Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of January 27-February 2, 2014. We've got one final night of Joan Crawford, and one final night of "Science in the Movies" on TCM before February begins, with its annual 31 Days of Oscar. Of course, with the polar vortex covering the northern part of the country, Summer Under the Stars might be more appreciated right about now, but what can you do? There are some interesting movies on other channels, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Normally this thread covers feature films, but this week I'll start with a short subject that might be of particular interest to some folks here: Minnesota: "Land of Plenty", at about 9:00 AM Monday or just after Juke Girl which starts at 7:30 AM and runs 90 minutes. This is one of those Traveltalks shorts that James FitzPatrick and MGM made so many of in the 1930s and 1940s. With war in Europe, and the approach of war in Asia, FitzPatrick was limited to the western hempishpere by this time, and did a lot lot of shorts focusnig on various states. This one looks at Minnesota when they didn't even have a pretend football team, spending time on the Mississippi, looking at the den of corruption that is the State Captiol, visiting an iron mine, and informing us of the importance of agriculture in Minnesota. I'll let the people actually in Minnesota tell us how much the state has changed in the 70 years since this was made.
The first feature film I'll mention this week is The Velvet Touch, which is airing at 3:15 PM Monday on TCM. Rosalind Russell stars as a Broadway actress married to producer Leon Ames. He keeps casting her in light romantic comedies because they're successful, but she wants to do something successful, like play Hedda Gabler. She's also fallen in love with another man, an architect played by Leo Genn. The husband and wife get in an argument, which ends up with Ames accidentally dead. Enter Sydney Greenstreet, who actually plays a good guy for once, as the detective investigating the case. Even though we know who the real killer is, Greenstreet of course doesn't, and first suspects competing actress Claire Trevor, who winds up committing suicide. If it weren't for the Production Code, we'd wonder if Russell can get away with it; instead, we're left to wonder what her downfall is going to be.
William Holden in his later life had a thing for conservation, when he discusses a bit in the interview that shows up from time to time on Carson on TCM. His part interest in a wildlife preserve probably is part of the reason he made The Lion, which you can catch Tuesday at 1:15 PM on FMC. Holden plays a lawyer who at the start of the movie is being picked up by his ex-wife (Capucine) at a nature reserve in Kenya. She wants him to see their daughter (Pamela Franklin) because Mom is afraid that the daughter is getting old enough that living on a wildlife reserve is no longer so healthy for a growing girl -- Mom is married to the chief game warden (Trevor Howard). It turns out there is a problem: daughter identifies with stepdad, and has developed what she thinks is a friendly relationship with several wild animals, including a lion. You just know that lion is going to be dangerous later in the movie, and that danger comes for the various native groups. The main story isn't all that good, which is a shame since there's a lot of nice wildlife photography done on location (and a lot of bad rear-projection photography).
Back on TCM, on Tuesday morning and afternoon they're showing a bunch of movies directed by Ernst Lubitsch since it's the anniversary of his birth (actually, Wikipedia lists both the 28th and 29th). They're showing seven of his movies, and I think I've mentioned all of them before at one time or another, or multiple times. They're starting off at 6:45 AM with Loves of Pharaoh, a silent movie Lubitsch made in his native Germany, starring Emil Jannings as the pharaoh who falls in love with an Ethiopian slave girl.
At 12:15 PM you can see Ninotchka, which stars Greta Garbo as a Soviet functionary sent to Paris to fetch three failed trade emissaries; she gets seduced by playboy Melvyn Douglas.
The last of the Lubitsch movies being shown is To Be or Not to Be at 5:30 PM; Carole Lombard and Jack Benny play feuding husband-and-wife Polish stage actors who help Free Polish airman Robert Stack find a Nazi spy.
Some politician is giving a speech that's going to be on all the broadcast channels Tuesday night. If you want to see something worthwhile instead, TCM is programming a night of movies starring Michael Caine, although this unfortunately doesn't include Victory (sorry, Goalline). Instead, they're starting at 8:00 PM with Gambit. Shirley MacLaine plays a mixed-race woman working in a Hong Kong night club which is where she's met by Caine. He's a thief from the UK, one of those thieves who populated 1960s movies having grand plans to pull off a big heist. That heist involves a statue owned by Herbert Lom, a recluse ever since his mixed-race wife died years ago. MacLaine looks close enough to the dead wife that she can be used in the heist to confuse Lom, allowing Caine to get the loot. Or course, things aren't going to work out quite as planned, but where and how things go wrong is why you watch these heist movies.
