Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of February 2-8, 2015. Now that the long natinoal nightmare that was Shawn Slocum is over and done with, we can all finally breathe a sigh of relief and get back to relaxing with some good movies. February is 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, so no Star of the Month, but there are still a bunch of good movies there, and on some of the other channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with something that didn't get any Oscar nominations: Teenage Rebel, at 6:00 AM Monday on FXM Retro. Ginger Rogers plays a woman happily married to architect Michael Rennie, with a young son. However, it's her second marriage, and she's got a child by the first marriage. Amazingly for the 1950s, though, it was Dad who got custody since Mom was the adulteress (hence the marriage to Rennie and the child). Dad wants to get married now, so he's finally relented and let Mom have the summer custody of the child, now a teenager (Betty Lou Keim), that was part of the original custody agreement. Unsurprisingly, the daughter, not having seen her mother for a good eight years, feels a whole lot of resentment. Add in the fact that teenagers have long had growing pains, and you have the ingredients for one tough parent-child relationship to try to reconcile.
I think it's been a while since I've mentioned The Red Danube, which TCM is showing at 7:00 AM Tuesday. The setting is Vienna in about the same time frame as The Third Man, when there were occupation forces from all of the Allies controlling various zones of the city. Walter Pidgeon plays a British colonel. His job in Vienna is to work with the Soviets, who want their nationals who try to escape to the western zones repatriated. Once the Soviets blockaded Berlin, you'd wonder why the west would send people back to doom, but this movie is set before that. So when a young ballerina (Janet Leigh) tries to escape and comes to the place where Pidgeon has his office, there's the conflict between orders, and his underlings' wanting the young woman's freedom. Peter Lawford and Angela Lansbury play Pidgeon's adjutants with Pidgeon falling in love with the ballerina, and Ethel Barrymore plays the head of the convent where Pidgeon has his office.
A movie nominated for its music -- certainly not for its messy screenplay! -- is The Fallen Sparrow, at 10:45 AM Tuesday on TCM. John Garfield plays a man who fought in the Spanish Civil War against the Fascists. Of course, the Fascists under Franco won the war, so the result for Garfield's character was a stint in the Spanish clink, with the Fascists torturing him to get some valuable information out of him. A New York City cop helped him escape and make his way to a sanatorium in Arizona, and now that Garfield is out of the sanatorium, he wants to thank that cop. But, the cop is dead! Officially, he killed himself, but Garfield just knows it was really murder, and certainly the Nazis must have had something to do with it. That, and possibly one or another of his former girlfriends. Maureen O'Hara plays one of the girlfriends, while Walter Slezak (the bad Nazi from Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat) plays a doctor with Nazi sympathies.
A little, not so well remembered movie that got a nomination for its original story is The Star Witness, at 8:00 AM Thursday on TCM. In this nifty crime movie, veteran character actor Grant Mitchell plays the father in a 1930-vintage middle-class family. One day, though, he family's life is turned upside down when a gangster, having just committed a murder that they saw, uses their house as a bit of a hideout, threating the family with all sorts of violence if they talk to the authorities. So the prosecutor (Walter Huston) tries to get the information that he knows they have out of them, but still won't spill the beans to the prosecutor. To make matters worse, the gang kidnaps their little boy (Dickie Moore). It's up to Grandpa (Chic Sale, who was in his 40s when he made this) to save the day. He plays a Civil War veteran, and having fought to keep the country together, there's no way he's going to let gangsters tear it apart! It's all a real surprise package for it's short running time.
I'm not certain if I've blogged about Four Daughters before, or one of the sequels. Anyhow, the first movie in the series shows up on TCM at 2:15 AM Friday. The Lemp daughters are played by the three real-life Lane sisters (Priscilla, Rosemary, and Lola) and Gale Page. They're daughters of a widowed musician and music-school dean and live with him and their aunt Etta (May Robson). The four daughters being adults, all of them also want to find a handsome man, and one has a flame in the boy next door while another is being pursued by a banker. Their lives change, however, with the introduction of two other men. One, Felix (Jeffrey Lynn) is a composer and son of one of Dad's old freinds, and every woman he meets finds him charming. And then there's Mickey, the pianist collaborating with him (John Garfield). He's sort of the bad boy that women naturally find irresistible, even if he's really not the best person for them. This is at the beginning of Garfield's career, and made him a star.
