TCM is showing a bunch of early talkies on Monday. A problem that a lot of early talkies had is that the camera was still, leading to a lot of the scenes being in one room, with a whole lot of talking just because they could talk. A good example of this is She's My Weakness, which you can catch at 11:30 AM Monday. In this one, Arthur Lake (who would go on to play Dagwood in all those Blondie movies) plays a young man in love with Sue Carol. The only problem is, her parents like him to the point that he spends more time with them than with her!
So she begins to spend time with one of Lake's rivals. Meanwhile, her uncle (William Collier Sr.) is trying to make some money on a land deal involving land Lake inherited; the uncle is also involved in getting in the middle of his niece's romantic affairs. Creaky, creaky stuff, but the studios needed to churn out a lot of movies quickly so stuff like this got made.Monday night brings swashbucklers to TCM. Errol Flynn wsa known for his swordplay early in his career, but his career took a hit in the mid-1940s. What better way to try to revive the career than to cast him as another swashbuckler in The Adventures of Don Juan, at 10:00 PM Monday. Flynn obviously plays Don Juan, that famous Latin lover. Here, he starts off causing a diplomatic nightmare in England, and when he gets sent back to Spain, he finds the country being driven to penury by a duplicitous count (Robert Douglas) manipulating the King, with only the Queen (Swedish! actress Viveca Lindfors playing a Spaniard) putting up any resistance. It's up to Don Juan to save the day, although falling in love with a married Queen is a bit of a problem. But with the help of the fencing students at the Military Academy, Don Juan will be able to defeat the evil count. This was filmed in gorgeous Technicolor, but unfortunately Errol Flynn was already beginning to show the effects of years of hard living.
We have one last night of crime capers this Tuesday on TCM, kicking off with the glittering 1969 version of The Italian Job, at 8:00 PM Tuesday. (Watch this version, and not the execrable 2003 remake.) Michael Caine stars as a man who's just gotten out of prison who, while in prison, learned about an audacious plan to steal £4 million of gold, a plan which involves swiping it during an Italian traffic jam, and while everybody else is stuck in traffic, absconding with the gold to Switzerland. Of course, they're going to have to deal not only with the Italian authorities, but the Mafia as well. The film, however, is most remembered, and rightly so, for the use of Mini Coopers back in the days when they were the real deal, and not the faux retro things we have now. The cast also includes Noël Coward as one of Caine's fellow prisoners, and Benny Hill as a sex-obsessed computer expert.
Over on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel, you can watch The President's Lady at 6:00 AM Wednesday. The President here refers to Andrew Jackson, played by Charlton Heston, although the action is from before he was President. The Lady refers to his eventual wife, Rachel Robards, played by Susan Hayward. Therein, however, lies a story. When the two first met, Rachel was unhappily married to another man, and hoping for an annulment. Andrew and Rachel leave the backwater of Tennessee for the backwater of Mississippi (this was the 1790s), and upon hearing that Mr. Robards has gotten a divorce, get married. Well, it turns out he didn't actually get the divorce finalized before Andrew and Rachel got married, which is a bit of a problem. In real life, Andrew Jackson's political enemies used this incident against him. Jackson would win the Presidential election of 1828, but his wife would die between the election and the inauguration.
Wednesday over on TCM is given over to Paul Lukas, at least in the morning and afternoon. He won the Best Actor Oscar for Watch on the Rhine, which will not be running on Wednesday but instead is showing up at 2:00 AM Sunday. Instead, the movie I'd like to recommend is Confessions of a Nazi Spy, at 11:00 AM Wednesday. The German-American Bund was, as the name implies, an association of German-Americans in the 1930s. However, it was also a hotbed of Nazi sympathizers and even people willing to spy for the Nazis, including Lukas, who plays a doctor also dealing in secrets. The movie is supposedly based on a composite of real FBI cases investigating spying for the Nazis in the years before World War II, with Edward G. Robinson playing the FBI agent in charge of the investigation. Also, being based on real events, the movie is told in a docudrama style. Watch for George Sanders as a Nazi, and Grace Stafford (the future voice of Woody Woodpecker) as Mrs. Schneider, the wife of a low-level Bund member.
