Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for January 30-February 5, 2017. Now that the football season is over, it's back to watching interesting movies until either the meaningful Wisconsin Badger basketball games in March, or the NFL draft. So of course I've used my good taste to pick out a bunch of movies I know you will all like. As always, al times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I can't recall if I've recommended The Man From Snowy River before, but it's going to be on StarzEncore Classics at 5:45 AM. Jim Craig (Tom Burlinson) is a young man in the 1880s Australian highlands who has been working his father's farm since he was a little boy. Now he's 18, and Dad dies suddenly, leaving Jim to try to find a way to save the farm. This means leaving for a while to go to the lowland to work on a farm owned by Harrison (Kirk Douglas) and earn the money to keep the farm. Jim, meanwhile, falls in love with Harrison's daughter Jessica. Meanwhile, Harrison's brother Spur (also played by Kirk Douglas) was a friend of Jim's father, and the two brothers had a falling out years ago and still only reluctantly speak to each other. Eventually, all paths cross when everybody has to go back to the highlands to look for one of Harrison's runaway colts. There's a lot of tropes here, and Kirk Douglas is slightly miscast, but the movie does ultimately work.
Long before Lost in Space or the disaster movies of the 1970s, Irwin Allen made the hilarious mess The Story of Mankind, which TCM will be showing at 3:45 PM Monday. Mankind is on trial up in the heavens, and the Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman) is defending mankind against the Devil (Vincent Price) since mankind has reached the point where we can destroy ourselves with those nuclear weapons. So our counsel tries to show mankind's innate goodness with a bunch of anecdotes from human history displaying the human spirit. However, the casting for a large number of these sequences is hilariously off. Virginia Mayo plays Cleopatra, but that's far from the worst of it. Dennis Hopper is Napoleon! Peter Lorre is Nero! Groucho Marx buys Manhattan from the natives as an extremely wisecracking Peter Minuit. And Harpo plays Isaac Newton. Really. I could go on, as star after star appears for one scene, mixed with lots of clips from previous Warner Bros. movies. It's fun if only because it's such a mess.
TCM is spending Monday night in Las Vegas. I think I may have recommended The Las Vegas Story at 10:00 PM before, but why not mention it again. Jane Russell plays Linda Rollins, who has just gotten married to Lloyd (Vincent Price), who wants stop in Las Vegas on their way back from Boston to LA. Linda doesn't want to stop, since she's got a past there. She used to sing in one of the casinos' nightclubs, and also had a relationship before the war with Lt. Andrews (Vincent Mature); when he went off to fight she left for Lloyd. Now Andrews is a police detective. Lloyd starts to gamble heavily, so when Linda's necklace goes missing, suspicion naturally falls on Lloyd, especially on the part of insurance investigator Tom (Brad Dexter). But it might just be possible that Lloyd didn't steal it at all, and finding out who really did it might put Linda in danger. There was a lot of Vegas location shooting done, and it's interesting to see the strip as it was in its infancy (Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo was only around for about five years at this point).
Tuesday sees the last night of prison films in the TCM spotlight. This final night includes the excellent pre-Code 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, at 12:30 AM Wednesday. Based on the memoirs of Sing Sing's warden who was worried about the dehumanizing aspects of prisoner treatment, the story focuses on big-shot new prisoner Tommy (Spencer Tracy in an early role when he was on loan-out from Fox) who thinks his influence is going to make prison easy for him. Of course it doesn't, and his rebelliousness gets him into no end of trouble. But the warden, in an effort to rehabilitate prisoners, gives Tommy a furlough when Tommy's girlfriend Fay (Bette Davis; this is the only movie Tracy and Davis made together) is injured. Unfortunately, when seeing Fay one of Tommy's old enemies Joe (a young Louis Calhern) shows up and in the struggle for the gun, Fay winds up shooting Joe. Unsurprisingly, Tommy is the one who's going to wind up standing accused of the murder. Can Tommy be reformed? Watch for some interesting imagery, notably in the opening credits.
