Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 29-February 4, 2018. It's the Super Bowl this week, and everybody's celebrating the fact that the insufferable fans of the Minnesota team aren't in the game. But February also means 31 Days of Oscar is back on TCM, with a whole bunch of movies that were at least nominated for Oscars. There's interesting stuff before that, as well as some fun stuff on other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is running a bunch of Claudette Colbert movies on Monday in prime time. I've recommended It Happened One Night (10:00 PM) several times, so this week I'll recommend the following movie, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, at midnight Tuesday (ie. 11:00 PM Monday LFT). Colbert plays Nicole, the daughter of a broke French marquis (Edward Everett Horton). In a department store one day, she meets Michael Brandon (Gary Cooper) trying to buy just the top half of a pajama set, so her pick-up line is to buy the bottom half! IThe two fall in love and it turns out that he's wealthy: he agrees to marry her with a pre-nup that if they get divorced, she'll get $50,000 a year. The thing is, Michael has learned the hard way that this is a good arrangement as he's already been married seven times (hence the title). She decides to tame him so she can become more than just wife #8. Her father, however, sees dollar signs and sets out to milk Brandon for every cent he can get. David Niven has an early supporting part.
Apparently I haven't recommended Tomahawk Trail before. It's on StarzEncore Westerns at 6:53 AM Monday. Chuck Connors, shortly before he became The Rifleman, plays Sgt. McCoy, who is out on patrol in Apache territory with commanding officer Lt. Davenport (George Neise). The lieutenant gets heat stroke (and has an existing head wound) and is unable to command, the Apaches steal the horses, and Sgt. McCoy has to lead everybody back to fort. There he finds that a massacre has taken place. Worse for the sergeant, he's got two female hostages, one the Apache chief's daughter and the other a white woman who was the Apache's companion. The white woman wants there to be peace between the races, but she also has to face the fact that some people might just be pure evil. There's also the problem that the sergeant knows the Apache are going to come back, but if he deals with the Apache in the proper way, his commanding officer is probably going to have him court-martialed.
It's almost become a tradition to spend the last night before 31 Days of Oscar on TCM looking at the Governors' Awards, that are more or less lifetime achievement awards. These are awarded in a separate ceremony from the competitive Oscars, and the most recent edition honored black director Charles Burnett, cinematographer Owen Roizman, actor Donald Sutherland, and French director Agnès Varda. Each gets one exemplar of their work on Wednesday night on TCM, except that since there's some time left, TCM gave Varda a second movie, Le Bonheur, which will be on at 4:15 AM Thursday. François (Jean-Claude Drouot) is a carpenter in a small French town happily married to Thérèse (his real-life wife Claire) with two children (their real-life children). In fact, François believes he's perfectly happy and nothing could change that. One day, in the post office he meets clerk Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) and begins to fall in love with her. However, François is so happy that he sincerely believes he's got enough love for both women. Eventually he introduces the two women to each other believing they can all live together happily ever after. Unsurprisingly, the two women don't see things the same way as François, which causes problems.
Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence is back on the FXM Retro schedule this week, at 6:00 AM Thursday. Glenn Ford, at the very beginning of his career, plays Joe, who at the start of the film is working as a clerk at a New York department store, struggling to get by. However, he's saved up his money, and decided to buy some land out in Arizona so he can farm it and be his own boss. (What they grow in bone-dry Arizona is beyond me.) However, having spent all his money on the land, etting to it is going to be a bit of a problem. So Joe starts making his way west by hitchhiking and whatever else he can do. This even though he's a naïf who doesn't know the ways of the hobo. He meets a friendly hobo in Tony (Richard Conte credited under his real name Nicholas), and Anita (Jean Rogers), a young woman who fled the Spanish Civil War looking for relatives in California, although she's in the US illegally. Rounding out the crew is the “Professor” (Raymond Walburn). Why he's with them is a bit of a mystery, but it's probably alcohol-related. This is decidedly B material but not that bad if you can get past the Dalton Trumbo screenplay.
