Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of Jnauary 13-19, 2014. Now that the meaningful part of football season is over, there's not much to do with the Packers except wait for them to fire Dom Capers and hope they draft well. So why not make the waiting a little easier by watching some good movies? There's another 24 hours of Joan Crawford as Star of the Month on TCM, and a bunch of other interesting things to boot. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Silent Sunday Nights returns at midnight with another half dozen Arbuckle movies, including several starring frequent co-star Mabel Normand. After the second week of Fatty Arbuckle shorts, you can watch one of the more unique movies of the French New Wave: ClÉo from 5 to 7, at 2:00 AM Monday on TCM. What makes it interesting is that it's in real time and has a relative lack of plot. ClÉo starts the movie visiting a fortune teller, who tells her she sees death. This worries ClÉo, since she's supposed to receive the result of her recent biopsy from her doctor later in the movie. So ClÉo responds by going around Paris meeting various friends and lovers and co-workers to pass the time before the possibly fateful diagnosis. And then she meets Antonie, who also faces possible death. He's a soldier, and is about to be sent off to the civil war in Algeria (which was still a French colony at the time). From Antonie, ClÉo learns to face her own fear of death, and can go receive her diagnosis. As I said at the beginning, this is played out in real time (the film covers about 90 minutes of ClÉo's life, not getting to the titular 7), and was shot on location, showing the normal Paris that tourists don't normally see.
In among all tho Kay Francis movies, you can catch the short The Grand Bounce, just after 7:00 AM, or after the airing of Street of Women which begins at 6:00 AM. Directed by Jacques Tourneur of Cat People fame, the short tells the story of a man who writes a bad check for $1,000 (in 1937 dollars!), hence the grand and the bounce in the title. He's got to come up with a way to get a thousand dollars before the check can be cashed, or get the check back. Thankfully he's got an extra day since it's a holiday weekend, but there's also a catch: the guy to whom he wrote the check had debts of his own, and signed the check over to somebody else. And that person has debts to, so the check keeps getting passed around, between almost everybody in town.
Monday, January 13 is the birth anniversary of actress Kay Francis, so unsurprisingly TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with her. This includes one of her final films, Allotment Wives, at 5:15 PM. In World War II, wives of men who were off fighting the war would receive regular "allotment" checks which were more or less salary that the soldiers didn't need abroad. Kay plays a woman who's found a way to scam this system. She has young women marry soldiers going off to fight -- but has them marry mulitple guys at the same time, so that they can receive lots of allotment checks, which is of course fraud. And now the government is investigating it, in the form of Paul Kelly. He doesn't realize, though, that she's actually running the racket. Complications arise when her daughter returns from boarding school and starts romancing GIs, and when an old enemy from reform school shows up to blackmail her.
Lee Tracy played several cynical characters in early 1930s movies, delivering a series of one-liners in rapid-fire fashion. A good example of this is in The Nuisance, which is on TCM at 12:30 PM Tuesday. Tracy plays J. Phineas Stevens, an ambulance-chasing lawyer who is wiling to go to all sorts of unethical lengths to get judgments for his clients, including the use of a quack doctor (Frank Morgan) and paid eyewitnesses. Prescott, the owner of the local streetcar company (John Miljan) is sure that Stevens is corrupt, and sets a trap for the lawyer to fall into, after which Prescott can have Stevens disbarred. That involves having a lovely woman (Madge Evans) fake an accident and get Stevens to file a bogus case. But the woman finds that she might be beginning to like Stevens, and also finds that Prescott isn't all he's cracked up to be.
There's more lawyerly stuff on TCM on Wednesday night, including what I believe is the TCM premiere of The Paper Chase, at 10:15 PM. Timothy Bottoms stars as James Hart, a young man from the Midwest who thinks he knows it all as he enters Harvard Law School as a first-year law student. That is, until he meets Professor Kingsfield (John Houseman), who is tough as nails, treating his students as empty minds that need to be molded into lawyerly lives. Hart and his friends create a study group so they can get through the first year, but the stress is a big problem for all of them. Making things more problematic is that Hart falls in love with Susan (Lindsay Wagner), and then only later finds out she's the daughter of Prof. Kingsfield. Houseman had only appeared in bit parts in two movies before he made this one at the age of 71, but it made him an actor for the final 15 years of his life and won him an Oscar.
