Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of January 18-24, 2016. Unfortunately there's no more football worth watching, so why not unwind with some good movies? With the discerning taste I have, I've come up with another set of interesting movies across a range of genres. There's more from Star of the Month Fred MacMurray; some people whose birthdays it isn't, a holiday, and a look back at somebody who died recently. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is Martin Luther King Day, which means that once again TCM is going to be spending the day with a bunch of movies about black America. This year, they're pulling out several "race" movies: movies that were made during the era of segregation by blacks, for the black audiences and with all-black casts (well, except for where a white character might be explicitly needed for plot purposes such as when characters might have to confront racism). The movies were made in every genre imaginable, as you can see from Harlem Rides the Range, at 10:30 AM. This one is a western, starring Herb Jeffries, the first black singing cowboy. Here, he plays Bob Blake, who, together with his trusty sidekick Dusty (Lucius Brooks) comes across something suspicious-looking that turns out to be the bad guys trying to steal a radium mine. Bob saves the day, while singing a couple of songs with backup group the Four Tones along the way. There's not much different from the singing cowboy movies you know like Gene Autry, except that everybody here is black.
An interesting movie about the black experience that isn't airing on Monday is Lost Boundaries, which you can catch at 8:00 PM Sunday. Based on a true story, it stars Mel Ferrer as Scott Carter, a man who at the beginning of the movie is graduating from an all-black medical school. Yes, Ferrer is white, but that's part of the point: Scott is light-skinned enough that he can pass as white. He's also marrying a woman Marcia (Beatrice Peterson) who can pass for white too. But Scott doesn't want to go through life passing as white. That is until prejudice keeps this black doctor from getting good doctor jobs and with a kid on the way he makes the difficult decision to pass as white and be a small-town doctor in New Hampshire. 20 years go by, and then the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Scott and his now adult son both want to serve in the Navy, but there's the little problem that they're black and the Navy is segregated. Oh, and that Scott has never told his children that they are in fact black. The Navy will have no compunction about telling them.
One genre that TCM isn't showing on Monday is the pirate movie, so we get a bunch of typically Hollywood pirate movies on Tuesday, including Captain Kidd at 12:30 PM. This one bears little resemblance to the real William Kidd, however. Kidd, played by Charles Laughton, is portrayed as a grasping social climber, trying to get King William III to make him the escort for a ship from India, of course with the intent of robbing it and taking the treasure for himself. In his crew he's got John Carradine who is wonderful as his first mate, and Randolph Scott, the gunner who has a past. Also along for the ride is Reginald Owen as Kidd's valet(!) and some other great character actors of the day. Of cours, pirates couldn't really get away with their acts in these movies due to the Production Code (unless they were privateers working for one government against another), so of course Kidd will be found out.
Speaking of Randolph Scott, you can also see him in Western Union, which is running on Encore Westerns at 1:20 AM Tuesday and 1:50 PM Saturday. Scott plays Vance, a hopefully reformed outlaw who has been hired by the folks at Western Union (in the form of Dean Jagger) to help with their putting up the transcontinental telegraph line that obviated the Pony Express. Specifically, Vance is supposed to keep the lines from being sabotaged. Chief among the saboteurs is Vance's own brother Jack (Barton MacLane)! Meanwhile, doing the real business of installing the line is engineer Blake (Robert Young). Vance and Blake have a conflict of their own, in the form of the boss' lovely sister Sue (Virginia Gilmore). There's a lot of conventional stuff here but it's all well done, thanks to the direction of Fritz Lang, whom you don't normally think of as a director of westerns. That, and there's lovely Technicolor photography.
Myrna Loy may have been born in August, but TCM is spending Wednesday morning and afternoon with her even if it's not her birthday. One of her movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Third Finger, Left Hand, which comes on at 6:00 AM. Then again, I may have recommended it simply because the plot is so similar to a bunch of other things being done back at the time. Myrna Loy plays Margot Sherwood, a writer who finds that the publisher's wife is jealous of all the female writers since the publisher likes the ladies. So Margot gets around this by making up an estranged globe-trotting husband Tony Merrick who is a complete sham. This much to the chagrin of lawyer Philip (Lee Bowman), who'd like to marry Margot, if only she could find Tony to divorce him. Enter Jeff Thompson (Melvyn Douglas). He cottons on to the ruse and figures out that Margot is in fact unmarried, which is fine by him since he likes her. He makes her life a nightmare by showing up at her house and announcing that he is in fact Tony Merrick. Oops. You can probably guess where the movie winds up.
