Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of Feruary 10-16, 2014. Spring training isn't quite yet here, but even for the Brewers that only means training in how to lose with grace and dignity. So in the meantime, why not sit back with some great old movies? As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Back in the late 1930s, Warner Bros. made a series of two-reelers in Technicolor looking at early American history through dramatizations of great events Some of those shorts were Oscar-nominated in the shorts category, and since TCM is honoring the Oscars this month, why not honor the Oscar-nominated shorts, too? In fact, three of those history shorts are on this week's schedule:
Give Me Liberty at 6:05 AM Monday tells the story of Patrick Henry and the British predations in Virginia that led him to give the dangerous "Give me liberty, or give me death" speech.
Sons of Liberty, at about 10:35 AM Thursday (just after Marie Antoinette) tells the story of Haym Solomon (played by Claude Rains), a Jewish man who used his personal fortune to help the cause of the Americans in the Revolutionary War; and
The Declaration of Independence at 9:35 AM Sunday, which has as its dramatic hook the attempt to smuggle a key member of the Continental Congress supporting the declaration into Philadelphia in time for the vote on the declaration.
Deanna Durbin doesn't show up all that often on TCM, mostly because sh emade most of her movies at Universal, and TCM doesn't have much success trying to get Universal to rent out its earlier movies for broadcast. But there's one this week: Three Smart Girls, at 12:30 PM Monday. Durbin stars as the youngest of three sisters whose wealthy parents are divorced, so the sisters are now in Switzerland doing the boarding school thing, when they find that Dad (Charles Winninger) wants to get re-married, to a gold-digger (Binnie Barnes). So the three sisters head over to America to try to stop the marriage from happening, with their plan being to introduce the gold-digger to a European count (Mischa Auer). Things get complicated when they pick the wrong person (a young Ray Milland) to introduce to the gold-digger, and he falls in love with one of the older sisters. Durbin, being 14 at the time she made this film, couldn't be involved in any of the love relationships, but she did get to sing a popular song and a classical waltz since she was known as a vocal talent first before becoming an actress.
Monday night's prime time lineup on TCM is the movies that were nominated for the Best Original Screenplay of 1940. These include The Great Dictator, Tuesday at midnight (Monday at 11:00 PM LFT). Charlie Chaplin, who wrote the screenplay and also directed, plays two characters, the first of which is a Jewish barber from Tomania who saves a pilot at the end of World War I. Fast forward 20 years, and the dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel (also Chaplin), has a very Hitler-like policy of wanting to get rid of all the Jews, including that barber who has been suffering from amnesia for the past 20 years. The man he saved (Reginald Gardiner) has become one of Hynkel's chief associates, but turns against him and gets sent to the concentration camps. He and the barber escape, and because of the barber's uncanny resemblance to Hynkel, they could help foil Hynkle's plan for world domination. Chaplin's then-wife Paulette Goddard plays the barber's love interest.
In addition to the Original Screenplay category, there's an Adapted Screenplay category, and TCM is spending Tuesday night wiht the nominees in that category in 1956. The first of these is the epic Around the World in 80 Days, at 8:00 PM Tuesday. You probably know the story, based upon the novel by Jules Verne: British gentleman Phineas Fogg (David Niven) has calcuated that in modern 1870s society, it should be possible to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days; to this end, he makes a Β£20,000 wager with the other members of his gentlemen's club. (In fact, when the book was published an American lady reporter set off on a round-the-world trip for her newspaper, which she completed in 72 days.) Fogg sets off with manservant Passepartout (Mexican comedian Cantinflas in one of his few English-language roles) on a series of adventures (the balloon scene is, as far as I know, not in the original book). Along the way, they pick up exotic Princess Aouda (Shirley MacLaine), and meet a "cast of thousands" -- there are a lot of cameos here.
Another movie with travel difficulties and a whole bunch of stars in the cast is The VIPs, airing at 10:30 PM Wednesday. The setting is the VIP lounge at London's Heathrow Airport. A bunch of wealthy types are planning to take a flight to New York, except that one of those London fogs has socked in the airport and forced them all to stay in the lounge, where we learn their various stories. Liz Taylor was going to leave her husband (Richard Burton) for her lover (Louis Jourdan), expecting him to find the breakup note while the flight was over the Atlantic. Rod Taylor is trying to get to New York for a corporate board meeting where he will cover a check he didn't have the funds for when he wrote it; his secretary Maggie Smith is in love with him but he doesn't know it. Margaret Rutherford owns a castle, but needs to go to the US to earn the money to pay for the upkeep; and Orson Welles is a movie producer trying to escape the UK for tax purposes. Eventually the various stories intertwine and end more or less satisfyingly..
