Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of February 11-17, 2012.
Monday morning sees a switch in 31 Days of Oscar from films made and distributed by Fox to films made and distributed by RKO, a marathon which will run for three days. The RKO films start off at 6:15 AM with the 1931 version Cimarron, the only movie made at RKO to win the Best Picture Oscar. That will be followed at 8:30 AM by Flying Down to Rio. This is a movie that's generally remembered for being the debut pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but they're not the stars of the movie; they pretty much only show up to dance the Carioca together and make a name for themselves as a screen couple. In fact, the real story is about a bandleader (Gene Raymond) who flies planes and chases the ladies, falling in love with Brazilian Dolores Del Rio, and taking his band down to Brazil to be with her even though she's already got a fiancé. The story is fairly standard stuff, so watch for Astaire and Rogers, as well as the musical finale, which involves a bunch of chorus girls strapped to the wings of biplanes.
If you like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, you might be happy to know that the two made nine movies together a RKO in the 1930s, and Flying Down to Rio isn't the only one showing during 31 Days of Oscar.
Immediately following Flying Down to Rio, at 10:00 AM Monday, is Swing Time;
and at 2:00 AM Tuesday is Top Hat.
Over on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel, you can catch a movie I recommended years ago, but hasn't shown up on TV in quite some time: The Magnificent Dope, at 4:00 AM Tuesday. Don Ameche plays a man who runs a big-city Dale Carnegie-style "success school", which unfortunately hasn't been very successful. So, he runs a contest looking for the biggest failure in the country, with the prize being a free course and a substantial sum of money. Henry Fonda, from small-town New England, wins the contest, but he's also a man who's happy with station in life and has no desire to be part of the rat race. Instead, he only wants the money to buy his town a fire truck. All this threatens to derail Ameche's success school. Along the way, however, Fonda falls in love with Ameche's assistant, Lynn Bari, not realizing that she's also Ameche's finacée; and Ameche thinks he can exploit this to get Fonda to change his ways. It's not a bad movie, but Henry Fonda thought that lightweight stuff like this was being foist upon him by the studio heads and that he could do more serious things.
One of the last of the RKO movies is The Narrow Margin, which you can see at 12:30 AM Thursday on TCM. Charles McGraw stars as an extremely hard-boiled cop given the task with his partner of accompanying a woman (Marie Windsor) halfway across the company. The thing is, she's got a list of names of people in organized crime that she's going to give to the grand jury in Los Angeles. That is, if she makes it there alive. Needless to say, the bad guys know about her, and are going to stop at nothing to kill her while she's on the train. McGraw doesn't like this duty, and for her part, Windsor doesn't like the way he's treating her, and dammit, she doesn't want to get killed. Complicating matters are the woman and her obnoxiously bratty kid in the next compartment. The Narrow Margin is one of those low-budget movies that shows that if you've got a good story, you don't need elaborate sets or CGI effects to make a gripping movie.
After three days of movies from RKO, TCM puts the spotlight on Selznick International for a day. The studio's greatest movie was Gone With the Wind, which is airing at 8:00 PM, but I'd like to recommend something not quite so famous: The Garden of Allah, at 3:00 PM Thursday. Marlene Dietrich plays a woman who has gone off to French North Africa to seek spiritual renewal. While on the edge of the Sahara, she meets Charles Boyer, and falls in love with him. What she doesn't know is that he has a secret: He was a monk, and ran away from the monastery. Worse, he was the only one who knew the secret formula for the liqueur that helped pay the monastery's bills. Can our two leads find true love? And what will happen if Dietrich finds out Boyer's secret? There's less reason to care about that than to watch the gorgeious color. The Garden of Allah was made in brilliant Technicolor back in 1936, and everybody and everything looks amazing.
Starting on Friday, we get lots and lots of movies from MGM in 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, at least a few of which I haven't recommended before. When Ladies Meet is airing at 9:15 AM Friday. Myrna Loy plays Mary, a woman author who writes sophisticated books for sophisticated women. Robert Montgomery has his eye on her, although she's more interested in her publisher, Frank Morgan, even though he's married to Ann Harding. Loy, however, is going to write a book about the situation, to prove that in a situation where the wife learns her husband is more in love with another women, the wife will give up her husband for his happiness. Montgomery thinks that's a bunch of nonsense, even more nonsense than the pearl-clutching over cyberbullying, which of course they didn't have back in 1933. Montgomery plans to prove it by bringing together the wife and the mistress, although neither of them knows the true identity of the other.
