard Hollywood reasons. Brian has the dilemma of whether he should try to prove he can live up to the family legacy or whether he should make his own way in life. Stephen, on the other hand, wants to protect his kid brother, while also not having a member of the company who can't do the job. Eventually, Stephen gets Brian a position working with Rimgale (Robert De Niro). There's been a series of oddly specific fires, each of which has been killing somebody with a relationship to the fire department. It's up to Rimgale and Brian to crack the case, while Brian may be able to learn something about being a firefighter along the way.
Tuesday is the centenary of Wisconsin-born actress Carole Landis, so TCM is spending its Tuesday night lineup with her. I'm not certain if I've recommended Having Wonderful Crime before, but it's going to be on at 2:30 AM Wednesday. Landis plays Helene Justus, a private detective in the Gracie Allen mode. She's just gotten married to Jake (George Murphy). However, her general nuttiness has gotten the two of them, as well as their lawyer friend Malone (Pat O'Brien) in trouble with the cops, so all three of them go off to a vacation resort to escape the police. There, they catch a show from the magician Movel (George Zucco), but when the disappearing act comes, the peeson never reappears, naturally leading Helene to suspect murder. Things spiral out of control from there. Sadly, by the time this one was made at the end of World War II, both the comic detective genre and the screwball comedy had gone out of vogue, so a lot of the material seems to fall flat.
Meanwhile, StarzEncore Westerns is simply showing more westerns on New Year's. You'll have two chances to catch The Bravados, at 1:00 AM Tuesday and again at 9:49 PM. Gregory Peck plays Jim, who's riding into town when he gets stopped by a sheriff's deputy, who doesn't want anybody riding in. Well, except for Simms the hangman. They've got four guys in town who are scheduled to be hanged for having robbed the bank, and the sheriff is understandably worried that somebody is going to try to spring them. Somebody does, of course, although that person isn't Jim. Indeed, Jim wanted to see these guys because somebody committed a serious crime on his ranch, that of raping and killing his wife, and he thinks these might be the guys who did it. So Jim joins the posse, although while everybody else wants the men brought back to hang in town, Jim wants them for his own reasons, not particularly caring what the town wants. Stephen Boyd plays one of the bad guys while Joan Collins plays a former love interest of Peck's character (not the murdered wife).
If you want to have fun laughing at something that's terribly screwed up, try watching Vanessa, Her Love Story, which TCM is showing at 11:15 AM Wednesday. Helen Hayes plays Vanessa, a woman in Victorian England in love with Benjamin (Robert Montgomery), but due to misunderstandings don't get married yet. Just before the planned wedding, Vanessa's father suffers a heart attack and his house burns down at the same time, and since Benjamin is unable to save him, Vanessa dumps him. She marries Ellis (Otto Kruger) for his money, not realizing he's going insane because his family won't tell her. Benjamin is in a loveless marriage too, but the opportunity comes up for him to get a divorce and start anew with Vanessa. Except that the laws don't allow her to get a divorce if she's married to someone criminally insane. And of course all of polite society hates Vanessa and Benjamin for trying to carry on a relationship while her husband is insane. May Robson rounds out the cast as Vanessa's impossibly old grandmother.
Up against this over on StarzEncore Classics is Barbarella, which will be airing at 12:12 PM Wednesday, but also earlier at 5:50 AM Wednesday. Jane Fonda plays Barbarella, a secret agent millennia in the future traveling the universe in a groovy 60s spaceship. The universe is mostly peaceful, except that the notorious scientist Durand-Durand (Milo O'Shea) has supposedly come up with a new weapon that would enable him to destroy a large swath of the universe -- he's obviously got a view to a kill. So Barbarella travels to the planet where he's supposedly hiding to find him and destroy the weapon. Sure enough, he's there, in a city founded upon a sea of evil mental energy that turns everybody but the virtuous Barbarella evil. Helping Barbarella are an exiled professor (Marcel Marceau in a speaking role), and a blind guardian angel Pygar (John Phillip Law). Anita Pallenberg plays the queen of the evil planet, who doesn't have quite as much power as she thinks. This one is bizarrely psychodelic and worth at least one watch even if it isn't all that good.
TCM is honoring Marion Davies once again this Thursday on the anniversary of her birth, by showing a bunch of her movies. One that I don't think I've ever mentioned here before is The Bachelor Father, at 10:30 AM Thursday. Davies is obviously not the father here; that honor belongs to veteran character actor C. Aubrey Smith. Here he plays Sir Basil, a wealthy bachelor living on his estate in England. However, it seems as if he was a bit of a bounder back in his younger days. He fathered three children out of wedlock, and now that he's getting old, he wants to see the children, who would be all grown up. Geoffrey (a young Ray Milland) is English; Maria (Nina Quartero) is Italian; and Tony (Marion Davies), whom he had the most difficulty finding, is an American actress. The half-siblings meet each other, and Dad begins to form emotional bonds with each of them. But they also have their own lives from before meeting their biological father that they can't fully drop at the drop of a hat. Can Dad find true happiness?
A movie that's back on FXM Retro after a long layoff and that I supposedly haven't recommended for several years is Mister 880, which will be on at 8:40 AM Friday. Part of Fox's cycle of docudramas from the late 40s and early 1950s, this one concerns the Secret Service, which at the time of the movie was responsible for combatting counterfeiting. There's a particularly difficult case up in New York called Case 880, in which somebody is passing phony $1 bills. The case wasn't getting the attention it deserved because of the small denominations, but now they've put agent Steve Buchanan (Burt Lancaster) on it. One of the victims he interviews is Ann (Dorothy McGuire), a translator at the United Nations. What she doesn't realize is that it's her kindly next-door neighbor Miller, nicknamed Skipper (Edmund Gwenn) who's printing up these bills whenever he's short on money. The case gets complicated by the fact that everybody loves Skipper, and further by the fact that Steve begins to fall in love with Ann. But they're going to have to arrest Skipper eventually.
Coming up at noon on Saturday on TCM is The Spy in Black. Released in the UK just before the start of World War II, the movie is set in World War I. Germany has been defeated navally, with only the U-boats able to make it to the open sea. So U-boat commander Hardt (Conrad Veidt) takes his U-boat to the northern coast of Scotland, where he's going to meet one of the Germans' contacts in the country, a local school headmistress (Valerie Hobson). She's the go-between connecting the Germans to a British naval officer Ashington (Sebastian Shaw) who is willing to offer information on the movements of the British fleet and would allow the German U-boats to torpedo enough British ships to break the naval blockade. However, as Hardt analyzes the information, he begins to get the sinking feeling that he's being fed a pack of lies designed to get him in a trap. He has to get back to his U-boat, but that's going to be darn tough. This was the first of a string of collaborations between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
If you enjoyed Robert Montgomery in Vanessa, Her Love Story, you'll really enjoy him in Night Must Fall, which TCM is running at 7:45 AM Sunday. Montgomery plays Danny, a handyman who shows up at the isolated English cottage owned by elderly, wheelchair-bound Mrs. Bramson (Dame May Whitty), as his fiancée works for Bramson. The old lady takes him on, despite the fact that her caretaker and niece Olivia (Rosalind Russell) doesn't approve of him. This disapproval is heightened by the fact that Danny has an unseemly interest in the case of a woman whose body was found nearby, beheaded. That, and the fact he has a hat box that's the right weight for a human head instead of a hat. Meanwhile, Danny continues to charm Bramson, which makes Olivia even more worried, fearing that her aunt is in serious danger. Is Danny a murderer, or just misunderstood? And what's in that hat box? Montgomery received an Oscar nomination for his role.