Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of February 9-15, 2014. Valentine's Day is this week, so celebrate with your loved one with a home-cooked gourmet meal, some fine chocolates, and a night at the movies! And boy are there enough good movies to recommend for Valentine's Day -- and I didn't even have to mention a bunch of sappy chick flicks. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday morning and afternoon bring a bunch of World War II movies to TCM, most of which were made during the war itself. One that I don't think I've recommended before is Bombardier, at 9:00 AM. As you can guess from the title, this is a look at the life of a bombardier; that is, the person in the bomber whose job it was to calculate the targeting of the bombs and make certain that they blew up as close to the intended target as possible. Pat O'Brien plays the major who heads the bombardier school that trains new bombardiers. Randolph Scott, who had liaised with the British RAF, is his underling who sees the positives in doing bombing runs the way the RAF do, which is different from the way the US does, which is to develop a more accurate sight so that you can fly above the range of the anti-aircraft missiles. There's also a romantic subplot involving a woman in the auxiliary forces (Anne Shirley), all leading up to the climactic scenes of the bombing raids on Tokyo..
You may think of Doris Day for the musicals and light comedies that she did. But she also did a couple of serious movies, such as Julie, Tuesday morning at 7:00 AM. Julie, played by Day who turns 91 in April, is a former airline stewardess married to concert pianist Lyle (Louis Jourdan, who turns 94 in June). This is Julie's second marriage; her first husband committed suicide, and a friend from the first marriage (Barry Sullivan) worries that Lyle isn't right for Julie, since he's overly possessive. Indeed, the friend has a feeling that Lyle may have been involved in the death of the first husband! Julie begins to feel more and more put off by Lyle's controlling nature, to the point that she wants to escape and return to her old job. The only thing is, Lyle ends up on one of the cross-country flights on which Julie is a stewardess! It's actually pretty good, even if the premise sounds a bit cliched.
Burt Lancaster became a star almost right away when he made The Killers, which TCM is showing at 10:15 PM Tuesday. Two men come to a roadside diner looking for "the Swede". That Swede turns out to be Lancaster, and the two guys are hired killers who kill him -- he's resigned to his fate. That was the subject for an Ernest Hemingway short story, but movie adds a lot more to the story. Apparently the Swede had an insurance policy so the company sends an insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) to investigate what happened. The story is then told partly in a series of flashbacks by characters O'Brien interviews, a la Citizen Kane, and partly in the present day. Ultimately there was a failed career as a boxer, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, a femme fatale (Ava Gardner), and a heist gone wrong. The cast is uniformly good and the story, although a bit convoluted at times, turns out quite well too.
Western fans may enjoy Tension at Table Rock, which is airing twice on Encore Westerns, at 9:15 AM Wednesday and 4:15 AM Thursday. Richard Egan plays Wes, a gunman who's been drifting through the west under assumend names because in one of the gunfights, the only witness, the deceased's girlfriend Cathy (Angie Dickinson) claims Wes shot her man in the back. Wes comes to Table Rock to deliver an orphan to the boy's aunt (Dorothy Malone) and uncle (Cameron Miller); Uncle Fred is also the sheriff and having a rough time of it. Wes would like to forget his past and just work as a trail hand, but there's the matter of who killed the orphan boy's father. That, and a bunch trailhands who seem to want to turn Table Rock into an open, lawless town, all of which conspire to force Wes to pick up that gun again and be a gunfighter. There's a lot of familiar western territory covered here, but it's all fairly well done.
You may have seen any number of versions of Alexnadre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, but have you seen The Four Musketeers before? You have your chance this Wednesday at 6:15 PM on TCM. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (respectively Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain) have been joined by D'Artagnan (Michael York). There's a Protestant revolt in one of the port towns, so Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) has Constance de Bonancieux (Raquel Welch) kidnapped. She's an emissary from the Queen to her lover who backs the Protestants, as well as D'Artagnan's girlfriend. This of course gets the Musketeers involved. This is a sequel to a version of The Three Musketeers made a year earlier, and in fact the cast members thought they were making one long film. When the producers split it up into two, they sued. (This would also explain any sense of everybody having an unexplained past you might get.) And those locations? They're not France, as the movie was actually filmed in Spain.
If you want more stuff based on French literature, you could watch the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, at 7:00 AM Friday on TCM. Charles Laughton plays Quasimodo, the man with the hunched back who rings the bells at Notre Dame cathedral and has gone deaf and mute as a result. Quasimodo is told by Chief Justice Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke) to find gypsy girl Esmeralda (Maureen O'Hara) because Frollo developed an infatuatoin for her at first sight. However, there's a power struggle between the Chief Justice and the Captain of the Guards, Phoebus (Alan Marshall). Phoebus ends up being stabbed and Frollo, unable to have Esmeralda, trumps up charges against her so that she'll be found guilty and sentenced to death. Quaismodo and other friends of Esmeralda try to save her. Laughton is great as always, and the sets are extremely impressive.
