Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of January 12-18, 2015. The same programming features that I mentioned last week are still here -- Star of the Month Robert Redford on Tuesday night and Neil Simon movies on Friday night -- but there are other things worth watching as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Luise Rainer died at the end of December, two weeks before her 105th birthday. Monday would have been that 105th birthday, so TCM already had a morning and afternoon of her movies planned. Among them is the film that won her the first of her two Best Actress Oscars: The Great Ziegfeld, at 6:00 AM. The title, of course, refers to Florenz Ziegfeld (played by William Powell), the impresario from the beginning of the 20th century who took Broadway by storm with his lavish revues. Rainer plays French actress Anna Held, whom Ziegfeld meets in Europe and then marries to make certain she'll wind up performing in his shows. In real life they had a relationship but weren't married. Held would leave Ziegfeld and die young, while Ziegfeld would marry future Hollywood actress Billie Burke, who is played here by Myrna Loy since Loy was a bigger star at the time. Vaudeville star Fanny Brice playe herself. Among the extravagant numbers are "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody", with its ridiculous rotating staircase.
Monday afternoon ends with the interview Rainer did with Robert Osborne at the TCM Classic Film Festival in April 2010, three months after her 100th birthday. That can be seen at 7:30 PM.
Neil Simon may be the subject of this month's Friday Night Spotlight on TCN, but one of his films is showing up elsehwere on the TCM schedule this week: Barefoot in the Park, at 10:00 PM Tuesday. That's because it's running as part o fthe look at Star of the Month Robert Redford, who plays the male lead, reprising his role from the original Broadway play. Redford plays Paul, a fairly conservative man who's married bohemian Corie (Jane Fonda). Corie has gotten the two of them an apartment that's probably not best for them, on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, with a bunch of offbeat tenants in the other apartments, notably an amorous man played by an aging Charles Boyer. As the excitment of being newly married wears off, our couple faces the question of whether love can conquer all. Everybody does a fine job here, including another veteran actress, Mildred Natwick, as Corie's mother.
Mary Ann Mobley died back in December. The former Miss America had an acting career in hilariously bad movies like Get Yourself a College Girl, which you can catch at 12:45 PM Wednesday. Of course she (aged 27 at the time she made the movie) plays one of the college girls, going to a relatively conservative all-girls school but secretly writing rock-and-roll songs with provocative lyrics. The college discovers this, but decides to hold off punishment until after Christmas, which has everybody going to a ski resort for the winter break. Of course the guys there pursue the co-eds. Nancy Sinatra plays a newlywed, and Chad Everett plays Mobley's love interest. The plot is nuts, but there's some interesting music here, including the Animals performing a number; the Dave Clark Five; and jazzman Stan Getz performing "The Girl From Ipanema" with Astrid Gilberto.
Thursday, January 15 marks the birth anniversary of director William Beaudine, who was known for his economy in making films quickly and inexpensively. OK, I'm being kind here; he churned them out for Poverty Row in the 1940s, making something like 80 films that decade. So it's unsurprising that TCM will spend a day with him, although not showing all 80 of those films. Among the stuff on offer is Foreign Agent at 6:00 AM. The plot involves a Hollywood studio lighting technician who has invented a new type of spotlight that would have some military application: in case of air raids, folks on the ground can use it to spot enemy planes, but the planes won't see the shafts of light that you see in traditional air raid scenes. So of course, the Nazis and Japanese try to steal the plans for this light. It's up to the daughter of the inventor -- an actress at the studio played by Gale Storm later of TV's My Little Margie -- and her boyfriend played by John Shelton (you think Poverty Row could get name actors?) to foil the Nazis' nefarious plans.
Thursday night brings a night of train robbery movies to TCM. Train robberies were a staple of the old west, so it's unsurprising that we get som westerns, such as Whispering Smith at 10:00 PM. Alan Ladd plays the title character, a railroad detective who worked with old friend Murray (Robert Preston) untill Murray got fired. Now there's reason to suspect that Murray is part of a gang robbing the railroad, and it's up to Smith to foil whoever is in the gang. The fact that Smith and Murray used to be friends is one complication; the other is Murray's wife Marian (Brenda Marshall). Smith has a thing for her that she doesn't quite share, except that her husband is beginning to treat her like dirt. Donald Crisp is the actual head of the gang, while William Demarest gets one of his infrequent straight roles as the head of the wrecking crew and Smith's current best friend. Trains, the old west, and Technicolor -- you could do a lot worse.
Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy made only one movie together. That movie, Hellcats of the Navy, shows up on TCM this Friday at 6:30 AM. Ronald Reagan plays the commander of a World War II-era submarine, which in this case is patrolling the entrance to the Sea of Japan, trying to find minefields and disrupt the shipping of vital supplies to Japan. Nancy, using her birth name Davis even though she'd been married to Ronald for five years at this point, plays the Navy nurse back in Guam who is the love interest of our submarine commander and one of his officers. Like most submarine movies, there are a lot of cliches about the importance of saving the boat versus saving one man, and the cramped scenes in the submarine. There's only so much you can do in such closed sets. One thing making the movie interesting is that Admiral Chester Nimitz, who ran the submarine fleet in World War II, makes a cemeo appearance.
It's been almost four years since I've seen the movie I Was an Adventuress show up on the schedule. It's on again, at 9:00 AM Friday, on FXM Retro. Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre are interestingly cast as a pair of con artists going around Europe and bilking the rich. They're doing it with the help of of the "Countess" Vronsky (Vera Zorina, who's only billed under her surname). Things go OK until Vronsky meets the businessman Vernay on the Riviera. He's supposed to be the group's next mark, but she falls in love with him and doesn't want to do the con. So when the two guys go back to Budapest to wait for her, she runs off with Vernay and marries him. She then becomes a ballerina, while the two cons go around Europe looking for her. Of course they eventually find her, and that sets up the dramatic conflict for the finale.
For those of you who want another western, I'll mention one that's airing over on Encore Westerns: The Jayhawkers!, at 6:15 AM and 6:15 PM Saturday. You know the Kansas Jayhawks, but the term Jayhawkers originally referred to anti-slavery people in the Kansas Territory in the 1850s who banded together to fight assaults from pro-slavery groups when it was unclear whether Kansas would enter the union as a free state or a slave state. Jeff Chandler plays Darcy, the lead Jayhawker, who fancies himself a future territorial governor and lets personal ambition get in the way of dealing with the pro-slavery forces. So, the federal government sends in Bleeker (Fess Parker) to help the actual territorial governor by getting into Darcy's gang of raiders. Bleeker, of course, also has his own reasons for accepting the job, as Darcy took over his farm some years back.
While you're waiting for the Packers to beat the crap out of in Seahawks the NFC Championship Game, you can finishi your preparations by laughing at the awfulness of Raiders From Beneath the Sea, at 1:45 PM Sunday on FXM Retro. Ken Scott plays an ex-con with a tax debt reduced to managing an apartment complex owned by his wife (Merry Anders). However, he had worked as a salvage diver, and has dreams of getting out of debt. That plan, however, involves robbing the bank on Catalina Island. The guy who originally devised the plot finds out and forces his way in, as does Scott's good-for-nothing brother, a perv who's also been playing peeping tom with Scott's wife. The climax, which has to be seen to be believed, involves two of the criminal gang going ashore in full scuba gear and robbing the bank during the lunch hour, as if they'll be less likely to be noticed this way! The plut turns out to be a mess, the acting is bad, and the 60s organ score with derivative beach music is so incongruous to the emotions of the plot as to be extremely intrusive. The only thing not making this an even funnier bomb is that it wasn't conceived as an A film.
Finally, for those who like the shorts, you might enjoy Speed Week, airing at about 6:20 PM Friday, or following First Men in the Moon (4:30 PM Friday, 103 min). This is a look at vintage auto racing, or at least 1957 vintage. The action is centered on the annual "Speed Week" auto races in Nassau, the Bahamas and has some nice images of the racing and the cars they raced in back then. Unfortunately, this is part of the RKO Sportscope series, which were generally fairly poorly made in black and white and with underwhelming narration. But it's still a worthwhile look at history for at least one viewing.
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