Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of February 18-24, 2013. The Oscars are going to be handed out this coming Sunday, but frankly, it's more fun to think of the good movies that were nominated for the Oscar in years past. I mean, does Hollywood make anything these days other than remakes of comic books and CGI movies with washed out color save for the explosions? So let's all sit back and watch some good movies this week. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI announced his retirment last week, and it's just by happy coincidence that TCM happened to have The Shoes of the Fisherman scheduled for Monday morning at 6:30 AM. Anthony Quinn plays a Ukrainian Catholic Bishop who, for his faith, spent two decades in the Gulag, before being released by the Soviet Premier (Laurence Olivier) so that the Pope (John Gielgud) could name him a Cardinal. Not long after Quinn is named a cardinal, the old Pope dies, which means all the cardinals get together to name a new Pope, and they decide to select Quinn for his moving story of faith. Quinn is quickly confronted by several crises. The smaller one is the fact that you've got people coming up with unorthodox theologies (the movie was released in 1968, not long after the Second Vatican Council modernized the Catholic liturgy); the bigger one is the possibility of World War II because Red China is looking for more land for agriculture since they're suffering a famine, and the US has an embargo against them. So they're thinking of attacking the Soviet Union.
Who ever thought of Steve Martin doing a musical? Well, he did do one, and that movie, Pennies From Heaven, is airing at 5:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Martin stars as Arthur, a sales rep for a sheet music company during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He's married to Joan (Jessica Harper), but this being the 1930s times are tough and he dreams of happier times. At one of the record stores he meets Eileen (Bernadette Peters), falls in love with her, and starts having an affair. To escape from reality, Arthur has fantasy sequences, which is where we get the musical numbers, which are all songs from the late 1920s and 1930s, lip-synched by the actors to the voices of the people who sang them back in the day. Watch for Christopher Walken of all people doing a dance number to Cole Porter's "Let's Misbehave".
TCM's 31 Days of Oscar moves from MGM to Paramount on Tuedsay night, starting off with a couple of silents. I've recommended Wings (9:30 PM Tuesday) before; so this week I'll recommend The Racket instead, which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM. Louis Wolheim plays a gangster who is profiting off of Prohibition and is using those profits to buy off the police and courts so that they'll look the other way. There's one honest cop out there (which is about the average for a police department), played by Thomas Meighan, who vows to put a stop to Wolheim's life of crime. Eventually, Wolheim's brother (played by George Stone) gets involved in a hit-and-run accident, and Meighan realizes that he can use Wolheim's desire to keep his brother safe against Wolheim. Rounding out the cast is Marie Prevost as the moll.
The Paramount movies continue on Wednesday night with Hold Back the Dawn, at 8:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. Charles Boyer plays a man who, at the start of the movie, is visiting a director at Paramount (played by the real-life director Mitchell Leisen) to try to sell his story to a movie studio. That story is that Boyer wsa a Romanian born dancer partnered with Paulette Goddard. Thanks to war breaking out over in Europe, Boyer was stranded in Mexico obviously not wanting to go back to Europe and with no way to get into the US legally thanks to immigration quotas. Well, there was one way, which was to marry an American citizen, who conveniently comes along in the form of schoolteacher Olivia de Havilland. The plan is that he'll marry de Havilland, get citizenship, divorce her after a year or two, and marry Goddard. But Boyer falls in love with his wife. Goddard, knowing the truth about Boyer, deicdes to tell de Havilland the truth....
Thursday morning and afternoon sees several movies from producer Walter Wanger, who is probably most famous for making John Wayne a star when he produced Wayne in Stagecoach (which is airing at 1:45 PM). But Wanger started before that, as can be seen by watching Blockade, which was produced a year earlier. Blockade comes on at 8:00 AM Thursday on TCM. Written by a Communist screenwriter but watered down by the Production Code enforcers, the movie stars Henry Fonda as a peasant farmer in Spain who helps a Russian emigré countess (Madeleine Carroll) when her car crashes, and falls in love with her. Unfortunately, the Spanish Civil War intervenes and Fonda and the other farmers have to defend their land from the evil other side (who are clearly supposed to be Franco's fascists). In real life of course, the Soviets who were supporting the anti-Fascists would have instituted a forced collectivization scheme had they won and not what Fonda and his fellow farmers are fighting for.
