Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 15-21, 2018. Some of you may have a holiday on Monday, and for those of you lucky to have a short working week, you'll have some more free time to watch some interesting movies. There's more from star of the month Charles Boyer, some stuff appropriate for the holiday, and more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is Martin Luther King Day, so as usual we get a bunch of black-themed movies on TCM. One of the more interesting ones is The Duke Is Tops, at 9:30 AM Monday. This is one of the “race movies”, that is movies made by all-black casts and crews and intended for marketing to black audiences that weren't served by traditional Hollywood fare. The plot here is something that would have fit right in in Hollywood, however. Ralph Cooper stars as Duke Davis, the producer of the traveling Sepia Scandals musical revue. One of his discoveries is the young singer Ethel (Lena Horne at the beginning of her career), and she quickly shows just what a good singer she could be. Indeed, the New York producer Marshall (Monte Hawley) sees Ethel and says she could be a big hit in Harlem, so she leaves Duke for her chance at success, leaving poor Duke to do the medicine show circuit. Eventually their paths are going to cross again, with a whole bunch of black talent in tow. Most of the acts never had a chance to be in a Hollywood movie, so this is about the only chance you'll have to see them.
I see that Girls on Probation is back on TCM this week, at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Ronald Reagan is the male lead here, playing Neil Dillon, an assistant prosecutor who gets the case of Connie (Jane Bryan). She worked at a dry cleaners, when her no-good friend Hilda (Sheila Bromley) “borrows” a customer's (a very young Susan Hayward) dress to lend to Connie for a party. Connie gets found out when the dress gets damaged, but Neil takes pity on her and gets her probation. So Connie goes to the city to escape her past and pay back Neil, only to run into Hilda again. She gets in the care to tell Hilda off, and is too stupid to realize this is the getaway car for a bank robbery being carried out by Hilda's boyfriend! Amazingly she's able to get off with probation and more or less released into Neil's custody, which is OK by him since he's in love with Connie by now. Unsurprisingly, Hilda is going to show up yet again to try to make Connie's life even more of a living hell. This isn't Reagan's best B movie by far, but to be fare he's not the star; that honor goes to Bryan.
For those of you who can record multiple things at the same time, up against Girls on Probation over on FXM Retro is The Hunters, also at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Robert Mitchum plays Major Saville, a US fighter pilot who's been brought back into service because there's a war on in Korea. Among the pilots he's commanding are young hotshot Lt. Pell (Robert Wagner), and the weakling Lt. Abbott (Lee Philips). Abbott has a wife Kristina (May Britt) back in Tokyo, and she feels neglected by her hard-drinking husband, so she turns to Maj. Saville for emotional support. Wouldn't you know it, the feelings become mutual. And then Abbott gets shot down over North Korea. Amazingly, Saville decides to ditch his plane to help, even though this means having to march south through enemy territory. Oh, and Pell, who is shooting down commie planes in support, also gets shot down, and then once on the ground gets shot by the infantry, so the march out is going to involve carrying an injured man.
If you're sad that the football season is over, there's a football movie on TCM this week: Trouble Along the Way, at 11:30 AM Wednesday. Fr. Burke (Charles Coburn) is the head of a small Catholic college that is in danger of being shut down for financial reasons. So as in any good Hollywood movie from the era, he gets the idea to inject some revenue into the school by fielding a winning football team. First he needs a coach, for which he hires Steve Williams (John Wayne). Steve has some problems of his own. He had to leave coaching in disgrace, and he's a divorced man, which you'd think would be a problem at a Catholic school of that era. He's currently got custody of his daughter Carol (Sherry Jackson), but his ex-wife Anne (Marie Windsor) has come back, looking to get custody for herself. And a social worker Alice (Donna Reed) is one the case, investigating Steve and Carol's unorthodox living arrangement. Meanwhile there's that college team, and Steve could be falling afoul of recruiting regulations….
