Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of January 11-17, 2016. The Packers' season may be over by the time any of these movies air; or, we may be fretting about how the hell the Packers are going to beat Arizona or Carolina this coming weekend. Either way, why not relax with some good movies? As always, I've used my good taste to come up with a selection of interesting movies for you, including Star of the Month Fred MacMurray, a couple of birthdays, and more. All times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday marks the birth anniversary of Rod Taylor, who would be 86 if he didn't die at the beginning of last year. TCM is spending a morning and afternoon with Taylor's films, including the quirky The Liquidator at 4:00 PM. Taylor plays Boysie Oakes, who in the opening sequence is participaitng in the World War II liberation of Paris with his regiment and commanding officer Mostyn (Trevor Howard). Through sheer dumb luck he saves his CO's life. Fast forward 20 years, and Mostyn is now high up in MI-5, which Oakes is a playboy in middle England. Mostyn's superior is looking for people who can be super assassins to deal with threats to British security, and Mostyn remembers Oakes. The only problem is that he doesn't realize Oakes would make a terrible assassin. Mostyn hires Oakes, who solves his problem by hiring a hitman of his own to do the killings. It works until Oakes gets involved in real international espionage.... This is a gentle spoof of the spy movie craze of the 1960s.
Over the decade that I've been bringing you good movies, I've probably recommended everything that's on FXM Retro this week at one time or another. But I think it's been a while since I've mentioned Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, airing at 1:10 PM Monday. Walter Pidgeon plays Admiral Nelson, commander of an experimental US Navy sub. That submarine could be put to good use, as Earth faces a crisis: the Van Allen radiation belts have caught fire, sending the Earth's temperature skyrocketing and threatening life as we know it. The way to put the fire out is to fire a nuclear weapon at it, apparently, but the sub needs to get to the deepest point in the ocean for the trajectory to work and there are all sorts of problems preventing that. Helping our admiral out are crew members Barbara Eden and corpulent Peter Lorre; getting in the way is head shrinker Joan Fontaine. Rounding out the all-star cast for the interest of the teenage girls is Frankie Avalon.
On Tuesday TCM is showing a bunch of early movies with airplanes being key plot points, such as Secret Service of the Air at 2:30 PM. Ronald Reagan stars as Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in the first of four films in which he would play the character. This one involves a ring of people smuggling illegal immigrants into the country and Brass getting called in to investigate, which is a tough job because it's going to require his having to spend a good deal of time in jail so the smugglers will accept him as a criminal. The smugglers are ruthless, but eventually come to accept Brass as one of them, until the pilot with whom he shared a jail cell comes to suspect him. Reagan had a bit of a limited range as an actor, but playing an action hero fit that range, and this is actually a pretty good movie for what was clearly intended to be nothing more than a short second feature to play along with something more prestigious.
Wednesday is the birth anniversary of 1930s actress Kay Fwancis, who notoriously had difficulty with the letter R. TCM is showing a bunch of her movies on Wednesday morning and afternoon, such as Always in My Heart at 6:15 PM. Francis plays Mrs. Scott, a widow with two teenage children who is about to remarry to wealthy Mr. Ames (Sidney Blackmer). Or, at least, that's what she's told the children. In fact, she's a divorcÉe, having divorced Mr. Scott (Walter Huston) when he was sent to prison when a business deal he was involved in wound up with somebody getting killed. He was a composer in the outside world and wants her to remarry, going so far as not to tell her he's getting a pardon -- he wants the children to be taken care of. Well, he gets out of prison and goes to see the kids, them not knowing who this guy is, and things get complicated. The daughter is as into music as Dad is, while the son is into a woman who isn't appropriate for him. And of course they're going to learn the truth about their biological father along the way.
Over on Encore Westerns one that I haven't mentioned before is The Redhead and the Cowboy, at 11:45 PM Wednesday. The redhead is played by Rhonda Fleming, although since the movie is in black and white, you can't exactly tell she's a redhead. She's a saloon girl who at the beginning of the movie is seen celebrating with titular cowboy Glenn Ford. Except that she's got ulterior motives. She's actually a spy for the Confederacy, this being the Civil War, and when her contact shows up with a knife in his back, it's our cowboy who gets framed for murder, leaving him to go off and try to find the redhead, who has gone off to deliver that message that the contact was going to deliver before being so rudely knifed. However, can our cowboy trust anybody he meets? Watch for Confederate Col. Lamartine. That's Alan Reed, who a decade later would go on to play the voice of Fred Flintstone.
