Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of February 26-March 4, 2018. We're into the final week of 31 Days of Oscar, so next week at this time we'll have a new Star of the Month to talk about. In the meantime, there are some great movies on TCM, and some interesting movies on the other movie channels. As always, all time are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I think it's been a while since I've recommended Test Pilot before. It's airing on TCM at 6:00 AM Monday. Clark Gable plays the titular test pilot, a man named Jim Lane who has a sense of adventure causing him to live fast. His current adventure/job has him piloting a plane on a cross country trip for the airplane company's boss Drake (Lionel Barrymore), trying to set a speed record. The flight is not a success in traditional terms, ad Jim is forced to crash land in a field in Kansas. That field is owned by the Bartons, a farming family with an adult daughter Ann (Myrna Loy). Ann and Jim fall in love, and eventually get married and move to the big city. However, Jim still has that need to live fast, as his best friend and mechanic Gunner (Spencer Tracy) knows all too well. Jim feels the need to keep testing planes, and Ann constantly worries that each new test flight could be his last, leaving her a widow. And Gunner doesn't want Ann to experience that hurt.
Up against Test Pilot over on StarzEncore Westerns is Calamity Jane and Sam Bass, at 6:53 AM Monday. You probably recall Calamity Jane (played here by Yvonne De Carlo). Sam Bass (played by Howard Duff) was an outlaw in Texas who as far as I know never met Calamity Jane in real life, but that's never stopped Hollywood. In this movie, Bass shows up in Denton TX without a penny to his name looking for a job. He eventually gets one as a farm hand for the sheriff (Willard Parker) and his sister (Dorothy Hart). But Sam has a way with horses, and when Calamity Jane shows up with her wild horse that she's hoping to run in the big race, it eventually falls to Sam to tame the horse. Sam could win big on the race if only he had the money to bet. The attempt to get that money combines with a bunch of other strokes of bad luck to make Sam's life a mess and push him toward outlawry. Watch for a young Lloyd Bridges as Sam's friend Joel.
For this final week of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar, we get a raft of movies that were nominated for Best Picture, with prime time being films that actually won the big prize. So, for example, at 8:00 PM Tuesday on TCM we get On the Waterfront. Marlon Brando plays Terry Malloy, a dockworker who used to be a boxer but lost the big fight having been forced by the mob that also runs the waterfront to take a dive. (He coulda been a contender, don't you know?) Anyhow, one of Terry's friends is ratting the mob out to the authorities, so the mob uses Terry to lure the guy up to the roof where he (unknown to Terry) will be pushed to his death. The guy's sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) and local priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) decide to try to get the dockworkers to try to fight back. Terry falls in love with Edie, although she doesn't know of Terry's part in her brother's death. If you haven't seen this one before, shame on you! Watch it this week! The acting, the story, and the cinematography are all outstanding.
I can't recall whether I've recommended Broadway Melody of 1936 before. In any case, it's going to be on TCM at 9:45 AM Wednesday. Robert Taylor plays Bob Gordon, a struggling Broadway producer who wants to put on a new show, except that he doesn't really have the money to do it. Enter Lillian (June Knight), a widow and would-be dancer who does have the money. Except that she wants to be the lead dancer in the show herself which is a problem since the show would need a much better dancer. And don't you think the press vultures, in the form of columnist Bert Keeler (Jack Benny), know this. Into all this comes Irene (Eleanor Powell), an old schoolmate of Bob's. Being played by Eleanor Powell, you know she can dance, and Bob's secretary Kitty (Una Merkel) tries to get Bob to notice. But there's that little financial matter with Lillian…. OK, there's really not much inventive in the way of plot here, but boy can Eleanor Powell dance!
I can't recall the last time What a Way to Go! was on FXM Retro, but it's on this week, at 8:35 AM Thursday. Shirley MacLaine plays Louisa May Foster, a woman who at the start of the movie wants to donate all her wealth to the US Treasury. This is obviously insane, so she's handed over to a psychiatrist (Robert Cummings) to find out why. It turns out that she grew up poor but pursued by wealthy Leonard (Dean Martin). Her mother (Margaret Dumont) wants her to marry him, but she opts for love in the form of Edgar (Dick Van Dyke). Edgar succeeds and becomes wealthy just before dropping dead, so Louisa marries starving artist Larry (Paul Newman), who also becomes wealthy just before dropping dead. This happens in a third (to Robert Mitchum) and fourth (to Gene Kelly) marriage as well, each time leaving Louisa bereft of love but even more fabulously wealthy. For film fans, part of the fun is that Louisa describes each marriage as being like a certain type of movie, at which point the action severely parodies that type of movie. The fancy costume changes in the Mitchum segment would have been enough to make Audrey Hepburn blush.