Wednesday is another birthday salute: the 77th birthday of 1940s child star Margaret O'Brien. Personally I find her irritating at times, but there are people who like her cloying style, so if you're one of those people, you might enjoy Music for Millions, at 2:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. O'Brien plays "Mike", a young girl who shows up in the big city looking for her older sister Barbara (June Allyson), who didn't meet her at the station. Barbara plays in an orchestra condecuted by then-famous JosÉ Iturbi, which has become an all-ladies' orchestra what with the war on and all the men fighting. Barbara, in fact, has a husband, who's gone off fighting and left her knocked up. Complications from the pregnancy and from her husband's being in the war make up the dramatic portions of the movie. Comic relief is provided by Jimmy Durante who plays the orchestra's manager; he gets to sing a song called "Toscanini, Iturbi and Me" mocking Iturbi, only to have him show up unnanounced halfway through.
Remember that awful Starship song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"? If's from the film Mannequin. Oh, wait -- this is a different Mannequin, thankfully without Starship. It's a Joan Crawford movie airing at 4:15 AM Friday on TCM. Star of the Month Joan Crawford plays Jessie, a girl from the slums who wants a better life for herself by marrying Eddie (Alan Curtis). At the dinner after the wedding, then run into John (Spencer Tracy), who was originally from the slums too but has made good for himself by becoming the head of a shipping line. He immediately falls in love with Jessie, too, at which point Eddie hatches a plot: have John marry Jessie, paying a big settlement for Jessie and Eddie to get the divorce. Real slimy character, isn't he? Then again, Tracy is supposed to be playing the nice guy, so why is he pursuing the Joan Crawford character on her wedding day?
This week's TCM Underground brings the return of a movie that I don't think has been on the channel in over five years: Skidoo, Sunday at 2:00 AM. The basic plot sounds reasonably good: a retired gangster (Jackie Gleason) is called out of retirement by hsi old boss (Groucho Marx) because a rival gngster (Mickey Rooney) is planning to spill the beans to a Senate hearing. The problem is that the presentation makes it one of the all time hilariously bad movies. Gleason's wife (Carol Channing) has sympathy with the hippies of the late 1960s, and Rooney's character is being kept safe in solitary confinement in a prison, so Gleason has to get into prison and then break out, with the breakout involving drugging everybody in the prison with LSD. Carol Channing sings the finale dressed like John Paul Jones; earlier in the movie she does a strip tease for Frankie Avalon (really!) and the LSD hallucinations are hilaroiusly bad. This was all meant to be taken seriously, as director Otto Preminger was trying to make this an up-to-date movie for the younger generation of the 60s. He fails, but what a spectacular failure!
As for what's over on the Fox Movie Channel, you could watch The Story of Ruth, which is on at 8:00 AM Saturday, with a repeat at 7:10 AM Sunday. This is based on the Old Testament book of Ruth (played here by Israeli actress Elana Eden), who was born in the kingdom of Moab, and married Mahlon (Tom Tryon), the son of Naomi. Naomi's husband and her two sons both die, leading Ruth to go to Israel, which is her mother-in-law's homeland, and become Jewish. She marries Boaz (Stuart Whitman), and the rest is either history or myth depending on your point of view. That's the Biblical story; the movie adds some stuff about Ruth being a Moabite priestess under Viveca Lindfors before meeting Mahlon who introduced her to monotheism, and there's also a rival for Boaz in the form of Tob (Jeff Morrow). I don't know quite how much all of this follows the Bible, but I'm not religious enough to give a damn.
Or if you want something more recent on Sunday, try Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. It's on at 11:40 AM Sunday on HBO Family (and again at 2:40 PM if you've got the west coast feed too). Paul Reubens, before his kinky escapades became public, plays Pee-wee Herman, a childlike man who loves his red bicycle. And then, horror of horrors, the bike is stolen! Unsurprisingly, the police are worthless, so Pee-wee sets off on a quest to find his bike, which he believes might be at the Alamo. This sets off a road trip which eventually takes Pee-wee all the way to Hollywood, meeting a bunch of strange characters along the way, adventures which eventually become a film-within-a-film when Pee-wee finds the bike on the Warner Bros. lot and the exectuives hear of his tale. This is one of Tim Burton's earliest movies.
Original Post