Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of February 4-10, 2013. Football season is officially over by the time any of the movies here show up, and it's still a few weeks before the combine. So this is another good week to sit back with some good old movies -- and a few new ones -- and watch them. Of course, there's no Star of the Month since TCM is in the middle of its annual 31 Days of Oscar salute, but that doesn't mean there aren't still a bunch of good films out there. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Clifford Odets was a famous playwright, who might be best remembered for Golden Boy, which was turned into a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden. But Odets actually directed one of the works he wrote. That would be The Story on Page One, which is showing up at 9:50 AM Monday on TCM. Rita Hayworth stars as a woman in an unhappy marriage to a police officer who finds love with Gig Young, who's got mother (Mildred Dunnock) issues. Eventually the husband finds out about the affair, and pulls his gun on them, but gets killed in the struggle. Of course the authorities don't believe that a cop could ever pull a gun on his wife's lover, so the two lovers are accused of murder! A goodly portion of the evidence, however, is against the two lovers. All will become clear at the trial, where our lovers will hopefully be acquitted even as the evidence wrongly mounts against them. The one big problem is some glaring plot holes. (Was the gun ever checked for prints?)
I think I've recommended The Sundowners before, but if I haven't, you can catch it again st 6:45 AM Tuesday on TCM. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr star as a married couple in 1920s Australia. He's a sheep drover for hire, which means that he goes from ranch to ranch moving sheep the way the cowboys of old drove cattle. It's a life with no fixed residence, and something that Kerr wants to stop doing, since the couple have an adolescent son and it would be good for him if they all settled down. Along the way, they take Peter Ustinov into their band, who seems to have much wanderlust as Mitchum. Eventually, Kerr gets the entire family jobs on a farm for one season, in the hopes that they'll earn enough to put a down payment on the farm where she'd like to live permanently. But will Mitchum prevent that from happening? This earned Kerr her sixth and final Oscar nomination; she never won a competitive Oscar.
31 Days of Oscar moves to Universal for one night on Wednesday night, which means a lot of movies that are only going to show up once on TCM and then go missing for a long time. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with All Quiet on the Western Front, in which Lew Ayres plays the young boy who learns about the horrors of war when he gets sent to the trenches in World War I; Louis Wolheim in one of his final films before his untimely death plays the old experienced soldier who takes Ayres under his wing.
At 10:30, TCM is running the 1934 version of Imitation of Life, in which Claudette Colbert plays a widow who takes in housemaid Louise Beavers, who has a mixed-race daughter. The daughter, unfortunately, wants to be white, and only white, which causes no end of problems. Along the way, Colbert and Beavers become rich by marketing Beavers' pancake batter recipel
Then, at 12:30 AM Thursday, you can see Boris Karloff fall for Elsa Lanchester's frizzy hair in Bride of Frankenstein.
After the Universal movies, we get a morning of movies from Svensk filmindustri, which you might be able to guess means Swedish movies. Two of them were directed by Ingmar Bergman, including Wild Strawberries, at 7:45 AM. Victor SjΓΆstrΓΆm, who had a long career both in Sweden and directing silent films in the US, stars as a Dr. Borg Stockholm medical professor poshing 80 who is due to receive an honorary diploma in Lund, on the south coast of Sweden, which means a day-long drive to get to Lund. Along the way, our good doctor stops at the place he spent summers at a child and at his mother's old house; both of these places remind him of the fact that although Borg was extremely successful in his professional life, he made an utter mess of his personal life. One of the hitchhikers he picks up reminds him of a cousin he was supposed to marry, but who fell in love with his brother instead. And the sins of the father are visited upon the son, too, as his own son is in a failing mariage. I know some of you like tits and explosions in your movies, but you might want to give this one a chance.
The three Swedish films are followed by three from Italy, including Big Deal on Madonna Street at 3:30 PM, which I mentioned last month as part of the TCM salute to heist films.