Speaking of Maggie Smith, she shows up in our next movie, Travels With My Aunt, which is on at 3:30 PM Thursday on TCM. Smith plays the aunt, whom we don't see first thing. That honor goes to nephew Henry (Alec McCowen), who is a strait-laced banker going to his mother's funeral. At the funeral, he meets his Aunt Augusta (Smith), who is his polar opposite. Like Auntie Mame, she's a boehmian oddball who's lived quite the life. Her current adventure involves her lover, who has supposedly been kidnapped for ransom; she needs the money to free him and perhaps Henry as a banker can help? Well, he can't help with money, but he can certainly go on an adventure across Europe with his aunt, learning about her life along the way in a series of flashbacks. Watch for Louis Gossett Jr. as Augusta's assistant.
A bit of trivia: the shortest movie ever to be nominated for Best Picture is She Done Him Wrong, which TCM is showing at 6:30 AM Saturday. Mae West plays Diamond Lou, the owner of a turn-of-the-century bar/nightclub who has a taste for diamonds, and is willing to have a series of shady boyfriends if they'll keep her in diamonds. One of those boyfriends is escaping from jail and wants to use her place as a hideout; a woman who's involved with some of the other criminals who use Lou's place as a hideout discovers and confronts Lou. Meanwhile, Cary Grant plays a mssionary from the Salvation Army next door who seems intent on saving Lou's soul, although he may have ulterior motives. This is the movie that made Grant a star. West gets away with a series of bawdy double entendres, and even a killing in self-defense!
On Saturday night, TCM is running the nominees for Best Picture of 1929/30. Back then, studios released their movies in a "season" roughly analogous to the TV season of today, which ran across the January 1 boundary between calendar years. The winner was All Quiet on the Western Front, based on Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel; that kicks the night off at 8:00 PM.
That's followed by Robert Montgomery as a naΓve playboy prisoner learning too much from Wallace Beery in The Big House, at 10:30 PM;
Norma Shearer learning that men can sleep around, but not women, in The Divorcee at 12:15 AM Sunday;
King Maurice Chevalier marries to Queen Jeanette MacDonald in The Love Parade at 2:00 AM; and
George Arliss as Disraeli at 4:00 AM Sunday. Arliss won the Best Actor Oscar.
You might know the musical State Fair, but the first movie version of the story is not a musical. The 1933 movie version of State Fair will be on TCM at 11:45 AM Sunday. This is the story of Iowa farm family the Frakes, led by patriarch Abel (Will Rogers) who is entering his hog into the hog competition, while Mom is entering a pie in the pie competition. Adult daughter Margy (Janet Gaynor) goes with them and meets urbane newspaper reporter Pat (Lew Ayres) and falls in love with him. Her brother Wyane (Norman Foster) also finds love, with a trapeze artist. But of course there's the question of whether the sort of "love" you fall into at a state fair is something that can last once you have to go back to the farm. This version, having been made in 1933 before enforcement of the Production Code, is rather more open about what "love" means, too. If you'd prefer to see a more sanitized musical versoin, the Fox Movie Channel is running the 1962 version with Pat Boone, Bobby Darrin, and Ann-Margaret at 11:00 AM Friday and 7:30 AM Saturday.
Also on the Fox Movie Channel on Saturday is A Flea in Her Ear, at 1:15 PM. This one stars Rex Harrison as a French lawyer married to Rosemary Harris. She suspects that her husband is having an affair himself since he's suddenly no longer interested in sex. Her friend (Rachel Roberts) has a brilliant idea: write a phony love letter to the husband to meet someplace, and then confront him at the meeting. He's not interested, though, and figures the letter was meant for Louis Jourdan. Meanwhile, his Spanish friend sees the letter and realizes the handwriting is that of his wife (the Rachel Roberts character), so he assumes that she is having an affair, and vows to take revenge. Complications abound. The bad news is that the last time Fox ran this, they ran a panned-and-scanned print.
Finally, we've got a Sherlock Holmes mystery: Terror By Night, at 7:15 AM on Encore Suspense. Holmes, played here once again by Basil Rathbone, boards an overnight train at the behest of a man whose wife owns a valuable diamond and is, together with her son, travelling on an overnight train from London to Scotland. Would Holmes and Watson (Nigel Bruce) make certain that the diamond and its owners arrive in Scotland safely? Sure enough, there are all sorts of odd characters who look as though they might want to steal the diamond, and eventually, the diamond goes missing and the son is found murdered. Holmes has failed! Well, not really. All he has to do is find the diamond and unmask the murderer, and he's got some tricks up his sleeve. It's fast-paced and entertaining, but nothing particularly earth-shattering, either.
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