Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 22-28, 2018. It's hard to believe that we're getting to the end of January already, but that just means we inch closer to another installment of 31 Days of Oscar. There's this month's Guest Programmer, another night of Charles Boyer, and a great movie on FXM Retro I haven't mentioned in a long time. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday morning and afternoon on TCM sees a bunch of movies about women who are more or less prostitutes, except that a lot of the time the movies couldn't use that word. One of the movies on the day's lineup I haven't recommended before is Millie, which you can catch at 7:30 AM. Helen Twelvtrees (not a stage name as she became Mrs. Twelvetrees by her first marriage) plays Millie, a naïve country girl who marries a man from the big city (James Hall) and lives a seemingly perfect life with him. Except that he's always away “on business”. Eventually, she discovers that said business is seeing other women, so she immediately files for divorce. This leads her to descend slowly into a life of booze and one-night stands, until she finds that men are treating her now young adult daughter (Anita Louise) the way Millie has been letting them treat her. It all ends up with Millie as a defendant in a criminal case. These early 1930s melodramas are always something.
Monday night sees this month's Guest Programmer on TCM: actress Joana Going, whom you might remember from the movie Wyatt Earp or perhaps the pretentious Tree of Life, as well as a bunch of TV appearances. She sat down with Ben Mankiewicz to discuss four of her favorite movies, and those movies are on Monday night:
The Black Stallion, about a boy (Kelly Reno) and his horse, kicks off the night at 8:00 PM;
Wim Wenders' tedious Wings of Desire at 10:15 PM;
François Truffaut's great film about moviemaking Day for Night at 12:45 AM Tuesday; and
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton arguing and arguing in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at 3:00 AM.
I'm not certain if I've ever recommended An American Werewolf in London before. It'll be on StarzEncore Classics at 10:46 AM Monday. David Naughton plays David, who visits the UK with his friend Jack (Griffin Dunne). The two young men are attacked and mauled by a werewolf with Jack getting killed and David waking up several days later in a hospital in London. The werewolf was killed but not after going back to its human form, and the locals swear there's no such thing as werewolves. It's obvious that something is going on, however, as David recuperates in the London flat of one of the nurses (Jenny Agutter; there's much more of her later in the week), falling in love with her along the way. David starts to have strange dreams, and in those dreams is visited by dead people including Jack, who tell him that he's a werewolf and that there's a curse that's going to require David's dying to break. And of course if David doesn't do anything he's going to turn back into lupine form at the next full moon….
I've mentioned the Luise Rainer version of The Great Waltz a couple of times before. The movie was remade in the early 1970s, and that version of The Great Waltz will be on TCM at 5:30 PM Tuesday. Horst Buchholz plays the “Waltz King”, Johann Strauss Jr, whose waltzes were all the rage in Vienna in the second half of the 19th century. His father (played by Nigel Patrick) was also a composer, and the son was able to get out of his father's shadow once Dad died. Most of the story of the movie, however, deals with the love of Strauss' life, opera singer Jetty (Mary Costa). Jetty has another man in love with her though in the form of Italian baron Tedesco (Rossano Brazzi), and that forms part of the romantic tension of the movie. This one is definitely a throwback to the earlier days of Hollywood stories, but unlike the 1930s version benefits not only from color and good set decoration, but lovely location shooting – it's tough to go wrong with Vienna if you don't have to shoot on the backlot.
I see that Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is back on the FXM Retro schedule, at 10:10 AM Tuesday and 7:25 AM Wednesday. Robert Mitchum plays Mr. Allison, actually Cpl. Allison of the US Marines. At the start of the movie he's in a life raft that washes ashore on a South Pacific island. This obviously means danger since the Japanese destroyed his ship and probably occupy the island. Allison looks around but doesn't find any Japanese, instead only finding one woman, the Catholic nun Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr). She and a priest came to the island several days ago and the priest died, and Angela is rather stupidly praying in the church and generally letting out big signals saying, “Hello Japanese, there's still somebody on the island!” Allison sets about finding a way to survive as well as find a way off the island, before the Japanese come back, which is certain to happen. Complicating matters is the fact that Angela comes down with a serious illness, while Allison begins to feel a seriously illicit love for her. They're the only two in the movie for about 90% of it, and they do extremely well.