Christmas has been over for a couple of weeks now, but I see that Scrooged is airing over on StarzEncore Classics, at 4:21 AM Wednesday. You can probably guess from the title that this is yet another version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol story, this time updated for the 1980s. (Really it's been 30 years since this came out? I'm getting old.) Bill Murry plays the Scrooge character, here named Frank Cross, a hard-driving TV executive who is trying to produce a live TV version of the Dickens story, to air on Christmas Eve. The stress has gotten to the point that Frank fires one of his underlings Eliot (Bobcat Goldthwait), which ultimately results in Frank being visited in his sleep by… former TV executive, now deceased, Lew (John Forsythe). Lew tells Frank that he's going to be visited by three ghosts, and from them will learn the true meaning of Christmas. There are several cameos in the movie including Robert Mitchum, Mary Lou Retton, and the final appearance of the Solid Gold dancers, and the memorable closing song – we could always use more Annie Lennox:
We get another night of Charles Boyer films on Thursday night on TCM. I'm not certain if I've recommended The Earrings of Madame de… before, but it will be on at 10:00 PM. Madame, technically a 19th century countess named Louise, is played by Danielle Darrieux (who died only last year aged 100), receives a pair of earrings from her husband, the general André (that's Charles Boyer if you couldn't tell). However, Louise is profligate, leading to her racking up a bunch of debts and having to sell the earrings to a jeweler, making up a story about them having been stolen. André buys them back without telling Louise, and gives them to… his mistress Lola! Lola, like Louise, is a big spender, and in her case she racks up a bunch of gambling debts forcing her to sell those earrings when André goes abroad. An Italian baron, Donati (Vittorio De Sica) sees the earrings in a pawn shop and falls in love with them, buying them for his lover… Louise. So of course when André returns, he finds the earrings that had a past that his wife doesn't realize he knows about. All sorts of complications ensue.
Friday morning and afternoon brings a bunch of Joel McCrea movies to TCM. These are all from early in his career, before he became a star and long before he wound up making all those westerns toward the end of his career. One that's mildly interesting is The Sport Parade at 9:15 AM, which has McCrea playing a college football star back in the days when college football was the thing. But he wanted to keep playing football, so after graduation he tries to go pro, only to find out that this doesn't bring the life he might have wanted.
It's been just about a year since I've recommended Rio Grande, which is scheduled to be on StarzEncore Westerns at 10:23 AM Friday. John Wayne plays Lt. Kirby Yorke, a Civil War cavalry veteran whose life is a bit of a mess. He fought for the north and his wife Kathleen (Maureen O'Hara) was from the south, leading to the breakup of their marriage and Kirby having a son he hasn't seen for 15 years. Now Kirby is out in Texas at a fort dealing with Apache attacks when he learns that his son Jeff (Calude Jarman Jr.) has flunked out of West Point and is getting stationed at the fort where Kirby is serving. Meanwhile, Kathleen decides to follow her son out to the fort because she wants him to go home and get out of the cavalry. Well, she'd also like to patch things up with Kirby, even though that's going to be tough after all these years. And of course there are those Apaches who could bollix the whole thing by raiding the wagon train carrying Kathleen. Interestingly, the only reason this movie even got made is that John Ford wanted to do The Quiet Man in Ireland, but the producers forced him to make a cheap moneymaker (which would be Rio Grande) first to fund The Quiet Man.
Another movie that I'm glad to see back on TCM after an absence is Make Way for Tomorrow, which will be on at 7:45 AM Saturday. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play Barkley and Lucy Cooper, a couple who have been married almost 50 years, which of course means they're getting into their golden years. Except that the golden years aren't so golden since there's a depression on. Their home is about to be foreclosed on. They've got adult children, but none of them have room for more than one more person in their houses. So Lucy goes to live with her son George (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife Anita (Fay Bainter), while Barkley goes out west for health reasons with his daughter Cora (Elisabeth Risdon). Unfortunately, the children and their spouses tend toward selfishness and think that their parents are constantly getting in the way. This especially when Lucy starts giving advice to her granddaughter, and being around for the daughter-in-law's bridge lessons. Ultimately they may have to send Lucy to an old folks' home, but that means permanent separation for her and Barkley.
Speaking of absence, there's another showing of Absence of Malice on TCM at 8:00 PM Sunday. Mike Gallagher (Paul Newman) is a Miami liquor wholesaler who is trying to live a reasonable, quiet life despite the fact that he's in an illicit relationship with Catholic school teacher Teresa (Melinda Dillon) and that his uncle Malderone (Luther Adler) had Mob connections although he's mostly retired now. There was a mob murder some months ago, and the special prosecutor Rosen (Bob Balaban) is getting nowhere in his investigation. Perhaps he can get Mike to put some pressure on his uncle to reveal what he knows; to do this, Rosen makes up a completely bogus story about Mike being under investigation and subtly feeding it to ambitious but gullible reporter Megan (Sally Field). Sally approaches Mike, who has a perfectly valid alibi – except that said alibi would reveal something about Teresa that would get her in serious trouble. Needless to say everybody's lives get turned upside-down. Watch for Wilford Brimley in the finale.