Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of February 13-19, 2017. Valentine's Day is this week, so why not sit down with your significant other and watch some good movies? (Of, if you can't watch any of your numerous boyfriends on TV, watch these good movies instead.) Once again, I've used my impeccable taste to pick out a bunch of movies I know you'll all like. Again no star of the month until March, but with all those Oscar-nominated movies, there's bound to be something that tickles your fancy. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Since TCM is running the titles in alphabetical order, there are a couple of cases where this is precisely the case. One example is the 1934 and 1959 versions of Imitation of Life, airing back-to-back at 10:45 AM and 12:45 PM Monday. In both cases, a white widow with a daughter fortuitously runs into a black woman with a daughter who is a good maid and in need of a job. So the two half-families live together and the daughters even become friends, while the black woman's hard work helps the white woman become a major success professionally. There's only one problem. The black daughter is very light-skinned, to the point that she can pass as white. But this hurts Mama tremendously, and of course the secret that the daughter is, in fact, black, is bound to come out. Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers play the mothers in the original; in the remake it's Lana Turner and Juanita Moore. The 1934 version is probably the better overall telling of the story, in no small part because they used a black actress for the daughter, but the 1959 version is over the top and often unintentionally hilarious. Sandra Dee, the white daughter in the 1959 version, is still playing Gidget, inhabiting an entirely different world. And the climactic funeral is way over the top.
(There's another pair of “original” and remake, that being the 1933 and 1949 versions of Little Women, which will be on TCM at 4:45 AM and 6:45 AM Wednesday, respectively.)
It's been a while since I've recommended Kings Row. It's on TCM again at 4:00 AM Tuesday, so why not recommend it this week. In the circa-1900 town of Kings Row, child Drake (ultimately played by Ronald Reagan as an adult) is friends with child Parris (adult version played by Robert Cummings). Parris is in love with Dr. Tower's (Claude Rains) daughter Cassandra (Betty Field) while Drake eventually falls for Randy (Ann Sheridan). Disaster befalls them, though: Dr. Tower and Cassandra are killed in a murder-suicide because Cassandra may be going insane; Drake loses his inheritance when a bank manager absconds with the money. And then Drake has his legs amputated after a railyard accident causes Dr. Gordon (Charles Coburn) to cut them off. Parris, who has gone off to Vienna to study psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, suspects that the town is harboring dark secrets, and plans to figure out what they are in order to help his old friend Drake. This is the movie that gave Ronald Reagan the immortal line “Where's the rest of me?”
It's been a while since I've recommended An Affair to Remember. It's going to be on StarzEncore Classics at 10:45 PM Tuesday. Cary Grant plays Nickie, a playboy who is about to travel back to the States to marry heiress Lois (Neva Patterson). Deborah Kerr plays Terry, a singer who is going to marry Texas oilman Kenneth (Richard Denning) when she gets back to the States. Nickie and Terry meet on the boat going back, however, and you can guess what's going to happen. They fall in love, especially after Terry meets Nickie's grandmother, who thinks Terry is the right woman for Nickie. But the two decide to go their separate ways and marry their betrotheds, with a caveat: six months from now, they'll meet on the observation deck at the Empire State Building. Fast forward six months. Terry is going to the Empire State Building when she gets run down by a car, breaking her leg. Nickie is already up at the platform, not realizing that Terry really does want to see him. It goes on like this. As sappy as the plot sounds, it's actually a really good movie.
You've probably heard the song Look For the Silver Lining. It first appeared in the Broadway play and movie Sally, starring Marilyn Miller, and so Warner Bros. used the song title to a biopic of Miller. That biopic will be on TCM at 4:15 PM Wednesday Miller was born in Indiana at the turn of the century and when her parents divorced and Mom married a vaudevillean, Marilyn wound up on the road. She made it to New York, first dancing with Jack Donahue (played by Ray Bolger) and then becoming a singer and actress. However, her real life wasn't particularly sunny. Her first husband Frank Carter (Gordon MacRae) died young, and Miller would marry three more times in her short life, which was cut short when she died in her late 30s of a sinus infection following surgery. The movie prefers for the most part, however, to look at the successful parts of Miller's life, giving Haver a lot of songs to sing and taking a lot of liberties with her actual life story to make for happy crowd-pleasing entertainment. Enjoy it for what it is.
