Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 7-13, 2015. Amazingly, the Packers didn't meet their doom on Thursday night, so we have another week at least until the bottom falls out on their season. That, and Iowa lost, so I know you're all looking for a reason to celebrate. Why not celebrate by watching some good movies? As always, I've got a wonderful selection for you since I know how much you all appreciate my superior discerning taste. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned, which is important this week since a couple of movies begin at midnight ET.
Monday is December 7, which is the anniversary of the day when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, sending the US into World War II. So TCM is showing a bunch of World War II movies, such as Task Force at 9:45 AM. Gary Cooper plays Jonathan Scott, a Navy pilot who is retiring and looking back on his career. His career started in the early days of aviation, and after World War I the Navy brass was like much of the rest of the country in favor of isolationism. Scott, however, was forward-thinking enough to conclude that the US would need a way to enable planes to take off and land at sea, which of course means the aircraft carrier. Those ideas, however, were none too popular with the superiors who didn't think it would be feasible although, to be fair, nobody new how to land on such a small runway at the time. Still, Scott works to develop the carrier, and as we know from history, the attempts to build carriers were ultimately successful. Jane Wyatt plays his wife, and Walter Brennan his mentor. The last section of the movie is in color including a lot of real war footage.
We have a little movie returning to FXM Retro after a substantial absence: Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence, at 6:00 AM Tuesday. A very young Glenn Ford plays Joe, who works as a clerk in New York. But he has dreams. Having seen a brochure about cheap land in Arizona, he's going to buy a plot of land and become a farmer, raising oranges. (Apparently he didn't hear that the oppressive heat in Arizona is a dry heat.) The problem is getting there. He doesn't have the money, so he thumbs rides and hops trains. Along the way he meets nice but petty criminal Tony (Richard Conte), Spanish immigrant Anita (Jean Rogers), and the "Professor" (Raymond Walburn). Along the way the four have various adventures, while Joe begins to fall for Anita which could offer her a more stable future. And she knows a heck of a lot more about farming than Joe.
Later on Tuesday and over on TCM, you can catch Glenn Ford again in The Teahouse of the August Moon, at 2:15 PM. Ford plays Capt. Fisby, who is being sent to Okinawa as part of the American occupying forces to teach the locals about democracy, and to build a schoolhouse. However, the locals don't want a schoolhouse, as interpreter Sakini (Marlon Brando, playing Japanes) informs them. They want a teahouse. The clever natives ultimately succeed in getting Fisby to build that teahouse for them, which unsurprisingly ticks off the military brass. But Fisby has something up his sleeve for them. It turns out that the locals produce really good liquor, and dammit, the military brass like their alcohol! They send in a psychologist (Eddie Albert), but he too goes native. The role of Fisby's commanding officer was supposed to be played by Louis Calhern, but he died during filming so the role went to Paul Ford (unrelated to Glenn Ford).
Unless he dies in the next few days, Kirk Douglas will be turning 99 on Wednesday. With that in mind, TCM has decided to spend the day with the films of Douglas. One that I don't think I've recommended before is The Hook, at 2:00 PM. Douglas plays a US Army sergeant in the waning days of the Korean War. With the truce at Panmunjom upcoming, he and the two remaining soldiers under his command, privates Nick Adams and Robert Walker, Jr., are being evacuated southward after the ship they were about to board was attacked by the North Koreans. And wouldn't you know it, on their way south the ship spots a stranded man and picks him up so he won't drown -- and it turns out to be the pilot of the plane that shot at them! Making matters much worse, however, is that the South Koreans order the sergeant to execute the pilot. This would of course be a serious war crime, and the three have various levels of conflict over what to do.
The other movie returning to FXM Retro is The Magnificent Dope, at 12:10 PM Wednesday. Don Ameche plays Dwight Dawson, who runs a Dale Carnegie-style "school for success" together with his on-again, off-again love interest Claire (Lynn Bari). In order to increase attendance, Dwight comes up with the idea of a contest to find the person most in need of his success course, and giving that person a big cash prize as well as a free course which will change the person's life and make the school itself a success. Tad (Henry Fonda), living in small-town New England, enters the contest, but only because he wants the money so that his town can get a new fire engine. He wins, but when he gets to the school, he has no interest in the success classes, much to Dwight's consternation. More worryingly, Tad's small town, be thankful for what you've got attitude begins to rub off on everybody else, which would spell disaster for Dwight's school. Also worrying is that fact that perhaps Claire is beginning to fall in love with Tad.