If you like foreign films, one that TCM is running this week is My Life as a Dog, Friday at 10:15 AM. Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) is a 12-year-old boy growing up in Sweden in the 1950s. Unfortunately, Dad is always away on business, and Mom has some terminal illness that has reached the stage where she can no longer take care of him. Ingemar is constantly fighting with his older brother, so they send Ingemar off to spend time with an uncle who lives in some small town in the Swedish countryside. This town is full of oddball characters, such as an old man with an obsession for lingerie ads, or a tomboy who wants to play on the boys' soccer team. Through these people, Ingemar learns about life and growing up, much in the way that adolescent boys all over the world learn about life.
A bloated but visually interesting movie is Modesty Blaise, at 3:30 AM and 12:55 PM Sunday on FXM Retro. Based on a 1960s comic book, this one tells the story of Modesty (Monica Vitti), the world's greatest female spy. Modesty, together with her partner Willie (Terence Stamp), get involved in a plot to recover stolen diamonds. Those diamonds have been stolen by archvillian Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde), who spends his days on his Mediterranean island stronghold together with his minions, most notably Mrs. Fothergill (Rossella Falk), who trains a bunch of paunchy older men to dole out the violence. The plot is an absolute mess, although that's probably in part due to the fact that movie is supposed to be a spoof of the 1960s spy craze. The good news is there's all sorts of groovy production design of things and places as they were in the 1960s. Watch for an early scene in which Bogarde is served his drink in a glass with a ridiculously long stem. And those garish colors.
Not quite as wholesome as Four Daughters is Midnight Cowboy, airing on Encore Classic at 1:35 AM and 9:00 PM Wednesday. John Voight plays the original Joe Buck (not the crappy football play-by-play guy), a naÏf from Texas who goes to New York thinking he'll make it as a hustler. Of course, the big city is so much more worldly than the Texas that Joe came from, and Joe quickly winds up with no money. At this point he comes across Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a small time conman who had in fact conned Joe once before. This time the two become friends of a sort. Ratso needs money to get down to Florida, which he thinks is going to improve his health much in the way that the idle rich would go to mountains or spas. When originally released, the movie carried an X rating, but got an R on re-release. Midnight Cowboy presents an engaging portrait of a crumbling New York City on the way to being told to drop dead by President Ford a few years later, and introduced the Nilsson song "Everybody's Talking".
Encore Westerns is running Firecreek at 10:35 AM Sunday. The title refers to a town, where James Stewart plays Sheriff Cobb. Cobb is only sheriff part time, mostly because it's a town with not much crime. Of course, you know this means that crime is going to come to the sleepy little hamlet, which it eventually does in the form of Henry Fonda. Fonda plays Larkin, the head of a gand that's been trying to stay one step ahead o fthe posse, at which point they wind up in Firecreek. Larkin himself wouldn't necessarily mind ending his life of crime since he's aging and got a girlfriend in the form of Evelyn (the tragic Inger Stevens), but the other members are itching for a fight, so you know that eventually we're going to get one.even though the sheriff doesn't want it. Stewart and Fonda were lifelong friends despite their political differences, but they made only one other film together.
And now for the short subjects. This being [i]31 Days of Oscar[/i[, TCM is pulling out the Oscar-nominated shorts available to them, which means theoretically we get better shorts, but also means no Traveltalks.
Those of you who like Pete Smith will enjoy Strikres and Spares at 12:32 AM Wednesday (still 11:32 PM Tuesdaly night LFT!). Smith offers his acerbic wit (for some values of wit) to the topic of a 1930s-era professional bowler who barnstorms the country doing trick shots
A popular series in February is the Crime Does Not Pay shorts, which start off with an MGM moral scold warning us about different types of cime, and then a 15-minute or so vignette showing why crime does in fact not pay. A couple of the 1930s entries show up this week, such as 1937's Torture Money at 11:38 PM Wednesday, which looks at the staging of car accidents for insurance fraud, and how the cops break the racket.
The closest we get to a Traveltalks is Warner Bros. 1949 short Calgary Stampede, at 12:36 PM Saturday. As you can guess from the title, this one shows the famous rodeo round-up as it was back in the late 1940s, in Technicolor glory.
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