The idea of Joseph Cotten in a Western may seem a bit odd, but he did make a couple. One of the lesser-known ones is The Halliday Brand, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 2:27 AM Thursday. Cotten plays Daniel Halliday, the son of Big Dan Halliday (Ward Bond), who is one of those range barons who basically owns everything and acts like it. One day, Big Dan finds out that one of his half-Indian ranch hands Burris (Christopher Dark) is in love with Big Dan's daughter Martha (Betsy Blair), and the two even want to get married. There's no way Big Dan is going to let that happen, so when Burris gets arrested on a rustling charge, Big Dan (who just happens to be the sheriff in addition to everything else) lets a lynch mob handle it. Son Daniel wants real justice. Things are greatly complicated by the fact that Daniel is in love with Burris' sister Aleta (Viveca Lindfors, who is a really odd choice for a western, especially since she's supposed to be mixed race). An interesting western, even if it doesn't have much of a reputation.
A movie that's been in the rotation on FXM Retro that I don't think I've mentioned before is Champagne Charlie, which will be on this week, at 6:00 AM Friday. Charlie (Paul Cavanaugh) is a professional gambler who plies the cruise ships. Apparently he's been bankrolled by some gangsters but has lost a good deal of money, so they've been trying to get him to marry heiress Linda (Helen Wood). But then one of the gangsters winds up dead, and was it Charlie, Linda, or Charlie's valet Mr. Fipps (Herbert Mundin) who did it? And frankly, why would either of them want to take the blame for Charlie? Then again, you know this is the sort of movie in which the good characters are going to pull through happily in the end. Much of the story is told in flashback. It's a breezy little movie over in an hour. To be honest, however, I've always thought Warner Bros. had the best B movies and all the other studios' were rather inferior by comparison, even MGM.
Normally when you think of Alfred Hitchcock, you don't think Best Original Song Oscars. But one of his movies did get nominated for that award. That movie is the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Thursday. James Stewart plays a doctor taking a working holiday, both going to a medical conference, and detouring to see the sights with his wife, a former professional singer (Doris Day), and their child. But one day in Morocco, they see a man get stabbed to death! That man says something to the good doctor, and that something is obviously an important secret. So important that dark forces are willing to kidnap the doctor's son and take him to London. It turns out that there's a plot afoot to murder a visiting world leader, but can our hero and his wife stop it in time? And can they find their child? Doris Day sings the song “Que Sera Sera”, and that song won an Oscar. This is a remake of one of Hitchcock's British movies from 1934, and both movies are worth watching.
Patty Duke died last year. She won an Academy Award for her performance in The Miracle Worker, which TCM will be showing at 8:00 PM Friday. Duke plays Helen Keller, who was a normal infant up until contracting scarlet fever aged around 18 months. This left little Helen both blind and deaf, which was even more difficult in the late 19th century, and it causes no end of difficulty for Helen's parents (Victor Jory and Inga Swenson), who have no idea how to communicate with Helen, who is an absolute hellraiser since she's got no way of learning discipline. (In real life, Helen did have some signs.) Eventually the Kellers bring in Anne Sullivan (Anne Bancroft, who also won an Oscar), who herself was only partially sighted, to try to communicate with little Helen. Anne isolates herself and Helen away from other stimuli, and if you know the story eventually hits upon the idea of teaching Helen about water since that's something Helen can understand. And, of course, it's all based on a true story. 
Another movie I haven't recommended in a long time is Network, which TCM will be showing at 10:30 PM Saturday. Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is the reader of the nightly news at the failing Union Broadcasting System. One night at the end of the news, he announces that, as he's being fired, he's going to commit suicide on air in the near future. Needless to say, the suits are horrified. But there's a problem. Beale's rants turn out to be a ratings boon, and Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), the new head of the news division, wants to use Howard Beale as much as possible to boost ratings Howard's best friend at the network, Max (William Holden) tries to get Howard to tone things down, but along the way Howard is falling in love with Diana despite being married to Louise (Beatrice Straight). Meanwhile, the rest of the network is going with increasingly outre ratings-grabbing programming. It's all bound to come crashing down at some point… The movie won a ton of Oscars, but not the big one, losing Best Picture to Rocky.
Finally, for something a little less dark, why not enjoy the musical On the Town, at 6:00 PM Sunday on TCM. A US Navy ship pulls into harbor in Brooklyn, and three sailors get off the ship with 24 hours' leave. Gabey (Gene Kelly), Chip (Frank Sinatra), and Ozzie (Jules Munshin) want to see New York City, but they know next to nothing about the city and what they should see. As luck would have it, each of them meets a girl to spend the day with. Gabey meets “Miss Turnstiles”, Ivey (Vera Ellen); Chip gets roped in by lady cabbie Hilda (Betty Garrett); and Ozzie finda that anthropologist Claire (Ann Miller) takes a liking to him because she has a thing for prehistoric-looking men. All together and as pairs, the six share a series of adventures as they sing and dance their way through New York City as it was in the late 1940s.
