Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of February 16-22, 2015. Monday is a holiday for those who work for a branch of government, and many schools will be out all week, so why not celebrate by watching some good movies? Teach the little rugrats about good cinema. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Forst. last week, somebody requested Good Morning, Miss Dove. If you missed it last week, you've got a chance to watch it again. This story of a small-town teacher (Jennifer Jones) who seems overly stern, but doesn't realize until after she's leaid up in hospital with a life-threatening illness just how much of an effect shes' had on the students she's spend decades of her life teaching, shows up at 8:40 AM Wednesday on FXM Retro
TCM is showing a couple of epics on Monday morning and afternoon, including the three-hour long Nicholas and Alexandra at 4:30 PM. If you know your history, you'll know that these are the names of the last Emperor of Russia and his wife. Czar Nicholas II (played by Michael Jayston; in fact, most of the cast is relatively little-known stage actors) has seen one revolution in his country back in 1905, but World War I was a disaster for Russia and ultimately led to two more revolutions in 1917, the lastter one bringing in the Bolshevik government. The Soviet Communists arrest the imperial family and ship them east to Siberia, eventually taking the family to the middle of nowhere town of Tobolsk in western Siberia, well north of the main rail line and big cities, and then summarily executing them, never letting on that this was the intention the entire time. Even though we know from history what's going to happen, the execution is still somewhat shocking. Lovely sets, although of course nothing was filmed on location since this was the era of the Soviet Union.
Our next movie is one that would be difficult to make today: Pillow Talk, at 11:00 PM Monday. Rock Hudson plays Brad, a New York songwriter with a bunch of girlfriends. Jan (Doris Day) is an interior designer, who shares a party line phone (see why I said they couldn't make it today?) with Brad, but can never use it since he's talking to one or another of his girlfriends on the phone. And then Brad sees Jan and realizes she's a cutie, so he decides to pursue her romantically, although of course he can't claim to be Brad since Jan will know who that is and she'll hate Brad. Instead, Brad claims to be Rex, visiting from Texas. Meanwhile, Jan has a wealthy client named Jonathan (Tony Randall). He's one of Brad's friends, but he's also in love with Jan, although Jan only has professional feelings towards Jonathan. Jonathan tries to find out who this "Rex" is. Thelma Ritter earned her fifth Best Supporting Actress nomination for the part of Jan's housekeeper.
Another interesting movie that would be difficult to make today is The Mark, at 11:30 AM Tuesday on TCM. Stuart Whitman received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his role as Jim, a man who's served a long stretch in prison for the attempted sexual assault of a minor. Prison psychiatrist Dr. McNally (Rod Steiger) believes he's cured Jim of his impulses, to the point where Jim can go and get a job and become a productive member of society again. (Nowadays, Jim would be stuck in the only trailer park in town that's not within 10 miles of any schools, and background checks would keep him from being hired anywhere.) His boss (Donald Wolfit) is the only one who knows Jim's true past, and Jim does indeed begin to be productive, even to the point of falling in love with a young widow (Maria Schell). But then a child is murdered, the police understandably have to bring Jim in for questioning, and his past begins to become public.
Fifteen years before The Band, there was the movie Cripple Creek, which you can catch at 9:25 AM Thursday or 4:45 AM Friday on Encore Westerns. Back in the day, the US was on the gold standard, so gold smuggling was a big thing (well, it still is). The Secret Service, in charge of protecting the money supply, has digured out that somebody's been smuggling gold from the mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado, so then send in three agents (George Montgomery, Richard Egan, and Jerome Courtland) to investigate, figure out who's doing the smuggling, and stop it. The agents of course solve the mystery and save the US money supply, since the Production Code would never let smugglers get away with their criminality. They do it fairly quickly, too, since this was conceived as a B movie. As a result, it's competently made but there are a lot better westerns out there.
Up against the first showing of Cripple Creek over on TCM is Twilight of Honor, at 8:15 AM Thursday. Richard Chamberlain plays David Mitchell, a young widower and attorney who's given a thankles task: handle the defense in a case where Air Force officer Ben (Nick Adams) is on trial for a muder of a prominent local figure that he's confessed to, up against a prosecutor (James Gregory) who is hoping to use the case to advance his political career. David turns for help to his old friend Art (Claude Rains in one of his last roles), an aging attorney who's too sick to handle the case himself, but can help a young friend. Together, the two try the same defense that James Stewart tried in Anatomy of a Murder (which, by the way is on at 8:00 PM Monday on TCM): claim that the victim was engaging in an adulterous relationship with Ben's wife, which would be a valid defense in the jurisdiciton where the trial is taking place.
