Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of Februery 3-9, 2014. With the only important sporting event this week being the thoroughly corrupt Olympics opening up, why not spend some time with some good movies? There's no Star of the Month on TCM because of the annual 31 Days of Oscar, but there are some good foreign films. There are good movies on other channels, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
As you know since you all read the obituaries I post religiously, Maximilian Schell died over the weekend. TCM didn't have any of his movies on the schedule this week, although Schell does show in in he John Carpenter-directed horror flick Vampires, which is on at 4:05 AM Friday on Cinemax, and presumably 7:05 AM if you've also got the west coast feed. This is one of those movies that I didn't pay any attention to when it came out, so I have to admit to not knowing anything about it.
During 31 Days of Oscar, TCM's intention is that when it runs shorts in between the movies, the shorts will also have been nominated for Oscars. Back in the 1940s, there were separate categories for one- and two-reel shorts, and the 1946 winner in the one-reel category is Facing Your Danger, on a little after 6:45 AM Monday, or following Anchors Aweigh (starts at 4:15 AM, runs 139 minutes). This one actually started off as a home movie, about a group of men trying to raft down the Colorado River, but Warner Bros. obtained the footage, added some new footage and narration, and released it in the form you see here. A nice color look at the Colorado River as it was in the 1940s
We'll next see stage star Ethel Merman in one of the only roles she reprised on the big screen, in Call Me Madam, Monday at 11:00 AM on TCM. Merman plays the "madam", which here refers to a society hostess in Washington DC. She gets named Ambassador to a tiny European Grand Duchy. The Duke and Duchess are trying to marry off their niece (Vera-Ellen), but need money to do it and hope that the new US Ambassador can get them a loan. She, for her part, doesn't seem to care about money, or about proper diplomatic etiquette, although all that's going to change when she meets a general played by George Sanders. Also complicating things is the fact that the Ambassador's assistant (Donald O'Connor) falls in love with the niece that the Duke and Duchess are trying to marry off. Along the way, everybody sings several lesser-remembered Irving Berlin songs.
TCM is showing quite a few foreign movies this week, with a whole block of them on Tueesday morning and afternoon. These include The Burmese Harp, at 8:45 AM Tuesday. The setting is Burma, near the end of World War II. Japan has surrendered, except that there are still some units that haven't heard about the surrender and continue to fight. Soldier Mizushima is sent by his CO to get to one such unit and tell them continuing to fight is useless as they'll be annihilated. The mission isn't successful; the unit is destroyed; and Mizushima winds up at a monastery as the only survivor. Stealing one of the monks' clothes as a disguise, he plans to make it back to his original unit, but he sees so much suffering that the only thing he can do is become a deserter and try to bury all of the dead bodies that haven't been given a proper burial. It's a very diferent look at the war from what we'd see out of Hollywood.
William Faulkner isn't particularly a favorite of mine, but those of you who enjoy his writing may enjoy The Reivers, Wednesday at 3:30 PM on TCM. Set around 1905, Will Geer plays Grandpa McCaslin the patriarch of a wealthy landowning family in Mississippi who has just bought the first car in the county. One person who's particularly intrigued by this is McCaslin's handyman around the plantation, Boon (Steve McQueen). He's got a girlfriend who lives up in Memphis, and man would he like to see her. Of course, he can't just take the car, especially since the girlfriend is also working in a bordello, so he's got to come up with an excuse, which comes in the form of the McCaslin's grandson Lucas. Boon convinces Lucas to lie about going to Memphis to see a relative (you'd think Grandpa would know where all the family lives), allowing Boon to take him and the car. Stowing along for the ride is Lucas' mixed-race "cousin". Together they have adventures and Lucas learns about life.
A movie that's showing up back on the Fox Movie Channel after some time -- at least, it's been two and a half years since I recommended it -- is Hangover Square, Wednesday at 6:00 AM. Set at the turn of the last century (again), but this time in London, Laird Cregar stars as a composer with a serious problem: when he hears discordant notes he goes into blackouts, waking up with no idea of what he's done! One time, he wakes up in a different part of London, finding out the next morning that a murder was committed near where he woke up. He tries to take the stress out of his life, but meets beautiful dance hall girl Linda Darnell, who is only using him as a source for songs for her to sing, which is complicating things since those themes were supposed to go into the piano concerto he's trying to compose. It's all enough to give him another blackout. Laird Cregar is excellent in what was his final film before his tragic early death; Hangover Square is also one of the few Hollywood films I can think of to use Guy Fawkes Day as a plot point.