Fred MacMurray's turn as TCM Star of the Month continues on Wednesday evening with a Fox movie that I think is a TCM premiere: Woman's World, at 12:30 AM Thursday. Clifton Webb plays Gifford, the head of an automotive company who is looking for a new general manager. He's got three men in mind. Bill (Cornel Wilde) is a small-town man; Jerry (Van Heflin) is the social-climbing Texan; and Sid (MacMurray) is the company man who at first glance seems best for the job. However, Gifford has the idea that the right man for the job needs the right wife, so he's brought all three men and their wives to New York to meet the couples and help him decide who should get the promotion. This is a problem for Sid since his marriage to Elizabeth (Lauren Bacall) is on the rocks. But Bill and his wife Katie (June Allyson) and Jerry and his wife Carol (Arlene Dahl) aren't perfect, either. Nice vintage shots of New York, and vintage car buffs will enjoy trying to ID all the cars.
Over on FXM Retro, we have the return of a move I've mentioned a couple of times before: If I'm Lucky, at 8:40 AM Wednesday. Perry Como plays a singer who, together with the band, performs at a political rally because they need the jobs. They turn out to be popular, but they get more than they bargained for. One night, the candidate they're working for (Edgar Buchanan) gets so drunk that he can't go out and give his stump speech. So Como does some speaking and says a bunch of populist nonsense, which gives the party machine the idea that they can dump Buchanan and nominate Como instead! Como keeps campaigning because he wants to parlay this into a radio show, not into the Governor's mansion, but who's really using whom? Vivian Blaine plays Como's girlfriend; Harry James is the bandleader basically playing himself; and Carmen Miranda gets a musical number. She really should have been in Technicolor, however.
TCM is running some Glenn Ford movies on Friday. One I don't think I've recommended before is It Started With a Kiss, at 2:15 PM. In this one, Ford plays Sgt. Fitzpatrick, an Army man who's about to be stationed over in Spain. Before that, however, he buys a raffle ticket from Maggie (Debbie Reynolds), falls in love with her at first sight, and marries her. But there's a problem: the good sergeant wins the raffle, which is a $40,000 (in late-1950s dollars) luxury car, which will make relations with the locals difficult. That and the tax burden. Meanwhile, Maggie has decided she wants to get to know her husband better before getting to know him some more in the Biblical sense. During this, Sgt. Fitzpatrick meets the Marquesa (Eva Gabor) who has a thing for him, while Maggie meets the bullfighter Antonio (Gustavo Rojo) and develops a thing for him. It's all played as pleasant comedy, however.
I mentioned the Rusty the Dog movies airing on Saturday mornings on TCM. This week, airing immediately before the lastest Rusty movie, is another dog movie, Skippy, at 7:45 AM Saturday. Skippy is actually a human, a young boy played by Jackie Cooper. He lives on the good side of town with his mom (Enid Bennett) and Dad (Willard Robertson) who works for the public health department. Dad is trying to get the shanty town shut down for health reasons, which is distressing to Skippy because he likes to go over there and play. He's also met a boy over there named Sooky (Robert Coogan) who has a dog. Unfortunately, the dog catcher lives near Sooky, and that dog catcher catches Sooky's dog and demands the princely sum of $3 to get the dog licensed or else. Sooky and his mom have no money, so it's up to Skippy to get that money. The movie ultimately has a happy ending, but what happens along the way is shocking.
Alan Rickman died this past week. While TCM isn't doing a tribute to him, some of his movies are showing up on various premium commercial-free channels. (There are others showing up edited on the commercial cable channels too.) The best-known of these movies would be the first Die Hard movie, in which Rickman plays Hans Gruber, the bad guy who takes over an office tower in Los Angeles; cop Bruce Willis has to stop him. You can see that three times on Friday on Encore Action.
The other one you can watch is A Promise, airing tomorrow at 3:05 AM and Friday at 7:20 AM on Showtime Women. (This is for you, Goldie.) This one has Rickman playing an industrialist in Germany just before World War I who's old and sick, and when he trains somebody to take over the business his wife begins to fall in love with that man although she promises her husband to remain by his side. She doesn't realize thanks to the war how long that's going to be.