Steve McQueen showed for anybody who didn't already believe it that he could act when he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in the movie The Sand Pebbles, airing at 9:45 PM Thursday on TCM. McQueen plays Jake Holman, an American navy man who in the 1920s in on a gunboat sent to patrol a backwater part of China in order to "protect" American interests in China as all the other western powers are doing. His job is as the ship's engineer, which he likes since it means he doesn't have to get involved in any of the politics that's going on over on dry land. But of course, those politics are going to come for him, when he's ordered to join a patrol going ashore to protect some American missionaries. Holman begins to respect Chinese culture, but he also begins to fall in love with young missionary Shirley (Candice Bergen). The all-star cast includes Richard Crenna as the ship's captain, and Richard Attenborough as one of the sailors. Lovely cinematography, although of course Taiwan had to stand in for mainland China.
For the ladies who want to look at a photogenic male lead in an action/adventure movie, you could do worse than to watch Captain From Castile,at 6:00 AM Friday on FXM Retro. Tyrone Power plays Pedro de Vargas, son of a Spanish nobleman circa 1517. Pedro gets caught up in the Inquisition, but is helped to escape by a man he met named Juan Garcia (Lee J. Cobb, of all people!) who had spent some time in the New World and talks of the New World's riches. So Pedro and Juan head off for Cuba, the big Spanish colony of the time, together with Catana (Jean Peters), a servant woman who fell in love with Pedro from the moment she saw him. They all wind up on Hernando Cortez' (Cesar Romero) expedition to Mexico, and things go more or less well for Pedro until Madrid sends out an Inquisitor to investigate the New World, who just happens to be the same one Pedro fell afoul of back in Spain! Pedro is continually winding up in life-or-death situations only to get out of them through a miracle. Many of the scenes from the Cortez expedition were filmed on location in Mexico, and the color cinematography is lovely. The movie is a bit long at 140 minutes, but nice to look at.
If you want to watch an Oscar-winning movie on a channel other than TCM, you could always watch The Woman in Red, at 2:00 PM Saturday on Encore Classics. Gene Wilder plays Teddy, a man living in San Francisco with his wife and two children. He's seemingly happily married until, one day, he comes across a woman in a red dress (Kelly LeBrock) who has the heating grate scene from The Seven Year Itch happen to her. Teddy immediately becomes captivated with the woman, and wants to find out who she is, even though he's already married and knows how wrong it would be to cheat on his wife since he's seen one of his friends do it. Making matters more complicated is that all of his attempts to meet this woman wind up as humorous disasters. Wilder also directed and wrote the screenplay (although it's based on a French movie from the mid-1970s); the Oscar went to Stevie Wonder for the quintessentially 80s song "I Just Called to Say I Love You".
I don't think I've ever recommended McCabe and Mrs. Miller before. It's airing at 11:00 PM Saturday on TCM. McCabe, played by Warren Beatty, is a gambler who comes to a two-bit mining town in the old Pacific Northwest loking to open a vice house. Eventually coming to the same town is Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), who is a madame who knows a thing or two about how to run the prostitution part of a vice house. So the two wind up going into business together, even though they have rather differing world-views. The business becomes a success though. That is, until a mich bigger mining company arrives on the scene to make a better go of the mines in the area. They offer everybody big buyouts, but will the people accept? And either way, what's going to happen to them? Robert Altman directed, so you know this isn't going to be a typical western.
And now for the shorts. First up is a propaganda short that won an Oscar: Hitler Lives, at 12:44 PM Monday on TCM. This one, released just after the end of World War II, warns us that although the Allies won the war and Hitler committed suicide, his ideas can still live on in the hearts of many Germans; at least they didn't think back in 1945 that Hitler could be cloned.
Where Pete Smith was too snarky in his narration for MGM shorts, Carey Wilson was often too earnest; watch the Nostradamus shorts. Wilson also narrates The Great Heart, airing Wednesday at 4:02 PM on TCM; this one tells the story of Father Damien, the Belgian-born priest who founded a leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.
Last week I mentioned the John Nesbitt's Passing Parade series of shorts; this week I'll mention the Crime Does Not Pay shorts. One that airs this week is Drunk Driving, at 12:05 PM Thursday. As you can guess, this one tells us about the dangers of drunk driving, doing so by showing a ridiculously over-the-top case of a man driving drunk with his wife and mother-in-law as passengers.
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