Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of February 17-23, 2014. This week sees everything from a rare talkie from an actress who died at the beginning of the sound era, to a foreign film with a bizarre conceit, to everything in between. There's also the first English-language film for a Best Actor Oscar winner who passed away recently. But more on all of that in just a bit. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Maximilian Schell died at the beginning of the month, which of course you all know since you read religiously the oibtuary threads I start. Schell's first English-language film was The Young Lions, which is on TCM at noon on Monday. This movie tells the story of World War II through the personal eyes of two American soldiers and two Nazis. The Americans are Noah (Montgomery Clift), a Jewish man who gets drafted and serves in part to get away frmo America's anti-Semitism, and Michael (Dean Martin), a nightclub singer who goes at the insistence of his girlfriend (Barbara Rush). She had years earlier made the acquaintance of Austrian-born Christian (Marlon Brando), which is going to bring the stories of the Americans and the Nazis together. Schell plays the other Nazi, who is much more idealistic about the war than is Brando's character, which is ironic since his family in real life fled Austria just before the Anschluss.
If you want a different look at World War II, you could do worse than to watch Four Jills in a Jeep, over on the Fox Movie Channel at 9:15 AM Monday and repeating at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Kay Francis leads a group of entertainers including Martha Raye, Carole Landis, and Mitzi Mayfair. Martha Raye's big mouth, however, gets them in trouble when she says they'd be willing to work with the USO; this is World War II after all. The four of them get sent to England, where they meet singing soldier Dick Haymes and scheming Phil Silvers. There's some budding romance, and then the ladies get sent closer to the front, where they experience the same dangers our GIs were facing -- the movie is based on the real experiences Landis and Francis had had working with the USO. In order to flesh out the movie, Fox brought in some of its big musical stars like Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda, to perform a number each.
A movie that's lovely to look at but might not be to everybody's tastes is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, airing at 8:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Catherine Deneuve stars as GeneviÈve, the daughter of an umbrella saleslady, in love with auto mechanic Guy. Unfortunately, it's the late 1950s when Algeria is fighting France for its independence, and Guy gets called up to serve in Algeria. Mom wants GeneviÈve to marry someone better anyhow, and that person comes along in the form of gem importer Roland. GeneviÈve resists, but then Guy's letters stop coming. She thinks he's been killed in action, but he was only injured, and he returns to Cherbourg to find his love gone, having married for convenience. Can our two tragic lovers find happiness in life? The cinematography is gorgeous, with vibrant (if unrealistic -- I doubt working class cities looked like this) colors. Unfortunately, director Jacques Demy had the brilliant idea of having everybody sing all their dialog, and that often distracts from an otherwise well-crafted story.
Next up is The Barefoot Contessa, which you can see at 12:45 PM Wednesday on TCM. The movie starts at the funeral of actress Maria Vargas (played by Ava Gardner). Several of the men in her life are there, and they begin to flash back to how she came into their lives.... Humphrey Bogart plays Harry, a Hollywood screenwriter whose career is going down the tubes until he meets wealthy Kirk (Warren Stevens), who'd like to produce a movie. The two men see Vargas performing at a dive bar in Spain, and hire her, making her a success, helped by press agent Muldoon (Edmond O'Brien, who won the Oscar for his part). Maria, meanwhile, is looking for security, and thinks she's finally found it in Count Torlato Favrini (Rossano Brazzi). Unfortunately for her, he's carrying a secret which could make her life even worse. (Well, obviously, it does, considering that she dies young.)
Thursday morning kicks off with a couple of 1929 films not nominated for Best Picture, such as the original version of The Letter. Jeanne Eagles, the troubled 1920s actress who died not long after of a heroin overdose (at least according to one of the several autopsies she underwent) plays Leslie Crosbie, wife of a man mangaging a rubber plantation in colonial Malaya (Reginald Owen) who fills her time with a lover (Herbert Marshall, who would go on to play the husband opposite Bette Davis in the 1940 version). Things go sour, she writes the boyfriend a letter, he comes over, she shoots him dead, and then claims self-defense -- but she needs to get the letter back if she wants her self-defense claim to stick. It's part talkie, part silent, and the only surviving print is rather rough at times, but Eagels gives a compelling performance, with a stunning finale that's better than the fate that befalls Bette Davis courtesy of the Production Code.
