Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 1-7, 2018. Now that the meaningful football season is over save watching for Minnesohhhta's collapse, why not spend the time until the Brewers start failing with some good movies? Once again, I've used my good taste to select some movies I know you'll all enjoy. There's a new Star of the Month on TCM, and some other movies that haven't shown up in a long time. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
Those of you who like more recent movies will be happy to see that Beverly Hills Ninja is on The Movie Channel at 6:30 AM Monday (and a few other places throughout the week; check your cable/satellite box). Haru is shipwrecked and orphaned as a child, and raised by a bunch of ninjas to become the Great White Ninja. Of course, Haru grows up to become Chris Farley, and you can't imagine him as a ninja. Sure enough, Haru would make the most incompetent ninja ever. Sally (Nicolette Sheridan) visits the ninja academy and thinking Haru is in fact a ninja, asks him for help. She's worried that her boyfriend Martin (Nathaniel Tanley) might be up to no good and wants Haru to investigate. Haru tries, but ultimately gets involved in a murder investigation that takes him to Beverly Hills. Since he's incompetent, the ninja school has sent along a “guardian” ninja to shadow Haru and keep him safe. It's a Chris Farley comedy, so you should know what you're getting into.
TCM is running a bunch of WC Fields movies on Tuesday in prime time. However, I notice that in among all those is something even more interesting: Movies on Sundays, at 1:34 AM Wednesday (or following Never Give a Sucker an Even Break which begins at 12:15 AM Wednesday). Those of you living in states with blue laws limiting the sale of alcohol on Sunday will probably know what a drag those can be. Well, the blue laws used to be even more restrictive, and some states even had laws on when showing movies was permissible. In Pennsylvania, a campaign to liberalize the laws was begun in 1935, and Hollywood brought together some of their stars to give moviegoers talking points on why movies are uplifting and should be allowed on Sundays. Then again, they also used Warner Oland as Charlie Chan. Hilariously dated but also a fascinating time capsule.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns, you can watch something like Trail of the Lonesome Pine, at 7:21 AM Thursday. The movie is set in hillbilly country, with a feud between the Tollivers and the Falins. Within the Tollivers, there are cousins in two branches of the family, June (Sylvia Sidney) and Dave (Henry Fonda) who are in love with each other with the plan that the two get married eventually. Ah, but coal deposits are found in the hills, and the railroad company wants to build a railroad through the area to get at the deposits. The Tollivers and Falins are bound to fight over who gets more money out of the deal. But the more immediate complication for the Tollivers comes in the form of mining engineer Jack (Fred MacMurray). He's sent out to pinpoint the coal deposits and determine a path for the railroad, but he falls in love with June, and the feeling is mutual. Spanky MacFarlane plays June's kid brother. This was the first three-strip Technicolor feature filmed with extensive outdoor locations.
Oh goodie! Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman will be on TCM this week at 2:30 PM Thursday. Susan Hayward plays Angie Evans, a nightclub singer who has a good career going when she meets fellow singer Ken (Lee Bowman) and his songwriting partner Steve (Eddie Albert). Angie and Ken fall in love and eventually get married. As was the thing at the time, Angie retired from performing to raise a family, eventually having a daughter. But Angie finds the family life boring, to the point that she deals with the tedium by drinking. And when that's done, she drinks some more. And more. Meanwhile Ken's career becomes more and more successful, unsurprisingly making Angie wonder what might have been had she kept up with her career, leading to a vicious cycle of ever more drinking. Unfortunately, the Production Code restraints mean that the ending we get is a mess and thoroughly unbelievable. But Hayward is great, earning an Oscar nomination.
Now that we're in a new month, we get a new Star of the Month on TCM: suave French actor Charles Boyer. Boyer's films will be on TCM every Thursday in prime time, continuing into the early hours of Friday morning. This first night of the lineup includes a bunch of Boyer's films from the 1930s, including Break of Hearts at 6:45 AM Friday. Katharine Hepburn plays Patricia, a young struggling composer studying under Professor Thalma (Jean Hersholt). Thalma introduces her to conductor Franz Roberti (Boyer), and the two immediately fall in love and get married. However, there are a couple of problems. One is that Franz is quite the ladies' man, and he still has a roving eye that ultimately pisses poor Patricia off, leading her to pursue young violinist Johnny (John Beal). The other problem is that Franz likes to drink, so once Patricia leaves him the problem gets worse and worse. But perhaps Patricia and Franz still love each other…. Sappy stuff like this is the reason why Hepburn was ultimately labeled “box office poison” in the late 1930s, before movies like The Philadelphia Story turned her movie career around.