Fred MacMurray returns for another night of his movies as TCM's Star of the Month this Wednesday. Actually, they're showing enough movies to run well into Thursday morning, finishing up with On Our Merry Way at 9:30 AM. This is actually an anthology story, so MacMurray only appears in one third of the film. The framing segment involves a man (Burgess Meredith) working in the want ads section of a newspaper who wants to be a reporter, and convinces his editor to let him do a human interest piece on "how has a child influenced your life". So he interviews several people who tell their stories. The first one involves James Stewart and Henry Fonda, playing a pair of struggling musicians who are going to judge a small-town talent contest only for things not to go as planned; this section includes jazz trumpeter Harry James. The second one has Dorothy Lamour and Victor Moore telling how she became a Hollywood star back in the silent era. Finally, we get MacMurray and future TV partner William Demarest doing a version of O. Henry's "Ransom of Red Chief" in which two guys kidnap a child, only for the child to show both of them up.
Another movie back on FXM Retro this week is The Rains Came, which you can catch at 10:45 AM Thursday. George Brent plays dissolute playboy Tom, living in the British Raj province of Ranchipur, when old friend Lady Edwina (Myrna Loy) shows up with her husband (Nigel Bruce). She's not particularly happily married, but she's not in love with Tom either. Instead, she meets local doctor Rama Safti (Tyrone Power) being groomed for bigger things by the Maharani (Maria Ouspenskaya). Of course, that relationship can't work because of miscegenation, and he denies her advances. Ah, but that's the boring half of the film; later on we get an earthquake and flood that won an Oscar for special effects, and that brings an epidemic forcing Lady Edwina to go to work at the hospital Rama runs as they try to perform triage on all the locals coming down with the epidemic brought on by the flooding.
The TCM Spotlight this month is dedicated to art director/production designer William Cameron Menzies, who pretty much invented the term production design with his work on Gone With the Wind (airing Thursday at 8:00 PM). Every Thursday, James Curtis, the man who wrote the book on Menzies (literally; he wrote a bio of the man) is presenting some of Menzies' work. I already mentioned Gone With the Wind, but the one I'd really rather talk about is Our Town, at 1:45 AM Friday. You probably know this story already since I wouldn't be surprised if half of you did the play back in high school. This one looks at the town of Grovers Corners, NH, and more specifically at two young people in the town, George Gibbs (William Holden) and Emily Webb (Martha Scott). They graduate high school together, fall in love, and eventually get married, although tragedy strikes. The story isn't the greatest since the ending of the play was changed and this one drags a bit in the third act, but the production design is gorgeous.
Another western over on Encore Westerns I don't think I've recommended before is Wells Fargo, at 11:30 PM Saturday. Joel McCrea plays Ramsay MacKay, a man who signs on with the fledgling Wells Fargo company in the 1840s as they're building their stagecoach (and eventually banking) empire to deliver people and parcels to the new territories in the west. As Ramsay grows with the company, he meets and marries Justine (Frances Dee, his real-life wife). But there's a problem. 1860 comes, which of course means the Civil War. Ramsay is from the North, and Justine was originally from the South, and still has all those family ties and sypmathies for the Confederacy, something which threatens to tear apart her marriage. And you've also got all those Confederates out west trying to disrupt the gold shipments (led by former college football player Johnny Mack Brown), which Ramsay has to keep going. Watch also for a young Bob Cummings as a prospector.
Finally, if you like the music of Irving Berlin, then you're probably going to like Blue Skies, which you can catch on TCM at noon Sunday. Fred Astaire plays radio personality Jed Potter, who one day on his show decides to tell his listeners his life story. Jed was a dancer who, returning from World War I, met and fell in love with chorus girl Mary (Joan Caulfield). The only thing is, she falls in love with nightclub owner/singer/Jed's friend Johnny (Bing Crosby) even though it's obvious he's not right for her as he a bit driftless in always wanting to go on to new things. Johnny and Mary marry and have a daughter, but of course the marriage doesn't work out, and Jed tries to catch Mary on the rebound, which doesn't work either. What ever happened to Mary? The movie is known for Crosby's singing the tunes of Irving Berlin, and Astaire dancing to those tunes, with the most notable dance number being to "Puttin on the Ritz".