It's been a while since TCM has run Pride of the Yankees, but they're showing it this week at 3:45 PM Thursday. Gary Cooper stars as Lou Gehrig, the popular New York Yankees first baseman of the 1920s and 1930s who never missed a game until suddenly he got the illness that would later bear his name and be forced to retire from the sport. Gehrig would then give that memorable echoic speech at Yankee Stadium about being the luckiest man on the face of the earth and all that stuff. The movie starts with his days as a young man in a working class German-American neighborhood, eventually going to Columbia before playing for the Yankees, and then meeting Eleanor (Teresa Wright) who would become Mrs. Gehrig. Babe Ruth plays himself. Gary Cooper couldn't actually play baseball, and he was right-handed while Gehrig was a leftie, so the baseball scenes had everything filmed backwards with the print flipped.
We've got a pair of Alfred Hitchcock movies this week. The first one I'll mention is Marnie, which will be on StarzEncore Classics a 3:13 AM Friday. Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a woman with some serious problems, with the first one we see being her compulsive thievery and changing identities to hide it. She gets a job with a firm run by wealthy scion Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) and immediately plots to rob the safe. Mark figures out what's going on and who's done it, but he's got problems of his own, namely that he's in love with Marnie. And dammit, he's going to try to figure out just why Marnie has all these problems. Complicating things is the presence of Mark's sister-in-law Lil (Diane Baker), who realizes something about Marnie is not right and that Mark is obviously keeping secrets about it. She sets out to reveal the “truth” about Marnie. Marnie's problems become more and more ridiculous, up to the shocking finale. Well, shocking by 1964 standards, I suppose. Everybody tries hard, and Connery is good and Baker delicious, but the film remains a bit of a mess.
One of Alfred Hitchcock's more underrated movies is Foreign Correspondent, which will be on TCM at 3:00 PM Friday. Joel McCrea plays John Jones, a hotshot reporter for a New York newspaper in August 1939. As you can tell from the date, it's just before the start of World War II, and Jones' boss Powers (Harry Davenport) wants to find out what's really going on in Europe. He needs a fresh, unused mind, which is what Johnny, renamed Huntley Haverstock, has. In Europe, our reporter finds a peace conference in Amsterdam of “well-meaning amateurs” led by Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall) and his daughter Carol (Laraine Day). They've invited Dutch cabinet member Van Leer (Albert Basserman) to the conference, but Van Leer gets assassinated. Johnny follows the assassin, only to discover that Van Leer was replaced by a double and the real Van Leer was kidnapped because he's got a secret clause in a treaty the bad guys want to know! George Sanders plays fellow reporter ffoliott (no capitalization); Robert Benchley plays an alcoholic reporter; and Edmund Gwenn plays a hired assassin. This has one of the great climaxes when a transatlantic flight gets shot down.
For those of you who prefer more recent movies, I could recommend something that's only about 15 years old: Girl With a Pearl Earring, at 6:15 AM Saturday on HBO Signature. The title refers to a painting by Dutch master Jan Vermeer (played here by Colin Firth). In real life, nobody knows who the girl really was, leaving things open for all sorts of interesting speculation. In this telling, Vermeer was a relatively middle-class artist, although he still had to hustle for commissions and his family seem to be rather intimidated by his genius which leads him to be a bit brooding and secretive. Into all this comes scullery made Griet (Scarlett Johansson). She's impossibly beautiful for a 17th century Dutch working girl, and Vermeer is immediately taken by her. Ultimately, he uses her to model for the famous painting. The story itself may be hokey, but the movie is physically gorgeous to watch thanks to the art direction (based on Dutch paintings of the era) and cinematography.
Saturday is the last day of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar, although this year's awards will be handed out on Sunday night. At any rate, we start to get decidedly non-Oscar material back on TCM Sunday morning, such as Million Dollar Legs at 6:30 AM. This movie was made in the run-up to the first Los Angeles Olympic games of 1932. Klopstokia is one of those mythical dirt-poor eastern European countries, exporting nuts and goats, and with a president (W.C. Fields) at odds with his cabinet. Enter American brush salesman Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie). His boss would like to sponsor some Olympic athletes, and Migg finds that almost everybody in Klopstokia would make a great Olympic athlete, including the president and his daughter Angela (Susan Fleming). The President realizes that the brush company's awards for Olympic medalists would make his country financially solvent again so he jumps on the idea, but the cabinet tries to sabotage it. Or something like this since the plot is really secondary to the bizarre humor.