Wild and crazy Steve Martin has one of his less remembered movies showing up this week: The Lonely Guy, at 1:22 AM Friday on StarzEncore Classics. Steve plays Larry, a greeting card writer who has a girlfriend in ballerina Danielle (Robyn Douglass). Except that one day he finds she's cheating on him, leading him to break off the relationship. He tries everything he can think of to find another woman, but nothing seems to work, at least until he meets fellow lonely guy Warren (Charles Grodin). Larry begins to learn to live again, and starts to write a book about being a lonely guy. Surprisingly, that book turns out to be a huge hit (leading to cameos from Merv Griffin and Joyce Brothers). Larry even finds another woman, Iris (Judith Ivey) who might be right for him, but it's going to take a lot of work for the two to realize they could be made for each other. If you like quirky Neil Simon comedies of the Goodbye Girl and later era, then you'll probably like this one.
Ronald Reagan was always entertaining in those B movies, even if the material was sometimes subpar. A good example of a fun Reagan B movie is Nine Lives Are Not Enough, which will be on TCM at 1:30 PM Friday. Reagan plays Matt Sawyer, a reporter for one of those big-city newspapers who unfortunately has a tendency to jump on a story a bit too early, which has led to him falling out with his editor Murray (Howard da Silva) and getting the police beat. But he's in luck, when he gets wind of a case of a dead guy found just outside a boarding house. It turns out that the dead guy Abbott was a millionaire. Matt, being the kind of guy whowants to write the big story, is quite certain that Abbott was murdered, but the authorities believe it was a suicide, and that's what the coroner's inquest concludes. Who should show up but Abbott's daughter Jane (Joan Perry), who tends to think it was murder too. And of course, she and Matt are going to fall in love along the way.
If you want a bizarre romantic fantasy, you're in luck: FXM Retro is airing That Lady in Ermine, at 10:00 AM Saturday. Betty Grable plays Countess Angelina. Angelina is the ruler of one of those small Italian principalities circa 1861 that dotted the landscape before Italy was unified in 1870. She's just gotten married to the dashing Count Mario (Cesar Romero), but before she can consummate the marriage, the equally dashing Hungarian colonel Ladislas (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) leads an invading army, with Mario fleeing. Ladislas falls in love with Angelina, but of course she can't return the favor. However, in a thoroughly improbable twist, Angelina has an ancestor Francesca who happened to repel a Hungarian invasion three centuries earlier. And the portrait of Francesca, who looks amazingly like Angelina, comes to life. Further complicating things is that Ladislas apparently looks like the Hungarian nobleman who invaded the principality back when Francesca was ruling. Ernst Lubitsch was set to direct, and you can imagine him giving a light touch to the material. But he died early in the production and Otto Preminger was brought in.
I'm happy to see One Man's Journey back on the TCM schedule, at noon Sunday. Lionel Barrymore plays Eli Watt, who is not an overrated defensive lineman but a widowed country doctor who at the start of the movie shows up in some small town in the midwest early in the century with young son Jimmy in tow. Eli gets a call to aid in childbirth, but the mother dies, so the father (David Landau) wants no part of raising the child, and Eli takes her in as a foster daughter Lettie. Years pass, and Jimmy grows up to be a dashing Joel McCrea while the daughter grows up to be a good-looking Dorothy Jordan eventually going back to live with her biological father. Eli keeps treating the poor folk, living a tough life since they can't really afford to pay him. Jimmy trains to become a doctor, but he's got the possibility to work in the big city which his father never had, causing much heartache. Eventually Eli gets his day in the sun. May Robson plays Eli's housekeeper while Frances Dee plays Jimmy's girlfriend and would eventually go on to marry McCrea in real life.
Annette Bening is playing Gloria Grahame in the new movie Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, which got a limited release last week (just in time for any possible Oscar nominations) and will presumably be getting a wider release later if it's successful. As you may know, Grahame was an actress of the golden age of Hollywood, so it should be unsurprising that Bening will be sitting down with Eddie Mueller, normally host of Noir Alley on Sunday mornings, to discuss the Grahame as well as presenting two of Grahame's movies. In a Lonely Place at 8:00 PM is definitely noir, while the second, The Bad and the Beautiful at 10:00 PM, isn't. But it won Grahame the Oscar and is just so damn good that it's always worth watching again.