Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of December 22-28, 2014. Christmas is on Thursday, so enjoy the holiday. After that, it's a long wait for Green Bay to beat Detroit and get its first-round bye in the NFL playoffs. So in the meantime, why not sit back and relax with some good movies? As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday, December 22 is the birth anniversary of actress Ruth Roman, who is probably best remembered for playing Farley Granger's fiancÉe in Strangers on a Train. That movie is airing at 11:45 AM Monday on TCM as part of a birthdy salute to Roman. Immediately following, at 1:30 PM, is Tomorrow Is Another Day. Steve Cochran plays Bill, a man who's just gotten out of prison, after spending nearly two decades in stir for killing his father, a murder that happened when the son was just a teenager. So he's never been with a woman, and when he gets out of prison he winds up meeting Cay (Roman). She's a taxi dancer at a really run-down dance joint. He falls for her although she's only acting professionally. That is, until her boyfriend gets shot, and Bill and Cay get wrongfully accused. Their response is to go on the lam, eventually making their way ot the farms of California working as day laborers, where she tries to reform him before their secret is revealed.
This fourth Monday in the salute to Star of the Month Cary Grant brings a bunch of comedies to prime time, including all four of the films he made with Katharine Hepburn. Bringing Up Baby (1:15 AM Tuesday) and The Philadelphia Story (3:15 AM Tuesday) are great and well-known; almost as good but not as well-known is Holiday, at 5:15 AM Tuesday. Grant plays Johnny, a businessman who's doing the business thing because he wants to earn enough money to live the life he imagines -- the only thing is, he's not certain exactly what that life is. And then he meets Julia (Doris Nolan) and falls in love with her. When he goes to tell her father that he wants to marry her, he finds that Julia's family is wealthy beyond belief, and Johnny isn't so sure that this is the life he's imagined. Further complicating matters is the fact that Julia has a sister Linda (that's Hepburn) who is more of a free spirit and the type of person who would approve of Johnny's unorthodox plans for life. But there's no way Dad would approve of Linda taking Johnny away from Julia, or probably even Johnny's plans for life.
Thursday being Christmas, it's not surprising that we're going to be getting a whole bunch of Christmas movies. In the cast of TCM, those movies start Wednesday morning at 6:00. One of the first movies TCM is showing is Bundle of Joy, at 7:30 AM Wednesday. Debbie Reynolds plays Polly, a department store clerk who gets fired. On her way home, she passes the orphanage, where there's a foundling on the steps. She goes to take the baby in, but the people working their mistake her for the mother, so she winds up with a baby even though she's not the baby's mother. Store owner JB Merlin (Adolphe Menjou) has a son Dan (Eddie Fisher), and the boss' son, also mistaking Polly for the mother, has pity on her and gives her her job back. Meanwhile, JB thinks he might be a grandfather. This is a Techicolor musical remake of Bachelor Mother which starred Ginger Rogers as the shop-girl, David Niven as the boss' son, and Charles Coburn as the boss. Bachelor Mother can be seen at 9:30 AM Thursday on TCM.
Christmas week programming over on FXM seems a bit more family-oriented than usual. Starting at 3:00 PM on Christmas, they're showing the 1951 Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol several times in succession. But, I think they did it last year, running a colorized version and putting in commercials. At least the movie wasn't in widescreen for them to pan and scan. Earlier in the week, there are multiple Shriley Temple movies, including one I don't think I've recommended before, Susannah of the Mounties, at 10:15 AM Wednesday and 3:00 AM Thursday. Shirley obviously plays Susannah, a young girl who's discovered by the Mounties, in the form of one named Monty (Randolph Scott). But that discovery is of her as the sole survivor of an Indian attack out in the Canadian Rockies in the 1880s when Canada was trying to build a railroad across the country. Anyhow, Monty takes Susannah back to base, where she proceeds to charm everybody, including the Indian chief's son. There's a romantic subplot involving Scott and Margaret Lockwood, and dramatic tension over those building the railroad and those who want it stopped, but overall this is a formulaic Temple picture. It's been colorized, and I won't be surprised if FXM Retro shows the colorized version.
After TCM gets done with its long block of Christmas movies, they're spending prime time Thursday with something decidedly un-Christmassy: Mel Brooks. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with High Anxiety. This film is a spoof of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, with a plot that borrows at first from Spellbound, with Brooks playing the new head doctor at a psychiatric institute who gets framed for murder. The climax comes from Vertigo, as our hero has to overcome his "high anxiety" to solve the case and catch the bad guy. In between, a lot of Hitchcock's other famous scenes are parodied, notably the shower scene from Psycho and stuff from The Birds. Madeline Kahn plays the blonde, looking for her father; Cloris Leachman plays a nurse at the institute who has a thing for doctor Harvey Korman.