If you don't like reading subtitles, you could always switch over to FMC for a rare showing of Rings on Her Fingers, at 7:20 AM. Gene Tierney plays a shop girl who struggles to survive on her small shop girl salary, and live a lot of women, wants the better things in life: a rich guy and fine fashions. She's hired by two rich people, Spring Byington and her nephey Laird Cregar, to model some of those fine clothes, and when that experience goes well, they let her in on a secret. They're really con artists, and could use her to con rich guys. The three go to Palm Beach, where they con wealthy ship owner Henry Fonda. At this point, however, complications arise. One is that Tierney finds herself falling in love with Fonda, with the feeling being mutual -- he, of course, having no idea they're out to con him. The other problem is that Fonda is in fact not wealthy, and when he gets conned out of his life savings, he hires a detective to find out who did it. (Oops, his girlfriend is one of them.)
20th Century Fox shows up for 31 Days of Oscar on Friday. This includes the TCM premiere of Wilson, at 8:00 PM. You should be able to guess that a title like Wilson implies a biopic, which in this case is a biography of Woodrow Wilson, who is played by Alexander Knox. Knox was a relative unknown at the time, but does a fine job with the material he was given, which is unsurprisingly hagiographic, as we follow Woodrow from his time as president of Princeton University, to his run for Governor of New Jersey, the divded 1912 Democratic convention, and Wilson's two terms as US President. Wilson lost his first wife (Ruth Nelson) in 1914, and remarried Edith (Geraldine Fitzgerald) less than two years later. The rest of the cast has a lot of great character actors, such as Charles Coburn as a college professor, or Vincent Price as one of the men helping Wilson secure the presidential nomination in 1912.
There's a lot more Fox through the rest of the weekend, mostly stuff that I've recommended before when it aired on FMC when FMC wasn't the shell it is today. I've also blogged about several of them, such as:
Carmen Jones (Saturday at 10:15 AM), a modern-day all-Black retelling of the opera Carmen;
Sidney Poitier's first film No Way Out at 2:00 PM Saturday; or
The Snake Pit at 4:15 AM Sunday, with Olivia de Havilland as a woman who winds up in the state mental hospital and finds out that it's a horrifying place.
If you'd like something newer than all of these classic Oscar-nominated movies, I have a couple of good choices for you. First, at 12:50 PM Wednesday on Starz Kidz [sic] and Family (that's Channel 525 for those of you with DirecTV), and repeated at 8:00 PM Wednesday, is Secondhand Lions. A middle-aged cartoonist receives a call one day that his two crazy uncles died in a plane crash. Flash back to the summer the cartoonist spent, aged about 12 circa 1960, at the uncles' place out in the country. The kid (played by Haley Joel Osment) is dropped off for the umpteenth time by his mother who's off chasing some guy; she hopes the kid can find out about the treasure that "everybody knows" the uncles have. The uncles, played by Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, regale the kid with tales of what they did in Arabia in the 1920s and 1930s, tales which can't possibly be real. At the same time, the uncles refuse to grow old conventionally, providing Osment with an Auntie Mame-like guardian for the summer.
Second, at 6:00 AM Friday on Flix, with a repeat at 11:30 PM, is Dead Again. Kenneth Branagh stars as a private detective into whose life comes Emma Thompson (who was his real-life wife at the time). She's an amnesia patient who can't remember anything about her past. She's having nightmares that tell an odd story -- the story of a famous 1940s Hollywood film composer and his pianist wife, who was murdered by him, for which he went to the electric chair. Under hypnosis, however, it seems as though the modern-day Branagh and Thompson have a strange relationship to the composer and his wife, which would explain why the two characters in the flashback are played by Branagh and Thompson. Was the pianist really murdered by her husband, and if not, who did it? And who is this mystery woman anyway? The plot strains credulity but is an enjoyable ride.
Finally, we've got Ruthless People, Sunday at 4:00 AM on Cinemax, and repeated three hours later on the western feed for those of you both feeds. Danny DeVito stars as a businessman who's got a mistress and a wife (Bette Midler) of whom he's sick and tired. In fact, he's planning to kill her. But before he can do that, somebody else gets in the way: the wife is kidnapped by Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater, a married couple who were fleeced by DeVito in the past and want revenge and compensation for the fleecing, so they as for $500,000 ransom on Midler or else they'll kill her. They, of course, have no way of knowing that DeVito is perfectly happy with this as he wanted his wife dead anyway. It's not quite original, as the theme has been explored before in comedies like Too Many Crooks. But it's entertaining enough.
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