Encore Westerns is running Four Guns to the Border twice this week, at 12:35 PM Thursday and 1:05 AM Friday. Rory Calhoun plays a bank robber who left his home town years ago, thanks to the sheriff (Charles Drake). Worse, the sheriff married Calhoun's girl (Nina Foch). So Calhoun is going to come back to town with his gang and start a showdown with the sheriff that only serves as a diversion for the rest of his gang to rob the bank. On the way out there's a problem, however. Calhoun and his gang run into another outlaw (Walter Brennan) which wouldn't be such a problem, except that he's got a daughter (Colleen Miller) who's finally all grown up and, well, has the desires that any woman who's reached that point in her life has. And of course the men have desires too. And to complicate matters further, there are Indians around, which just may put the kibosh on any romantic entanglements.
Frank Sinatra returns on Wednesday night with what I think is a TCM premiere: The Detective, at 1:45 AM Thursday. Sinatra plays New York police detective Joe Leland, who is sent to investigate an interesting murder. We know it's interesting because Sinatra gets to utter the classic line about the victim: "Penis cut off". That's a sign that the victim was a homosexual, and that the murderer obviously didn't like this, or so the 60s logic goes. Leland investigates and arrests young thug Felix (Tony Musante), who is dule found guilty and sent to the electric chair. But then a funny thing happens. Another man, Colin (William Windom) jumps off the roof of the grandstand at Aqueduct racetrack, and when Leland investigates that, he discovers that Colin may have had something to do with the murder of the man for which Felix went to the chair, and that there's some sort of high-level corruption going on. Lee Remick plays Leland's estranged wife; Jack Klugman plays Leland's detective partner. It's an interesting look at late-60s New York and the attitudes towards gays that prevailed at the time.
On Thursday night on TCM, we get French director Claude Chabrol. Perhaps the most accessible of his movies is Story of Women, on at midnight Friday (ie. 11:00 PM Thursday LFT, or just after Arizona beats the crap out of the Vikings on Thursday Night Football). The setting is France during World War II, a time when the French have been defeated (yet again), this time by the Nazis. Marie (Isabel Huppert) is married to Paul (FranÇois Cluzet) whom she doesn't really love and who as a menial laborer doesn't make enough for her to be able to afford all of the necessities that are hard to come by during a period of war. So she opens her house to prostitutes, helping them out when they get "in trouble" by helping them to procure abortions. She also has an affair with a Nazi officer and otherwise humiliates her husband. Of course, abortion is highly illegal, and this gets her arrested. It's all based on the true story of the last woman to be guillotined in France.
TCM is running more Christmas movies on Friday night. One of the classic Christmas stories is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and that's been turned into a movie on several occasions. Two of them are showing up on TCM in this Friday's prime time lineup. First, at 10:00 PM, is the 1970 movie Scrooge (note that several of the movie adaptations bear this title). The 1970 version is a musical version, with Albert Finney, not known for his singing, playing the part of Scrooge, doing several songs. Alec Guinness, who plays Jacob Marley's ghost, also gets a song.
For a more conventional version of the story, TCM is following Scrooge with the 1938 A Christmas Carol at midnight (that is, the midnight between Friday and Saturday, or 11:00 PM LFT). This is the MGM version. Reginald Owen plays Scrooge here, leading an ensemble cast of all the character actors under contract to MGM. Good, but not quite as dark as the original story or some of the other movies since MGM didn't do dark as well as other studios.
Earlier I mentioned that I think The Detective is a TCM premiere. Another movie that I think is a TCM premiere is Apartment for Peggy, at 2:00 PM Sunday. Peggy (played by Jeanne Crain) is a young woman married to Jason (William Holden), a World War II veteran going to college on the GI Bill. Unfortunately, a whole lot of other GIs are going to college too, with the result being a severe housing crunch that has Peggy and Jason living in a trailer. But Peggy has an idea. She's been sitting in philosophy classes given to the wives of GIs by retired Professor Barnes (Edmund Gwenn), who has basically decided that he has nothing else to live for and eventually plans to commit suicide. He's got a big house, and Peggy wants to rent the attic even though that would be a real fixer-upper. But she and Jason move in, and that helps breathe new life into the old professor.