Last week I was able to point out five movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock; this week it's only one: Foreign Correspondent, at 5:45 PM Thursday on TCM. Joel McCrea plays Johnny Jones, a crime reporter in August 1939 who gets sent to Europe to cover the "big story" precisely because he knows nothing about foreign intrigue. In London, he meets the Dutch Foreign Minister (Albert Bassermann) at a meeting of a peace group led by Herbert Marshall and his daughter, Laraine Day, to whom he takes a liking. He follows the Foreign Minister back to Amsterdam, where the Foreign Minister gets assassinated -- and that's a big story. But it becomes an even bigger story when he discovers that the assassination did not in fact happen: somebody's kidnapped the Foreign Minister for whatever nefarious reason. All the while, he's having a dickens of a time getting Day to believe him. George Sanders is excellent in a supporting role as an English reporter, with some fabulous bit parts providing black humor.
As for a director who shows up multiple times this week on TCM, there's Preston Sturges, who's getting a three-film mini-marathon overnight between Wednesday and Thursday. It starts off at 12:30 AM Thursday with The Lady Eve, in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a con artist trying to con beer company scion Henry Fonda, only to fall in love with him.
That's followed at 2:15 AM by Hail the Conquering Hero, with Eddie Bracken as a man in World War II who lies to his family back hom about having failed his Marine physical, until Marine William Demarest makes him go home and play the part of Marine hero; and
The Great McGinty at 4:15 AM, about a bum (Brian Donlevy) who gets recruited by a political machine to be their candidate, only for him to decide he'd rather go straight.
Over on the Fox Movie Channel, you can have some fun laughing at the unintentional comedy of Sea Wife, Friday at 7:40 AM. The movie is told in flashback by Richard Burton, who is looking for his "Sea Wife"... flash back to 1940. Singapore was a British colony, but the Japanese were just about to overrun it, so as many British people as can try to evacuate, including Joan Collins, who is a nun. Seriously. The boat gets hit by the Japanese, and Collins, Burton, the black ship's purser, and a racist British bureaucrat are the only four who wind up in the lifeboat, with Collins having lost her habit along the way such that Burton doesn't know she's a nun. Burton falls in love with her; the black guy tries to keep her secret, and has to deal with the nasty racist in their midst. At least the things that go wrong make this movie an entertaining mess.
TCM, for its part, moves from Paramount to Columbia on Friday morning. So, about a half hour after Sea Wife ends, you can watch Holiday, at 9:45 AM Friday. Cary Grant stars as Johnny, a young man who would rather avoid the rat race and live the life he wants, if only money weren't a problem. He's engaged to Julia (Doris Nolan), not knowing that Julia is in fact from an extremely wealthy family. He learns this when she takem him home with her to introduce him to her father (Henry Kolker). Julia has a brother and a sister who have almost had their lives planned for them by Daddy, and when they meet Johnny, they take a liking to his ideas. Johnny, for his part, finds that he's beginning to like Julia's sister Linda (Katharine Hepburn), which of course is a problem since he's already engaged.
The second Columbia picutre I'll mention is Bell, Book, and Candle, at 11:30 AM Saturday. Jimmy Stewart plays a publisher who's engaged to be married when he runs into Kim Novak. What he doesn't know is that Novak is a witch, and that she knows and dislikes his fiancée. What's a witch to do? Why, use her witchly powers to get him to think about her, if only to torment the fiancée. Of course, things don't quite work out as planned, as she begins to fall in love with him, and the witch/non-witch romance is a big problem for all the other witches, represented by Hermione Gingold, as well as Jack Lemmon, who plays Novak's brother. Another subplot involves Ernie Kovacs, who is writing a book on witchcraft that presumably Stewart is going to publish. Lemmon can teach Kovacs a lot about witchcraft, but will Kovacs believe any of it?
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