Thursday night on TCM sees the nominees for Best Actress of 1934, an award won by Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night, which is on at 9:30 AM. The nominee who isn't so well known is Grace Moore, who was nominated for the movie One Night of Love, at 11:30 PM. That's because she was more of an opera singer than a film actress, and this movie uses that opera singing as a major part of the plot. Moore plays an aspiring opera singer who scrounges up the money to go to Italy. Her opera teacher (Tullio Carminati) bascially says don't you dare think of falling in love with me since he just had a bad break-up with his previous student, but Grace says that's OK because she's in love with welathy American businessman abroad Lyle Talbot. Of course, you can guess what happens next, which is that the teacher and student begin to fall in love, although neither of them wants to admit it. At least this is a comedy.
One day later, and TCM moves to Best Actor nominees, this time from the year 1944. Bing Crosy won for the dreadful Going My Way at 8:00 PM, a film I really really dislike. If I had had a vote, I probably would have voted for Alexander Knox in Wilson, at 10:15 PM. This is a biopic, really more of a hagiography, of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson started off as the President of Princeton, was convinced by the machine into running for Governor of New Jersey, and then pointed out their corruption and used the fame he thus gained to run for President. The convention is interesting, but the treatment of his presidency is a whitewash. There's one particularly amusing scene of Wilson and second wife Edith (Geraldine Fitzgerald) serving coffee to troops about to leave for World War I, and when Wilson sees folks from various European immigrant groups there, he commetns about all of America's races working together. This despite there being no black faces in the scene, and the military still being segregated at the time the film was made! The rest of Wilson's career is treated with similar reverential tones. Still, Knox does a great job despite being saddled with this horrible twaddle.
For those of you who prefer more recent movies, you can switch over to Cinemax. At 9:00 AM Saturday, they're showing Licence to Kill. The second of two movies in which Timothy Dalton played James Bond, this one sees Bond at the wedding of friend and CIA agent Felix Leiter. Unfotunately, Leiter and the wife get kidnapped and murdered by the drug dealers Bond and Leiter helped bring down, which leads Bond to try to get revenge. This, even though M wants Bond to go on a new mission for MI6. Bond disobeys, goes to "Isthmus City" (for whatever reason, they didn't want to call it Panama and draw comparisons to Manuel Noriega) to find Sanchez, the guy who killed Leiter, gets discovered and held captive, and gets helped by lady CIA agent Pam Bouvier (Cary Lowell; what ever happened to her?). Watch also for Wayne Newton as a phony televangelist providing cover for the president of Isthmus City This was a big change in tone from all those Roger Moore Bond films, and flopped at the box office.
On Saturday night, TCM is looking at the nominees for Best Picture of 1948, which included two entries from the UK. Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (at 10:30 PM Saturday) won the Best Picture Oscar; its showing is preceded at 8:00 PM by The Red Shoes. Anton Walbrook plays Boris, who runs not an Internet discussion forum but a ballet company. He expects complete loyalty to art from the folks he hires, witht his latest discovery being the ballerina Victoria (Moira Shearer). He wants her to be the lead dancer in the "Red Shoes" ballet, with music composed by Julian (Marius Goring). However, Victoria and Julian find themselves beginning to fall in love with each other, raising the question of whether she can effectively perform the difficult ballet. The music won an Oscar; amazingly, the absolutely gorgeous Technicolor cinematography by Jack Cardiff didn't get a nomination.
And finally, for the Oscar-nominated shorts. I don't mention Pete Smith all that much because his brand of humor is something I generally find grating. It's generally observational humor with 1930s/40s era snark that doesn't hold up so well. But if you want to see an example, you could do worse than ot watch Movie Pests, a little after 9:15 AM Thursday. The title is self-explanatory: the type of pests you might encounter when going to the movies. Nowadays, that would be people whose phones go off and who answer them during the movie, but they didn't have cell phones back in 1944. Instead, the nuisances include things like women with big hats who won't take the hats off. How much do people go out in public wearing hats other than baseball caps nowadays? At least some of the stuff is more timeless, like constantly getting a knee in the back of your seat. And don't you dare tick off the theater owners by talking about the overpriced snacks on offer! Is it any reason people would rather watch good movies in their home theaters, and only go to the real thing for IMAX effects they can't get at home?
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