Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 27-February 2, 2020. Unfortunately, the football season ended with the Packers' loss last Sunday, so unless you're a fan of soccer or tennis there's not much sport worth mentioning until training camp opens at the end of July. But that means more time for good movies. There's one final week of Star of the Month Patricia Neal; a great movie back on FXM after a long absence, and the start of 31 Days of Oscar over on TCM. There are a few more recent movies worth mentioning, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is running a bunch of Katharine Hepburn movies on Monday, which is a chance to mention a great comedy I haven't brought up in some time: Bringing Up Baby, at 4:00 PM Monday. Cary Grant plays David Huxley, an archaeologist digging up dinosaur bones who's just been told the final bone in the skeleton he's been constructing is available for delivery. While trying to solicit funds, he runs into selfish Susan Vance (Hepburn), who constantly makes David's life a living hell in part because of her jaguar Baby. But she knows the lawyer of the rich old lady David has been trying to solicit, so David eventually follows Susan out to Connecticut and her aunt Elizabeth (May Robson), where all sorts of things conspire to screw up David's life. Notably, Elizabeth's dog takes the dinosaur bone, while Baby goes missing at the same time a circus has its own jaguar go missing. While trying to find Baby, David and Susan fall in love, despite the fact that David has a fiancée waiting for him back home. I'm not the biggest Katharine Hepburn fan, mostly because she seems to keep playing self-centered jerks, but this is one funny comedy.
If Katharine Hepburn isn't your thing, perhaps you might like Sean Connery instead, who shows up in Sword of the Valiant, which you can see at 9:39 AM Monday on StarzEncore Classics. Miles O'Keeffe stars as Sir Gawain, one of the Knights of the Round Table under King Arthur (Trevor Howard) who have grown undisciplined in a time of relative plenty. One year at Christmastime, a mysterious knight dressed only in green and riding a green horse (Sean Connery) comes in, challenging any of the knights to take a swing at him. Young Gawain is the only one who does, and finds that the Green Knight is some sort of immortal (obviously not a Highlander) who can put his head back on his torso! Having tricked poor Gawain, the Green Knight gives Gawain a reprieve, telling him an abstruse riddle and saying that if Gawain can solve the riddle within a year's time, the Green Knight won't take his swing at Gawain. Gawain sets off on a journey of discovery across the length and breadth of Britain, learning about chivalry and other knightly values along the way, but that year is running out….
TCM is showing several Gregory Peck movies on Tuesday morning and afternoon, starting with his film debut in Days of Glory at 11:00 AM Tuesday. The Soviets were only on the same side of World War II as the Americans because Hitler was dumb enough to attack the Soviet Union (remember, they conspired to carve up Poland and the Baltic states with the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact) and declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor. As a result, American movie audiences got multiple propaganda movies about the value of the Soviet fight against the Nazis. When the Nazis invaded, the Soviets moved most of their industry eastwards along with a fair amount of the population, leaving partisans behind to fight the Nazis until a better trained and larger force could turn the tide. Peck plays Vladimir, a Red Army officer who is put in charge of one of the groups of partisans working southwest of Moscow. He's given a love interest in the form of ballet dancer Nina (Tamara Toumanova), and the heroic Soviet peasants fight and ultimately inflict a fair amount of damage on the Nazis.
About halfway between winning an Oscar for Network and screwing up naming Midnight as a Best Picture Oscar winner, Faye Dunaway appeared in a movie that otherwise has no business being mentioned in conjunction with the Oscars: Dunston Checks In, which will be on HBO Family at 9:55 PM Wednesday, or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed. Dunaway plays Mrs. Dubrow, the owner of a fancy hotel who knows that an incognito critic is coming from one of the luxury Michelin star-type organizations and wants to impress the critic. There are a few problems, however. One is the concierge Robert (Jason Alexander), a widower with two sons who finds that his sons are always getting into trouble around the hotel. Then there's Dunston, the orangutan owned by Lord Rutledge (Rupert Everett), who Dubrow thinks is the critic. Dunston, being an animal, is also getting into trouble, but the bigger problem surrounding him is that Rutledge is in fact a jewel thief and has trained Dunston to help him in robbing all the guests' jewels.
If you want an interesting true crime movie, you could do worse than to watch Dr. Crippen, at 7:15 AM Wednesday on TCM. Hawley Crippen (played here by Donald Pleasance) was an American doctor who moved to London with his second wife Cora (Coral Browne), better known as Belle since that was her stage name as an entertainer. Dr. Crippen, although having an American license, didn't have the right training to be a physician in Britain, so he mostly sold fake patent medicines and provided homeopathic treatments, while he suffered with Belle being increasingly overbearing. He met secretary Ethel (Samantha Eggar) and the two started having an affair. Cora disappeared at the start of 1910 and when her body was found, it was assumed Hawley murdered her, while he was fleeing to America with Ethel. He was arrested, tried, and ultimately executed. But questions remain over whether he deliberately murdered Cora, or whether it was an accidental poisoning thanks to the quack medicines he was using.