Thursday, February 1 is the start of 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, so we get a month of movies that were Oscar-nominated. This year, TCM is grouping the movies by nomination in the same category, with the first one up being Best Original Song. A movie that's interesting in that regard is Lady Be Good, at 10:00 AM Thursday. Ann Sothern plays Dixie, a lyricist who provides the words to one of her boyfriend Eddie's (Robert Young) songs. The song becomes a hit and the two get married, but Dixie discovers that the high society New York life is putting a strain on Eddie's composing, leading to her filing for divorce. That's a really stupid move, since the two really love each other can can't live without each other, so they get married again, although the marriage hits more snags. It's a fairly insipid plot, and the movie is better remembered for Eleanor Powell's dancing. That, and the Oscar-winning song “The Last Time I Saw Paris”, words by Oscar Hammerstein and music by… Jerome Kern. This song actually helped get the Oscar rules changed. At the time, a song didn't have to written specifically for a movie to get nominated, and Hammerstein had written the song a year earlier after the Nazis invaded Paris. Jerome Kern of all people helped lobby to change the rules. But that's why a lot of songs remembered for their use in movies weren't Oscar-eligible. [Hums “Don't You Forget About Me” from The Breakfast Club, which you can watch at 6:05 AM Monday on Cinemax.]
With football season nearly over, it's time to switch to hockey, which produced movies like Slap Shot, on at 7:55 PM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Paul Newman plays Reggie, the player/coach for a struggling minor league hockey team in a struggling Rust Belt mill town. Nobody really cares about the hockey team, and if the mill closes, the team is going to fold. So the team's GM decides to try to raise interest in the team by bringing in the Hanson Brothers, three of the gooniest players who ever skated. Reggie doesn't particularly care for the idea at first but warms to it, especially once the fans react and the team starts winning. And Reggie uses all this to push the team in one final attempt to win the league title, suggesting that if the team can win, they can find some dupes to buy the team and keep it running. Meanwhile, Reggie is also trying to resurrect his relationship with his wife Francine (Jennifer Warren).
On Saturday and Sunday, TCM's 31 Days of Oscar is looking at movies nominated for their cinematography. For many years, there were separate awards for black-and-white and color cinematography. One nominated in the latter category is The Four Feathers, which will be on at 11:30 AM Saturday. John Clements plays Harry Faversham, the son of a retired general in Victorian Britain who is expected to join his family's long line of military service in the officer corps. He does this with little enthusiasm, and when his regiment ultimately gets called to join Lord Kitchener in Sudan, he resigns his commission. As a result, three of his officer friends as well as his girlfriend Ethne Burroughs (June Duprez), herself the daughter of a retired general (C. Aubrey Smith) decide to give him one white feather each (hence the title), the ultimate symbol of cowardice in those days. Harry decides that he has to redeem himself, which he plans to do by disguising himself as a mute Arab and going to the Sudan himself, where he runs into one of his old friends (Ralph Richardson) who has been blinded by the sun.
Over on Showtime Extreme, there's a chance to watch the original Rocky, at 8:00 PM Saturday. Sylvester Stallone stars as Rocky Balboa, the small-time boxer in South Philly who makes ends meet by collecting debts for loan sharks. He gets a girlfriend in his best friend Paulie's (Burt Young) sister Adrian (Talia Shire), which is good for both of them. And then heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) comes to Philadelphia and decides to celebrate the bicentennial by giving an unknown fighter a shot at the big time. Balboa, nicknamed “The Italian Stallion”, is selected, and immediately throws himself into training to try to last an entire bout with the champ and avoid getting knocked out. Helping Rocky in his unorthodox training methods is Mickey (Burgess Meredith). And the ringside commentator is George O'Hanlon, best known as the voice of George Jetson. Rocky became an iconic character, spawning a bunch of sequels and the scene of running up the steps to Bill Conti's music, and being the subject of a statue defaced by sh*tty football fans.
As for black-and-white cinematography, one of the movies TCM is running is Battleground, at 3:30 AM Sunday. The time is December 1944, and with the D-Day invasion six months past, the Allies have really turned the tables and are winning the war in Europe. The Nazis, however, have one more trick up their sleeve, staging a counteroffensive in the Ardennes of southeastern Belgium, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Battleground is the story of one squad, the 101st Airborne, who were in the town of Bastogne and now have to hold it since it's under siege by the Germans. Van Johnson stars as Pvt. Holley, a guy who just wants his scrambled eggs, only to find that something is constantly happening to keep him from his appointed breakfast. War is like that. Ricardo Montalbán plays Roderigues, the Mexican-American soldier; John Hodiak, George Murphy, and Don Taylor play other soliders. This one was filmed entirely at MGM on soundstages and the backlot, yet they did an excellent job of making the action seem realistic.