For those of you who like more recent movies, you could do worse than watch Outbreak, at 6:20 AM Wednesday on Cinemax, with a repeat at 9:20 if you've also got the west coast feed. The movie starts off with a conspiracy theory, that the US government was doing virus testing work in Africa in the 1960s and created something similar to the Ebola virus. Fast forward to the present day of the mid-1990s, and a very similar virus shows up infecting a town in the redwoods area of California. Only, this one is airborne, as opposed to spreading through bodily fluids. So it's up to the public health doctors (Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo) to try to find out the vector that's spreading the virus to keep it from spreading further, as well as cure the currently sick people. The miltary, on hte othe rhand, has its own ideas, being prepared to blow the town to smithereens to stop the virus. It's a reasonably interesting story, even if it's filled with all the standard Hollywood tropes about government conspiracy theories and the virtue of everybody in government but the military.
Joan Crawford gets one final night of movies on Thursday night, starting at 8:00 PM with The Best of Everything. Crawford isn't really the star here; that honor goes to Hope Lange who plays Caroline, a recent college graduate. Her boyfriend left to study in Europe, so she goes to work at a New York publishing house as a secretary. She winds up sharing an apartment with two of her fellow secretaries, April (Diane Baker) and Gregg (Suzy Parker). Together, the three of them learn about working life as they try to navigate the office politics and idiosyncracies of the various editors, and love: Caroline turns to editor Stephen Boyd, while Gregg, who's really only working as a secretary to pay the bills because she's an aspiring actress, is seeing stage director Louis Jourdan. Crawford plays an embittered spinster editor at the publishing house, having an affair with a married man.
Friday night brings one final night of "science" in the movies ti TCM, although not all of this is science fact. The first movie, for example, is based on an HG Wells novel: First Men in the Moon, at 8:00 PM Friday. The movie starts off with a modern-day (1964) mission to the moon, which finds out that they are not in fact the first humans to make it to the moon. Apparently there was a mission back at the end of the Victorian era, in 1899. And one of the three people on that mission is alive and extremely elderly, so he tells us their story.... Beford (Edward Judd) tells of how he and his girlfriend (Martha Hyer) had met a scientist (Lionel Jeffries) who developed an anti-gravity paste, with the three of them getting in a big sphere and going to the moon, where they discovered a civilization under the surface of the moon that was very insect-like, and ultimately seemed to consider the humans a threat. Ray Harryhausen provided the animation for the lunar denizens.
Saturday brings the first day of 31 Days of Oscar.
This time, the prime time lineups are going to focus on one particular category in one particular year, with TCM running as many of the nominees as they could get the rights to, or I suppose, haven't already run. The month starts off with a salute to the Best Picture nominees of 1939. Back then, they had 10 nominees, a practice reinstated a few years back, and TCM will be running all ten of those nominees all day and night Saturday, with the exception of a new documentary called And the Oscar Goes To..., which will be premiering at 8:00 PM Saturday and getting a repeat at 10:00 PM Sunday. You've probably heard of all these movies, such as another airing of the previously-mentioned Ninotchka at 10:00 AM Saturday. Sunday evening will bring the five nominees for Best Picture of 1945, continuing into Monday morning; I'll mention The Lost Weekend at 8:00 PM Sunday which can't be any more depressing than this year's Super Bowl that doesn't have the Packers playing in it.
The Super Bowl itself begins around 6:20 PM Sunday. For those who want to skip all the pre-game garbage, try tuning in to the Fox Movie Channel. At 11:50 AM Sunday they're showing The Adventures of Hajji Baba. John Derek plays Hajji Baba, a barber in late medieval Persia going to the big city to try to make his fortune. Meanwhile, the Fakzia, the Princess of Isfahan (Elaine Stewart) escapes from being delivered to the arranged marriage her father the Caliph has set up for her, she having chosen a different prince for a husband. During her escape she runs into Hajji Baba, who wants the emerald ring she's wearing and decides to protect her, which goes through a series of adventures involving the Caliph's men, the Prince she'd like to marry, and a band of Turkomen female warriors led by Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke (er, Amanda Blake). It's a reasonably good time-filler, nothing great but certainly not terrible; unfortunately the last airing was panned-and-scanned.
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