Everybody remembers Roger Moore as James Bond; some also remember him from the TV series The Saint. Of course he did other movies but those generally aren't remembered or if they are, it's not for Moore's role in the movie. You've got a chance to see a different side of Moore in Gold of the Seven Saints, at 7:15 AM Thursday on TCM. Moore plays a fur trapper Shaun in partnership with Jim (Clint Walker). One day Shaun tries to steal a horse, but gets out of it by paying with a gold nugget. Obviously, the means that there's gold in them thar hills, and word gets out, so people want to know where that gold is, and dammit, they're going to find out by force or take whatever gold Shaun and Jim have on them. McCracken (Gene Evans) leads a gang to try to get Shaun and Jim who have to flee across the wilderness. Warner Bros. was trying to make a movie star out of Clint Walker, but surprisingly that never happened.
Charles Boyer returns on Thursday night for one more night in his turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of this night's movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Love Is a Ball, a 1:15 AM Friday. The star here is actually Glenn Ford, playing John Davis, who runs an unsuccessful charter boat service on the French Riviera. To earn the money to get his boat out of hock, he agrees to a daft plan from “matchmaker” Etienne (that's Boyer). Boyer pairs poor nobles with rich untitled people, and his latest match is going to be the Duke Gaspard (Ricardo Montalban) and American Millie (Hope Lang) who is visiting the south of France with her grandmother (Ruth McDevitt) and uncle (Telly Savalas!). John's job is to be a chauffeur to Millie, as well as to teach the Duke some things like auto racing, all of which will serve to make certain Millie and the Duke get together. Except that John falls for Millie, while the Duke falls for Etienne's secretary (Ulla Jacobsson). And Millie finds out about the whole scheme.
Thursday over on StarzEncore Westerns brings a movie with somebody who isn't normally a western star, although he did make a couple after his Fox career waned: John Payne. That movie, Rails Into Laramie, is on at 3:25 AM Thursday. Payne plays Jeff Harder, a troubleshooter for the US Army. He's sent to Laramie because the railroad going in that direction has reached Laramie but no further, and they want to know why. It turns out that the guy who runs the saloon and basically the whole town, Jim Shanessy (Dan Duryea) has been getting the railroad workers all liquored up and with the cooperation of other merchants, bilking all of the money out of the workers such that they're not getting any work done on the railroad. Of course it will be Harder's job to stop all of this, but there are some problems, notably that he's going to be going up against the whole town, but also that Shanessy and he used to be friends.
I mentioned Jenny Agutter at the beginning of the post; there's another chance to see much more of her in Walkabout, which will be on TCM at 3:30 AM Saturday. Agutter plays The Girl (unnamed), who has a younger brother (played by director Nicholas Roeg's son) and parents living a middle-class existence in an Australian urban apartment that's portrayed as bland and unfulfilling. One day Dad (John Meillon) takes the two kids for a picnic in the outback. Except that for him it's not a picnic as he tries first to shoot the kids and then kills himself by setting the car on fire! You'd think the Girl would be smart enough to go back the way she came, just follow the car's tire tracks until she gets to the road. But no, she takes her brother in the opposite direction, which ought to mean certain death, until she meets the Black Boy (David Gulpilil) who is an Aboriginal on “walkabout”, a rite of passage in which adolescents show they can live off the land. He doesn't speak English and the white kids of course don't speak the Aboriginal language, but they learn to communicate more or less. The cinematography is lovely and the story more or less works apart from The Girl's idiotic decision to go the wrong way. Oh, and there's naked Jenny Agutter.
Ooh, I see Tentacles is on TCM at 4:15 AM Sunday as part of TCM Underground. In a Southern California town, Mr. Whitehead's (Henry Fonda) construction company is involved in an underwater tunnel project. However, something is going seriously wrong on the project as people are winding up dead and washing ashore as just skeletons! Investigative reporter Ned Turner (John Huston the director who's in one of his acting turns) investigates and has the sinking feeling Whitehead's company has, in 1950s scifi style, brought up something from the deep that's causing the killings. Marine biologist Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins) is brought in, and he confirms this hypothesis, although none of the townsfolk want to believe because that will destroy the tourism. Worse is that there's a big regatta coming up that will put a lot of people out on the water. Turner and Gleason, along with Mrs. Turner (Shelley Winters) go out on the ocean to kill whatever it is that's been killing the people. This is one of the many Jaws knockoffs that are so bad they're good.