Wednesday night on TCM sees the nominees for Best Supporting Actor in 1946, an award won by Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives at 8:00 PM. One of the men he beat out was William Demarest, who was nominated for The Jolson Story, Thursday at 3:30 AM. The Jolson here refers to Al Jolson (played by Larry Parks), born Asa Yoelson the son of a cantor who discovered he had a natural gift for singing at the turn of the last century. Unfortunately, he wanted to sing secular stuff, while his father wanted him to become a cantor. Of course, Al would go on to a successful career as a singer and an actor, most notably in The Jazz Singer. Jolson was still alive at the time the movie was made, and did the singing for Larry Parks as dubbing actors in musicals was quite common back in those days. As for Demarest, he plays a vaudevillean entertainer who discovers Asa at one of his shows. It's a fictitious character, though, as there are a lot of liberties taken with Jolson's real life in this one.
Thursday night brings all five of the women nominated for Best Actress in 1966 to TCM, starting with Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at 8:00 PM. The movie I'd like to mention, however, is A Man and a Woman, Friday at 2:15 AM, which earned Anouk AimÉe a Best Actress nomination. AimÉe plays Anne. a Parisian widow who's got a daughter in a boarding school. One Sunday as she's dropping the daughter off back at school, she meets Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant whom you'll probably best recall from Z, which is on at 3:45 PM Tuesday), who's got a son at the school. Oh, and he's also a widower. She misses her train back to Paris, so he offers her a ride. As you can guess, the two begin ot develop a relationship, although it's going to be a very complex relationship what with both of them having children dealing with deceased parents, and the two adults dealing with the grief of their deceased spouses, since both spouses died young and unexpectedly.
For some reason, I thought I had recommended Conquest before, but a search of x4 and my archives suggests I haven't. It's airing at 8:30 AM Friday. Greta Garbo stars as Marie Walewska, a Polish countess in the first decade of the 19th century. This is a time just after Poland had been completely partitioned and lost its independence. It's also the era of Napoleon, played here by Charles Boyer. The two meet at a ball, and he falls in love with her even though she's already got a husband. However, Napoleon's France was not one of the countries that had partitioned Poland, so the Polish noblemen think Marie should get a divorce from her husband and marry Napoleon, as that might convince him to make Poland independent again when he goes on his invasions across Europe. Napoleon and the countess have a romance, but Napoleon also has other political considerations to worry about.
Friday night's theme on TCM is the Best Actor nominees for 1953. The winner was William Holden, for Stalag 17, which is on at 10:15 PM Friday. Holden stars as an American POW in a World War II Nazi POW camp who is trying to survive the difficult conditions by running the camp's black market. It's something that makes him unpopular with his fellow POWs, except that they have to deal with him for the things they want. However, when a couple of POWs get killed trying to escape, everybody else naturally assumes that he was responsible for ratting them out, since he didn't really think the escape attempt was a good idea. So it's a race against time as he tries to find out who the real informer is, all while in a race against time to prevent the real snitch from providing the guards with the hiding place of another POW they're looking for. Otto Preminger plays the camp commandant.
The Saturday night theme is again Best Picture nominees, this time the five from 1949. One that didn't win is Twelve O'Clock High, at midnight Sunday (ie. 11:00 PM Saturday for those of you in Wisconsin who are sick and tired of seeing your basketball team lose). Dean Jagger (who won a Supporting Actor Oscar) opens the film as a man who finds a souvenir mug in a London shop that reminds him of his World War II past, which leads him to drive to a now empty airfield and remember the time he spent there.... Jagger's character was the adjutant to a general played by Gregory Peck. The general has just been given an assignment at this airbase because the flyboys there have low morale and aren't doing a good enough job carrying out their vital mission. That mission is to execute daytime bombing raids over Nazi Germany, so you can see why they're unhappy, considering how many of their number aren't returning each day. Peck's general, quite the martinet, whips the flyboys into shape, and when there aren't enough men around, even heads up a mission himself....
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