Another one I think I might have recommended Thousands Cheer before, but it's got so many cameos that it's worth watching. It's airing at 4:30 AM Saturday on TCM. Gene Kelly plays a trapeze artist who has been drafted into the Army, because it's World War II after all. Seemingly the only woman on base is Kathryn Grayson, daughter of a colonel (John Boles) stationed on the base. Her parents are divorced, and she's trying to get them back together. She falls in love with Kelly, but he's rather try get into the air corps. Then the talent show put on for the troops comes to the base, and Kelly could use his talents there. Grayson's mother (Mary Astor) is an actress, and she shows up along with all of MGM's stars playing themselves, such as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland; June Allyson, Frank Morgan, and a bunch of others. And they're all in Technicolor!
Fox made a lot of lesser-rate musicals back in the 1940s, and if you want a good example of that lesser work that the studio was churning out, you could do worse than to watch You Were Meant For Me at 8:55 AM Sunday on the Fox Movie Channel. Dan Dailey stars as the bandleader of a band in the Roaring Twenties, a band which travels around the country from gig to gig. At one gig in the midwest, Dailey meets Jeanne Crain and immediately falls in love with her. The feeling is mutual and they get married, but then Crain has to learn about life on the road. She doesn't like it and that puts a strain on their relationship, but there's about to be a bigger strain courtesy of the stock market crash of 1929 which forces Dailey to break of the band. Can love survive poverty? Eh, the songs are lovely; who cares about the plot?
A little bit earlier, at 4:00 AM Sunday on TCM, is The Sheepman. Glenn Ford plays the title character, a man who's won some sheep in a poker game and stops in a Western town, intending to graze the sheep on the range. The only thing is, this is cattle country! And the cattlemen are horrified that somebody would try raising sheep here, since cattle and sheep just don't mix, and besides, it's not masculine to raise sheep! It just so happens that one of Ford's old enemies is around, and that he ever so conveniently happens to be one of the big cattle ranchers -- that enemy is Leslie Nielsen, over 20 years before Airplane! Nielsen tries to get rid of Ford by bringing in hired gun Adam Cartwright from Bonanza (er, Pernell Roberts). Rounding out the cast of this comic western is a young Shirley MacLaine as the love interest.
Tennessee Williams isn't my thing, but I'm sure there are a lot of people who like the sort of stuff he wrote. For those who you, you're in luck, as TCM is showing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, at 4:00 PM Sunday. Big Daddy (Burl Ives) owns a plantation and, at 65, is dying of cancer although he doesn't yet realize it. He's got two sons: Gooper (Jack Carson), who's given Big Daddy a lot of grandkids, but Big Daddy doesn't like Gooper despite Gooper's efforts to do everything he can to make his father happy. He likes Brick (Paul Newman), even though Newman's a failure of a man, an alcoholic who escapes into the bottle because he's in a loveless marriage with wife Maggie (the Cat, played by Elizabeth Taylor) and would rather remember his late best friend, who may or may not have been more than just a friend. The thing is, he really ought to have a kid in order to gain his father's inheritance. And then Big Daddy finds out how sick he really is....
This week's Alfred Hitchcock watch sees two movies that he made over at RKO, two at Selznick, and one at MGM. Indeed, it was David O. Selznick who brought Hitchcock over from England to make Rebecca, which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1940. Rebecca is airing at midnight Friday (or 11:00 PM Thursday LFT).
The other Selznick movie is Spellbound, which you an see immediately following at 2:30 AM Friday.
Joan Fontaine won a Best Actress Oscar for Suspicion, which is the first of the Hitchcock films at 8:15 AM Tuesday.
The other of the RKO movies is Notorious, which earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Claude Rains; that's airing at 10:15 PM Tuesday.
The MGM film is North By Northwest, which comes on at midnight Sunday (which again means 11:00 PM LFT on Saturday).
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