Wait a second. You mean the Packers lost?
Well, in that case, since there's no need to watch the rest of the season, there's more time to spend with good movies. We have more Loretta Young, more heist films, and a couple of birthday salutes, so there's bound to be something worthwhile for everybody, or at least those of you who have good taste as I do. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.This week's Silent Sunday Nights lineup sees a couple of films from the masters of comedy: two-reelers from Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, followed by The Pilgrim at 1:00 AM Monday, which is a four-reeler, running a little over 40 minutes. Chaplin's "Tramp" persona here is really a prisoner on the loose, trying to make it across the border to Mexico. In order to disguise himself from all the "wanted" posters, he's dressed himself up as a minister. Which is all well and good until he arrives in a town that's expecting the arrival of their church's new minister. Obviously, they presume that Chaplin is the minister they've sent for, and expect him to perform his ministerial duties, not knowing Chaplin's real identity. Chaplin, for his part, is forced into duty as it's the only way of keeping that real identity from becoming known.
TCM is honoring director Lew Landers on Monday morning and afternoon, although his birthday was actually back on January 2. Landers directed about a hundred B movies in the 1930s and 1940s before moving on to a prolific career in television in the 1950s. Among the films in Landers' prolific career is Crashing Hollywood, which comes up at 8:30 AM Monday. Paul Guilfoyle plays a convict who just got out of jail who, together with his wife (Lee Patrick) decide to make a fresh start in California. On the train, they meet struggling screenwriter Lee Tracy. Tracy's struggling because he's trying to write screenplays to crime movies, but what does he know about crime? So Guilfoyle sees the perfect opportunity to get into screenwriting by writing what he knows about, feeding information to Tracy. They make a success of it, but there's a catch. The screenplays are realistic because Guilfoyle has been writing about the gangsters he knew back in the day -- and once they see inside information about their life stories is showing up on screen, they want to know what's going on!
You've probably heard of director Robert Zemeckis. He won an Academy Award for directing Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump; directed all three of the Back to the Future movies; and most recently directed Denzel Washington to a Best Actor Oscar nomination in Flight. You may not have heard of Don Burgess. Burgess is a cinematographer who has photographed quite a few of Zemeckis' movies, including the aforementioned Forrest Gump and Flight. TCM is running another episode in its Art of Collaboration series, this time focusing on the director/cinematographer collaboration in the form of Zemeckis and Burgess. It's premiering on TCM at 8:00 PM on Monday, with a repeat at 11:30 PM for those of you on the west coast. TCM presumably couldn't get the rights to any of the better movies the two made together, because in between the two airings of the documentary they're only showing What Lies Beneath, a silly movie in which Michelle Pfeiffer thinks she's seen a murder Rear Window style, only for further investigation to reveal something different.
Lew Landers was honored on a day that wasn't his birthday, and the same is being done on Tuesday for Susan Hayward, who was in fact born in June of 1917. Her movies are running all morning and afternoon Tuesday, with one of the earliest being Girls on Probation at 7:00 AM Tuesday. Hayward only has a supporting role; the lead woman is Jane Bryan, who winds up on probation after she's caught by Hayward wearing Hayward's dress; the dress had been at the cleaners where it was pilfered by Bryan's "friend" Sheila Bromley. Eventually, she moves to the big city and when she runs into Bromley again, she's going to give Bromley a piece of her mind. The only problem is, Bromley is in a getaway car as her boyfriend just robbed a bank! The male lead, a proscuting attorney who tries to be nice to Bryan, is played by Ronald Reagan. This is decidedly B material, but Bromley is a great bad girl, and Warner Bros.' B movies were always zippy and full of action.
You probably remember a horrible movie from about 10 years ago called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A movie with a similar title which thankfully has nothing to do with that is The League of Gentlemen, which kicks off this week's heist films at 8:00 PM Tuesday. In this British movie, Jack Hawkins stars as Col. Hyde, a British Army officer who's been pensioned off and finds there's nothing left for him to do in life. So he decides to recreate his army life as best he can, by finding several similarly decommissioned and disillusioned army men, and recruiting them into an intricate scheme to rob a bank. All of the men find that that the like the military discipline and join in. But what's going to happen after the heist? This is a film with an ensemble cast of several excellent British actors, including Roger Livesey (A Matter of Life and Death) and Richard Attenborough (Brighton Rock).
The Loretta Young movies return on Wednesday night. I can't remember whether I recommended Man's Castle, which is airing at 8:00 PM Wednesday, back in the fall when Spencer Tracy was Star of the Month. Even if I did, it's worth watching for those of you who stupidly didn't watch it last time. Tracy stars as a drifter during the Depression who meets Young. She's out of a job and homeless, so Tracy takes her to his "home", a shack in a squatter's camp. She falls in love with him, although he doesn't want to be tied down by her. Meanwhile, other men in the shantytown take an interest in her too. And then she goes and gets knocked up, forcing Tracy to take action to help her. Glenda Farrell appears as the "other" woman, and Walter Connolly plays an older man who acts as a father figure to Tracy and Young as well as a protector.
Friday is the birth anniversary of Cary Grant, and TCM is running several of his movies on the day. Of the movies they're showing, my favorite is probably Notorious, which is airing at 4:00 PM; for the few of you who don't know the plot, Grant is a US agent investigating Nazis who have fled to Brazil, and uses Ingrid Bergman, whose father was part of the group, to get at them. Grant falls in love with her, but so does one of the people she's investigating, played by Claude Rains.
One of Grant's better performances on Friday is in Mr. Lucky at 8:00 AM, in which Grant plays a conman during World War II who plans to swindle Laraine Day, who's running a war relief charity. But then he falls in love with her, and begins to realize that perhaps he should do the right thing....
There's one other really different Grant performance, as the ne'er-do-well in None But the Lonely Heart at 10:00 AM; this one earned Grant one of his two Oscar nominations. (The other one, Penny Serenade, isn't airing on Friday.)
One advantage of silent movies is that there was no language barrier -- it was easy to remove the intertitles and insert new ones in the appropriate language. There was a problem when sound movies came about, since the subtitling technology of the day was lousy. What some studios did with a small number of their movies was to make multiple language versions of the same film, more or less at the same time. Probably the most famous example of this is Greta Garbo doing a German-langauge version of Anna Christie, which in English was her first sound film. On Friday night, TCM is showing some curiosities: foreign-language versions of Laurel and Hardy movies. TCM will be showing the original English-langauge versions, eg. starting with Chickens Come Home at 8:00 PM, and following them with the alternate-language version, as with Politiquerías at 8:45 PM. This one is in Spanish, but later in the evening there will be a French version of some other shorts: Les carottiers, at 12:45 AM Saturday, is a French version combining two of their English shorts.
Finally, prepare for the big game that the Packers won't be playing in by flipping over to what's left of the Fox Movie Channel. At 11:00 AM Sunday, you can catch A High Wind in Jamaica. The movie is set in the mid-19th century, which is just about the end of the era of piracy, at least in the Caribbean. Anthony Quinn and James Coburn play a pair of pirates (or "privateers" as they call themselves) who board a ship in the Caribbean. What they don't know is that the ship is carrying a bunch of children of the colonial elites: children being sent by their parents from Jamaica back to Mother England to get some civilization. In the confusion, the kids wind up on the pirates' ship! The pirates are looking for a place to drop the children off without killing them, while the children, being held captive for a long stretch, decide that they're going to be children and make mischief for the pirates, which obviously makes the pirates more anxious to get rid of the kids. Note, however, that this is no comedy.