After the Paul Lukas movies, TCM is bringing us the final night of Loretta Young's turn as Star of the Month. The night kicks off with her Oscar-winning performance, that being in The Farmer's Daughter, Wednesday at 8:00 PM. Young plays the title character, a young woman who leaves the family farm in Minnesohhhhhta to study nursing and winds up working as a domestic servant in the home of Ethel Barrymore and her son Joseph Cotten. Barrymore is the widow of a Senator, while Cotten has become a US Representative. You can probably guess that Young and Cotten fall for each other, even though he's engaged to another woman. But also, due to the death of another Representative, Young gets thrust into the political limelight when she questions one of the candidates running in the special election to replace him, and winds up running for the seat from the opposite party that Cotten represents!
January ends with a night of movies starring Lee Marvin, who really made a name for himself when he threw a pot of hot coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat. Unfortunately, that's not airing on Thursday night, so you'll have to make do with something like Monte Walsh, at 10:00 PM Thursday. Marvin plays the title role, a cowboy who is unfortunately witnessing the end of an era. With the introduction of barbed wire closing in the ranches, and railroads taking the cattle to the urban slaughterhouses, there's less and less need for cowboys. So, the cowboys have to find a way to settle down, and that ain't easy. Playing Marvin's best friend is Jack Palance, who decides he's going to try to settle down by marrying a widow who owns a hardware store. Things don't necessarily work out well for everybody, however.
Friday, February 1 sees the start of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM. Every movie shown received at least one Oscar nomination. Well, not quite, for reasons I'll get into. This year, TCM has decided to schedule the movies in groups by studio, so for the first four or five days -- through the rest of this week, at least -- we'll have movie after movie from Warner Bros., or the Seven Arts that it was merged into in the 1960s. 2013 also sees the 90th anniversary of Warner Bros. as a studio making movies, and there's a new documentary celebrating that fact, called Warner Bros. 90th Anniversary: Tales From the Lot. It's airing twice over the weekend, at 7:00 PM Saturday and again at 9:00 AM Sunday. I'm not certain exactly how much it contains: IMDb lists it as being 106 minutes, and what TCM's running is only 53 minutes.
Other than the documentary, the Warner Bros. movies are being shown more or less in rough chronological order, which means that on Friday, we'll be mostly in the 1930s, Saturday we'll be mostly in the 1940s, and Sunday sees the 1950s and beyond. Actually, Friday starts before the 1930s, with the first film being shown at 6:00 AM being the 1927 version of The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson playing the Jewish cantor's (Warner Oland) son who loves jazz music, and wants to sing it even if it's going to cause a serious rift with his father. And then, Jolson finds that his father is seriously ill on Yom Kippur and there's nobody to sing the Kol Nidre. It's widely thought of as the first talkie, but there were talkie shorts before this, and The Jazz Singer is only partially a talkie, mostly for Jolson's musical numbers. He did, however, do one ad-lib with the actress playing his mother, and that's dialog you can hear. You can see why Jolson was such a great stage presence.
I know I've recommended all of the movies TCM is showing on Saturday before. Still you could do a lot worse than to watch Ronald Reagan getting his leg cut off in Kings Row at 8:15 AM, Jimmy Cagney losing his beloved mother in White Heat at 5:00 PM, or Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains startting a friendship as beautiful as the one between Pakrz and Boris, in Casablanca at 8:00 PM.
But if you want to see something you're less likely to have seen before, you could try a foreign film like Cinema Paradiso, which is airing at 6:05 AM Saturday on Showtime Women. A middle-aged man living in Rome with a successful career as a filmmaker gets a call from his elderly mother in the village he grew up in on Sicily. It turns out that somebody he knew in his childhood has died. That person was the town's film projectionist who, in the days just after World War II, ran films for the entire town in an ornate but run-down building converted to be the movie theater, something which fostered the filmmaker's love of movies. He returns to his home town for the funeral and remembers all of this in flashback, as well as the girl he loved and lost.... Although the movie is running on Showtime Women, I wouldn't call this a chick flick; instead, it should appeal to anybody with discerning taste in film. (Yeah, I know that puts off half of you who only want to see tits and explosions.)