Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 9-15, 2013. We're finally reaching the end of The Story of Film, for those who may not be into that program. But there are lots of other interseting things worth watching as well, including Star of the Month Fred Astaire and this month's TCM Guest Programmer. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Errol Flynn was in pretty lousy physical shape at the end of his career, thanks to all that drinking and hard living. A good chance to see the effects of all this is in the movie The Roots of Heaven, airing at 11:00 AM Monday and 9:15 AM Tuesday on the Fox Movie Channel. Flynn gets top billing in what is a supporting role only because the original lead, William Holden, had to pull out. Holden was replaced by Trevor Howard, playing a man who sees what's being done to the majestic African elephant, and doesn't like it. And all of the legal means of trying to save the elephant have ended in a brick wall, so it's time for some guerrilla action. Flynn, playing a dissipated retired British Army major, is one of the few to believe in Howard's cause at the beginning, but other people start to join, all for their own personal reasons, including TV commentator Orson Welles and ivory dealer Paul Lukas. The movie was filmed in part on location by director John Huston, and as with The African Queen several years earlier, everybody who didn't drink prodigious quantities of alcohol got terribly sick.
Monday night brings the final installment of The Story of Film, including a Russian film that an acquaintance of mine born in the former USSR highly recommends: Russian Ark, at 10:00 PM Monday on TCM. Filmed entirely in the Hermitage museum in Sankt-Peterburg, the movie focuses on an unseen filmmaker, who goes through the museum with his travelling companion, a Frenchman from about 200 years earlier. Together, the two take a voyage through 200 years of Russian history, climaxing in with the final ball that the Romanovs held in the grand ballroom -- don't forget that the Hermitage was a Romanov palace before the October Revolution and the Communists' turning it into an art museum. Oh, and the movie appears to be one long take that would make Alfred Hitchcock's Rope blanch.
Tuesday night brings the December "Guest Programmer" to TCM: actor and stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt. Oswalt has an ecelctic selection of two old movies, and two recent foreign films, starting at 8:00 PM with Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Denis Price plays a should-be aristocrat who tries to bump off all the people ahead of him in the line of succession -- all played by Alec Guinness, including one who is a woman! Guinness is delightful in this comic gem.
That's followed at 10:00 PM by the classic 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma, in which Van Heflin tries to earn some extra money by escorting wanted outlaw Glenn Ford to the train that's going to take Ford to his hanging; Ford of course is going to do everything in his power to stop it.
As for the two foreign films, there's the Colombian film The Wind Journeys at 11:45 PM, and the French film Aaltra, a black comedy about two farmers who constantly go at each other.
Wednesday morning and afternoon brings a whole bunch of football movies to TCM. Or at least, movies that claim to be about football but aren't very accurate. One that I haven't recommended before is Gridiron Flash, at 10:00 AM. Grant Mitchell plays a booster for Bedford College, which badly needs a winning football team. So he goes to the state penitentiary, where he sees Eddie Quillan tearing it up at the prison football game. Mitchell offers Quillan an interesting proposition: play for Bedford, and Mitchell will arrange heists of the wealthy alumni who come to college football games! (One wonders if that's more or less than Cam Newton was offered.) Quillan doesn't want to play college football, but one of the coeds (Betty Furness) seduces him at the bequest of the administration. It's incredibly dopey, what with all the stereotypes of college life; Quillian at about 5'7' doesn't look anything like a football player either. But damn if it isn't entertainingly stupid. Watch for Marx Brothers foil Margaret Dumont as a woman whose house gets cased.
Fred Astaire returns on Wednesday night. Lasted week, he danced over and over with Ginger Rogers. This week, he gets to dance wiht several actresses, including Rita Hayworth in You Were Never Lovelier, at 9:45 PM Wednesday on TCM. Rita Hayworth plays the second daughter in an Argentine family where the daughters marry in order. Eldest daughter is married, and the two youngest daughters have men picked out, but dammit, Rita doesn't seem to be interested in anybody. So Dad (Adolphe Menjou) comes up with an idea to get daughter interested in a secret admirer, only for him to find a suitable man to play that part when the time comes. That of course isn't the way things turn out. Fred Astaire enters the picture, and through a mix-up Rita believes he's the secret admirer. She actually falls in love with him, which is a problem, since he's not the guy Dad intended for her. Yeah, we've seen the plot before, but the songs are nice, and Astaire and Hayworth are always worth watching.