For those of you who want more Mel Brooks on Christmas, turn over to Encore Classics, which is running Robin Hood: Men in Tights twice: at 5:50 AM and 1:30 PM. Spoofing the Robin Hood story in general, and especially the then recently-released Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Cary Elwes of Princess Bride fame stars as Robin of Loxley. Here, he's retunrning from the Crusiades to help a friend and formcer fellow captive, the Moor Asneeze (Isaac Hayes) find his son Atchoo (Dave Chappelle). Of course, Robin has to deal with the Sherfff (of Rottingham instead of Nottingham, and played by Roger Rees) and Prince John (Richard Lewis) who is trying to run England with an iron fist while his brother King Richard (Patrick Stewart) is also away fighting the Crusades. There are several actors with small parts who had bigger parts in earlier Brooks movies and other references to Brooks' previous work too.
TCM is also giving us a bunch of Christmas-themes shorts on Wednesday and Thursday. Not only that, but many of them are repeated in case you miss the early showing. Jackie Cooper sends us his holday greetings twice, in The Christmas Party, which is on at noon on Wednesday and again at 7:48 AM Thursday. The whole Hardy family (Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy et al.) shows up to open a Christmas present or two in a very brief short on at 3:41 PM Wednesday and repeated at 10:57 AM Thursday. Lewis Stone, who played the father in the Hardy family, is alone to offer his holiday greetings on behalf of MGM at 9:57 PM Wednesday and 7:36 PM Thursday. For those who like something of a more documentary nature, there's Snow Birds, looking at winter sports as they were back in the early 1930s, at 3:49 PM Thursday. Even the Vitaphone shorts get into the act. I mentioned Seasoned Greetings a couple of weeks ago; that's on again at 9:10 AM Wednesday. There's also Compliments of the Season at 11:46 PM Wednesday; that one tells of a pickpocket recently released from prison who saves a despondent woman from committing suicide. Pat O'Brien plays a cop.
On Friday, TCM is putting a spotlight on Henry Fonda, even though his birthday is in May. Among the Fonda movies being shown is I Met My Love Again, at 9:30 AM. This is a movie with an interesting premise. Fonda plays Ives, a college graduate who's gone on to become a college professor. Back in the day, he and classmate Julie (Joan Bennett), but when he waffled about marrying her, she went and married another man, and moved to Europe with him, where she had a daughter. But then that husband dies, so Julie comes back to America, looking for Ives, to see if perhaps she can renew the old flame she had for him. Will Ives still love Julie after she jilted him? Wil the townsfolk remember what Julie did to Ives and try to keep her from getting too close to him? It's an interesting idea, but the movie doesn't quite hit the heights of something like Holiday.
A movie that I've recommended a couple of times before, but is always worth another viewing, is Robinson Crusoe, at 10:15 PM Saturday. This version, made in 1954 by director Luis Buñuel, stars Dan O'Herlihy as Crusoe, the man on a ship that gets caught in a storm somewhere of South America and breaks up, leaving him as the only survivor. (Well, there's also a dog and a cat.) Cruso salvages what he can and tries to make a life for himself on this island, wondering what he did to deserve this. And then another man washes up on the island, and Crusoe names him Friday for the day of the week on which it happened. Crusoe treats Friday like a slave at first before coming to his senses. There are some savage natives who show up, and then another ship, which finaly gives Robinson and Friday the chance finally to get off the island. Or does it? Every time in the past that I've seen this film it's been a terrible print, which is a shame since the story is so well told and you can still see Buñuel's mastery of the camera.
For those of you who want a war movie, there's The Longest Day, at 8:00 AM Sunday on Encore Classics. The "longest day" is of course a reference to D-Day, June 6, 1944, the day the Allies invaded Normandy, and this film attempts to tell the story of that day. Of course, it attempts to do that by using more stars than even MGM could put in a film like Dinner at Eight. There are Americans (Henry Fonda as Theodore Roosevelt Jr. or Robert Mitchum and John Wayne as commanding officers); British (Sean Connery is a British army private, Richard Burton an RAF man, and Peter Lawford is Lord Lovat); and Germans (Curd JÜrgens is the best known name among the actors, but Field Marshal Erwin Rommel figures prominently among the Germans). It's tough to do justice to such a massive event, and one of the results is that the movie goes on for nearly three hours with sometimes mixed results. But the black-and-white cinematography is excellent.
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