With Wednesday being the first day of a new month, it means we get some movies returning to FXM Retro after an absence. One of these is the anthology movie We're Not Married! which you can see at 10:25 AM Wednesday and 9:00 AM Thursday. Victor Moore plays a justice of the peace who marries several couples over the Christmas holiday, only to find out quite some time later that his license didn't go into effect until January 1, so there are five couples who are technically not legally married. Those five couples are informed, and obviously the news has varying effects on the various no-longer husbands and wives. First up are Fred Allen and Ginger Rogers, who only married for the sake of their radio show. Marilyn Monroe is Mrs. Mississippi, married to David Wayne. So of course if she's not legally married, how can she be Mrs. Mississippi? Paul Douglas is in a rut with wife Eve Arden, so perhaps not being married might be an escape for him. Lawyer Louis Calhern is being given the run-around by Zsa Zsa Gabor, and finally, Eddie Bracken is about to be shipped off to fight in Korea when he finds out that his pregnant wife (Mitzi Gaynor) is no longer his wife, so he has to go AWOL to get a shotgun wedding. Watch for Lee Marvin in the last segment. It's an agreeable anthology, although there are better out there.
TCM is doing an interesting thing for this year's 31 Days of Oscar, which kicks off on Wednesday. The movies are being shown in alphabetical order by title. So the A's run from Wednesday morning until midmorning Thursday, including titles such as The Adventures of Mark Twain at 10:00 AM. As you can guess, this is about the famed American writer, played well by Fredric March who deserved an acting nomination he didn't get. Sure, the movie isn't quite factually true, although that's the case for any biopic. But the broad outlines are generally considered reasonably accurate. Samuel Clemens grows up in Missouri, becomes a riverboat pilot (from which he gets the name Mark Twain); goes west (with Alan Hale) and meets Bret Harte (John Carradine) at the contest that forms the basis for the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County; marries Olivia (Alexis Smith); writes novels; loses a fortune investing in a typesetter; and so on. Veteran character actor C. Aubrey Smith, playing an Oxford professor, sums up Twain's life; other character actors in the movie are Percy Kilbride and Donald Crisp.
For a western I think I haven't recommended before, you can watch California at 1:08 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. If you've ever wanted to see Ray Milland in a western, this is your chance. Milland plays Johnny Trumbo, a trail guide leading a wagon train to California, which is no longer part of Mexico but not yet a US state. On the train are vintner Michael (Barry Fitzgerald), and bad girl Lily (Barbara Stanwyck), trying to escape her past. Of course, news of the gold discovery at Sutter's Mill hits the wagon train, and a lot of the people break off to go for the gold. Time passes and Johnny returns to California to find Lily running a saloon and taking up with Pharaoh (George Coulouris), an ex-slave trader who is now running the mines with an iron fist. Of course the question of California's future comes up, and while there are some people who want to become a state, there are also people like Pharaoh who want to become an independent country; he is obviously intending to be one of the leaders of that country. Michael, meanwhile, is on the statehood side. It's not quite Micheneresque, if only because the movie runs a little under 100 minutes.
There are any number of movies that have the conceit of starting at a main character's funeral and then telling the story in flashback. Chariots of Fire (not in this year's 31 Days of Oscar) is one; another is The Barefoot Contessa, which will be on TCM at 10:00 PM Thursday. The movie starts off with screenwriter Harry (Humphrey Bogart) at the funeral of the “Contessa”, one Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner). It seems that some years ago, Harry and some Hollywood pals were in Spain, which is where they discover Maria, working as a flamenco dancer in some dive bar. Harry and his producer friend Edwards (Warren Stevens) sign Maria to a contract and she becomes a hit actress. Publicist Oscar (Edmond O'Brien, who won an Academy Award) helps Maria deal with her parents' legal issues. And while Edwards has been pursuing Maria romantically, she meets wealthy South American Alberto (Rossano Brazzi) and falls in love with him, although their marriage doesn't work quite as well as expected.
A movie that I don't think I've recommended before is Cain and Mabel, which TCM will be showing at 7:15 AM Sunday. Larry Cain (Clark Gable) is a boxer, while Mabel O'Dare (Marion Davies) is a waitress who has been catapulted into being the lead dancer in a Broadway show. Unfortunately she's not a star and Cain's career doesn't seem to be going anywhere either, so publicity man Aloysius Reilly (Roscoe Karns, who had worked with Gable in It Happened One Night) decides to create a phony romance between the two. This, even though the two don't really get along. Of course, over time they do fall for each other, and being willing to get married and lead a normal life out of the limelight means that Reilly has to come up with a scheme to have the two publicly bickering in the tabloids. This one got its Oscar nomination for the dance number. Watch also for Allen Jenkins, who gets a chance to shine as Gable's right-hand man.
Apparently there is a football game on this week, although of course the season really ended last Sunday. Since nobody wants to watch that game, what's on TCM against it is Portuguese-American fisherman Spencer Tracy teaching Freddie Bartholomew a few things about growing up in Captains Courageous at 6:00 PM, and Dooley Wilson singing a song for Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca at 8:00 PM.