I mentioned some football films on Wednesday, and Ven Heflin in 3:10 to Yuma on Tuesday night. How about Van Heflin in a football movie? That's the case with Saturday's Heores, at 7:45 AM Friday. Van Heflin plays a college quarterback in this one. He's not getting any money from the school, so he makes money on the side by scalping his complimentary tickets. (Didn't some Vikings coach do that with his Super Bowl tickets?) Heflin claims that because of all the practicing, they're not getting much of an education, either. Sounds like much of the SEC. Anyhow, for scalping tickets, Heflin gets booted of the team, and decides to get even by going to the press and exposing all the corruption at his old school! And then he starts providing coaching to his old school's biggest rival -- would any real life QB do that? As hokey as this movie is, it's funny how you can see many of the issues it presents still rearing their ugly heads today. All that's missing are the groupies.
I didn't mention it here, but last Monday you may have seen The House Across the Corner. That late 1940s movie was telling a story for about the fourth time; one which was already a remake in the late 1930s when it was filmed as Love Is on the Air, which you can see at 9:00 AM Saturday. Ronald Reagan, making his movie debut, plays a radio reporter who says on his show that he's going to reveal the mob corruption at City Hall on his next show. The gangsters don't like this, and pressure the station's owner to can Reagan. The only thing is, Reagan has a contract so instead of getting canned, he gets re-assigned to doing the children's show, displacing June Travis. But Reagan takes to the children's show, and you know Travis is going to fall in love with Reagan. When Reagan starts talking to the children, he finds that they can supply him with information about those gangsters! This is most definitely B material, but Reagan showed he was well-suited to playing likeable heroes in these second features.
Friday night brings the second night of Deborah Nadoolman Landis discussing costume design. This week, she presents a couple of women who worked in the 1960s and 1970s. First up is Irene Sharaff, who costumed Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, at 8:00 PM. That's followed at 10:45 PM by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton playing a dysfunctional couple making their dinner guests uncomfortable in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The second designer is Anthea Sylbert, another of those names I don't know well, although she worked on some famous movies. This includes a pair starring Jack Nicholson: Chinatown at 1:00 AM, and Carnal Knowledge at 3:15 AM.
Finally is Walter Plunkett, who has two very different movies being shown. First is the business attire of Katharine Hepburn in Adam's Rib at 5:00 AM. The second movie is Anne Francis' designs, and those space jumpsuits, of Forbidden Planet at 6:45 AM Saturday.
William Shatner did some strange things in his career, such as his "singing". Perhaps even more bizarre is the idea of making a movie in Esperanto. Yet Shatner did precisely that when he made Incubus, which is airnig at 3:30 AM Sunday on TCM. Shatner plays Marc, a virtuous soldier who shows up later in the story. First up is Allyson Ames as Kia, a succubus, or a female demon who leads men to their moral doom. But, she finds leading most men to perdition is just too easy, since they're already terribly immoral. When she meets Marc, Kia decides to take up the challenge of laying him low. Except that not only does it not work; Kia finds herself being changed! So she and her sister conjure up an incubus, roughly a male succubus, to try to deal with Marc. Don't worry; the movie has subtitles in case you don't speak Esperanto.
A few weeks back, I mentioned a new entry in TCM's irregular "A Night at the Movies" series, on crime films. Two years ago, they did one on Christmas films, and TCM will be showing that at 11:15 AM. It's just after the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol (10:00 AM), the MGM version with Reginald Owen as Scrooge. This will be followed by a pair of Christmas movies I've mentioned quite a few times:
Holiday Affair at 12:15 PM, in which Robert Mitchum teaches widow Janet Leigh and her kid the true meaning of Christmas and why Wendell Corey is such a boring drip.
And, at 2:00 PM, you could watch The Bishop's Wife, with Cary Grant as an angel sent to earth to help Episcopal bishop David Niven and his wife Loretta Young learn what Christmas is really about.
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