A movie I don't think I've recommended in quite some time shows up on FXM Retro: Tampico, at 6:00 AM Thursday. Edward G. Robinson stars as Capt. Mansom, running an oil tanker that plies the Gulf of Mexico during World War II. This means there are Nazis around, and Mansom runs into the effect of the Nazis when he picks up survivors of a boat that was torpedoed by a U-boat. Among those survivors is Kathy Hall (Fox contract player Lynn Bari), who finds herself the subject of a whirlwind romance from Mansom even though she has no way of proving who she is. This ticks off the first officer Adamson (Victor McLaglen), but he sees a chance when the Nazis torpedo Mansom's boat: insinuate that Kathy must have been in the employ of the Nazis! It's up to Mansom to investigate and find out how the Nazis were able to find and sink his boat. It's fairly routine World War II stuff, but Robinson makes a movie like this eminently worth watching.
Another movie returning to FXM after a long absence is House of Strangers, at 4:00 AM Saturday. Richard Conte plays lawyer Max Moinetti, who just got out of prison after several years when he took the fall for his father's bank fraud. Dad (Edward G. Robinson) was in Italian immigrant, steeped in the ways of the old country, and ran a bank for immigrants, but once the Depression came, his loose accounting practices did him in. Now out of prison, Max finds that his three brothers have taken control of the bank out from under Dad in the intervening years -- it seems all of the sons have some sort of resentment toward their father. The brothers offer Max money to up and leave, but Max gets the impression that they're really trying to hide something, and besides, he wants revenge for what he thinks they did to him. Susan Hayward stars as the decidedly non-Italian love interest, another source of frictino between Max and the rest of the family.
One of James Stewart's earliest comedies is Vivacious Lady, which TCM is running at 6:30 AM Saturday. Stewart plays Peter Morgan, a professor at a small-town college run by his conservative father (Charles Coburn). Peter goes off to the city to bring his wayward cousin home, and while there he meets Francey (Ginger Rogers), has a whirlwind romance with her, and marries her very quickly. This presents a problem when Peter returns home, because he concludes that Dad will never approve of the marriage to Francey: she was a nightclub singer, of all things! Well, that and the fact that Peter was already engaged to another woman Helen (Frances Mercer). So Peter tries to come up with a good way to break the news to Dad, but everything he tries seems to make matters worse. The great character actress Beulah Bondi plays Mrs. Morgan, who has her own way of dealing with family squabbles. Bondi, in fact, played Stewart's mom in several movies, including her Oscar-nominated role in Of Human Hearts the same year as Vivacious Lady.
It's been a while since T-Men has shown up on TCM, but it's going to be on again at 9:00 AM Sunday. The title, of course, refers to the Treasury men who investigated counterfeiting cases. Here, we've got a particularly successful counterfeiting ring doing its work in Los Angeles, and the quality of their work really has the Treasury Department worried. So they send out a pair of agens (Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder) first to Detroit and then to Los Angeles since that's where the action is, as the head of the gang is coming with the engraved plates necessary to produce even more accurate currency. The movie is told in the same sort of docudrama style that was so common over at Fox durin this time period. Among the supporting cast is Charles McGraw (the good guy from The Narrow Margin) as a hired assassin, and June Lockhart as the wife of one of the agents. The movie was made on a very low budget at the much lesser Eagle-Lion studio, but comes out quite well.
And now for the shorts. First up is The House I Live In at 6:42 AM Tuesday. This one has Frank Sinatra singing a song or two, and in between he steps out for a smoke and finds a bunch of kids taunting a Jewish boy, leading to Sinatra teaching the kids a thing or two about tolearance, at least toward people of European descent.
And then there are shorts in John Nesbitt's Passing Parade. John Nesbitt made a series of roughly 10-mintue shorts which mostly looked back nostalgically at an America that may never have been. Two of those shorts show up this week on TCM. First, at 6:15 AM Wednesday is Goodbye, Miss Turlock, looking at the one-room schoolhouse and how the brilliant teachers who worked in them were able to give everybody an education.
Then, at 5:04 AM Friday, you can catch Annie Was a Wonder, about the women (specifically Swedish) who emigrated to America to become house-servants working for a pittance until they could save up some money and marry, all the while becoming a part of the family to the children of the family for which they worked.
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