I know how much you all enjoy Audie Murphy westerns, so I'll recommend one from early in his career this week: Sierra, airing at 10:09 PM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. Murphy plays Ring Hassard, a young man living in a mountain hideout with his father Jeff (Dean Jagger) because Jeff has been accused of a murder that he didn't commit and the two know there's no way they can get justice. They make a living breaking wild horses, and one day when Ring is looking for horses he runs into a woman named Riley (Murphy's then wife Wanda Hendrix) who has gotten lost. Ring takes her back to his and his father's place up in the mountains, and finds out that Riley, amazingly enough, is a lawyer! Having saved Riley, Ring begins to think that perhaps he can get her to defend his father in court, a much better defense than they'd be able to get otherwise. But of course there are a lot of people who don't want Jeff to get that defense. The cast also includes Burl Ives as a fellow mountain man who gets some songs to sing, as well as Tony Curtis when he was so young he was still being credited as Anthony (of course, even that wasn't his real name).
Friday is the birth anniversary of actress Jean Simmons, so unsurprisingly, TCM is showing several of her movies that day. Among them is the fine little British movie So Long at the Fair, at 10:45 AM Friday. Simmons plays Vicki Barton, who is visiting the Paris Exposition with her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson). They get separate rooms at the hotel and go out for a day of enjoying the fair. The next morning, Vicki gets up and goes to wake up her brother. But it turns out there's no answer because he's not in the room, and the room she thought was his hotel room is now a bathroom! And when she asks the people at the desk what happened, they insist that she checked in alone and that there's no evidence she ever had a brother who checked in! She goes around Paris trying to retrace their steps, and at every turn finds everybody telling her they have no recollection of a brother. Is Vicki going crazy, or is something more sinister going on? A young Dirk Bogarde plays George, who meets Vicki and is the only one to believe her plight, ultimately helping her reveal the mystery.
Saturday is February 1, which means the start of 31 Days of Oscar on TCM. Every film TCM is showing will have been nominated for an Oscar, with the other theme tying them together being a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” style game in which each movie includes at least one star who was in the previous movie. The month starts at 6:00 AM Saturday with The Entertainer. Laurence Olivier, getting another Oscar nomination, stars as Archie Rice, an entertainer doing the British version of Atlantic City or the Borscht Belt in the mid 1950s; that being stage shows at fading summer resorts. The problem is that it's not enough to pay the rent, with his family going into debt. His wife Phoebe (Brenda de Banzie) wants to pull up stakes and take an offer to move to Canada, but this is all Archie's known. Daughter Jean (Joan Plowright, who fell in love with Laurence while making this movie and got married afterwards for the last 28 or so years of Olivier's life) is a social worker in London, while son Frank (Alan Bates) manages Dad's career and other son Mick (Albert Finney) has been shipped off to take part in the Suez Crisis. Archie's entertainment schemes involve a possible beauty pageant contestant, and then doing a show with his own father (Roger Livesey). But life keeps conspiring to beat Archie down, even though Archie still keeps trying to go on. An excellent if at times thoroughly depressing movie.
I am extremely pleased to see that after a long absence, The Incident is back on FXM. You'll be able to catch it at 11:15 AM Saturday and 9:30 AM Sunday. A varied group of people board a New York el train at various stops late one night: social worker Ruby Dee and her black power husband Brock Peters; elderly wife Thelma Ritter and her husband; middle-aged Ed McMahon and his wife; gay drunk Gary Merrill; army private Beau Bridges with a broken arm and an army traveling companion; and several others. Also boarding the train are a pair of young hoodlums, played by Martin Sheen and Tony Musante. They get their kicks out of terrorizing the passengers for no apparent reason, jamming the doors so that nobody can get in or out. We'd all like to think that in such a situation we'd play the hero, but in reality we'd all worry about our own safety. The hoodlums know this, too, and use this psychology to make the passengers' lives a living hell. Will anybody put a stop to it? An extremely underrated and disturbing little movie.
Our final selection this week is Hold Back the Dawn, airing at 10:00 PM Sunday on TCM. Charles Boyer plays Georges Iscovescu, a Romanian illegal immigrant who at the beginning of the movie is trying to sell the unbelievable story of his life to a director in Hollywood. Flash back…. George is a dancer together with his dance partner Anita (Paulette Goddard) who is stuck in Mexico as a refugee from the war over in Europe (the movie was released in 1941) because the US has a quota on how many people from each country they're going to take in. One day, spinster teacher Emmy (Olivia de Havilland) shows up with a group of her students and runs into Georges, and the two strike up a relationship. Georges gets the idea that he can marry Emmy, get into America that way; Anita can do the same with a man; then, both can dump their partners once safely in America. But things hit a snag when Georges finds that he's really falling in love with Emmy. But what will happen should Emmy find out Georges' original plans? De Havilland was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but lost to her sister, Joan Fontaine in Suspicion.