You may have heard about the new movie Stan and Ollie about Laurel and Hardy near the end of their careers doing live stage shows in the UK. TCM is marking the release by showing a night of shorts and features starring the acclaimed duo on Monday in prime time. The night kicks off at 8:00 with what is probably the pair's best known short, The Music Box which sees the two trying to deliver a piano up a long cloth of stairs. In and among the shorts are several features (although Laurel and Hardy features are generally relatively short), starting at 9:15 PM with Way Out West. This one has Stan and Ollie going west to help a prospector's daughter get the deed to Dad's mine, while the pair's perennial foil James Finlayson tries to stop them.
It's been almost two years since I recommended The Iron Sheriff. It's back on StarzEncore Westerns at 9:59 AM Monday. Sterling Hayden plays Sam Galt, sheriff of a small town in South Dakota where there's been a stagecoach robbery that resulted in the killing of the driver. Unfortunately for the sheriff, the chief suspect in the incident is Ben Galt (Darryl Hickman), who as you might be able to guess from the name, is the sheriff's son. The sheriff, who firmly believes in his duty to the law, has his son arrested, but since it's his son, he also wants to defend him and keep him from being executed, so he hires the best lawyer around (John Dehner). Further complicating matters is that Ben was in love with the daughter of the dead stagecoach driver, while there's a journalist (Kent Taylor) who's perfectly willing to see the course of justice perverted to get Ben out of the way so he can have the driver's daughter for himself. This one is just as much a mystery as it is western, just a mystery set out west.
If you like those short little noirs Eddie Muller presents on Noir Alley, you'll be glad to see that Desperate is on the TCM schedule at Tuesday. Steve Brodie plays Steve Randall, a truck driver who's been married to his wife Anne (Audrey Long) for four months now. And just to show you how perfect their marriage is, she's planning to tell him she's pregnant! He gets a call to do a job that night for big money, but finds out it's a fur heist masterminded by gang leader Walt Radak (Raymond Burr). Steve alerts the police, which gets Walt's brother shot while shooting a cop. Walt says to Steve, tell the cops you did it, or your wife gets it. So Steve escapes and flees with Anne to her aunt's farm in Minnesota – it's not as if the police will believe him. As you can guess, Walt isn't going to take this lying down, and sends out his henchmen to try to find Steve, which you know is going to happen eventually, leading Walt to try to gain revenge in the climax. Burr, unsurprisingly, is quite good as the brutal gang leader, while Jason Robards Sr. plays the police detective investigating the case.
We're in the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This month it's Kathryn Grayson, whose operatic singing style graced a bunch of MGM movies in the 1940s and 1950s. Her movies will be run on the next four Tuesdays in prime time, four movies a night. In this first week of her tribute we get films from early in her career with the first being Andy Harry's Private Secretary at 8:00 PM Tuesday. Mickey Rooney returns for yet another go-round as the son in the all-American family, this time graduating from high school and hiring Grayson has his social secretary.
I think it's been years since Hangover Square has been on FXM, but it returns this week, at AM Wednesday. Laird Cregar, in his final performance before his untimely death, plays George Bone, a composer in London circa 1900. He's writing a concerto for his girlfriend Barbara's (Faye Marlowe) father (Alan Napier), but the stress is causing him to have blackouts. He senses that he's doing something terrible during those blackouts, and asks his doctor friend (George Sanders) for help. Meanwhile, he meets music-hall singer Netta (Linda Darnell) and falls in love with her. But she wants his music for herself. This leads to more stress, and another blackout that results in tragedy. The law is closing in on Bone, but he has his obsession with finishing that concerto and performing it, even if it kills him. Cregar was an extremely heavy-set man, and in attempt to secure his leading man status (he's excellent here), he went on a crash diet. But the sudden weight loss played havoc on his heart, and killed him at the age of 30.
TCM is running Dust Be My Destiny at 1:30 PM Wednesday. John Garfield plays Joe Bell, a !an who's had terrible luck in life. First, he got sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Then the authorities don't help him on release, so he's forced to become a vagrant, getting sent to the prison work farm. There, he meets Mabel (Priscilla pane), the step-daughter of the work foreman. The foreman is an alcoholic brute, and when Joe defends himself in a fight, the foreman drops dead of a heart attack. So the only thing for Joe to do is to run off with Mabel and to try to start a new life. Things start to look up as Joe gets a job, but his job brings him just enough fame for him to come to the attention of the law, so he's going to get arrested and have to face the law. Is anybody going to believe his story that the foreman was killed accidentally, and in self-defense? Garfield is as good as always, although the movie doe have a bit of Warner Bros.' social commentary.
It's been a while since I've mentioned Papillon, which you can catch at 6:20 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Steve McQueen plays Henri Charriere, nicknamed Papillon (the French word for "butterfly") because of his butterfly tattoo. He's a small time thief in France who gets sent to Devil's Island for a murder that he steadfastly insists he didn't commit. On the boat to Devil's Island, he meets Dega (Dustin Hoffman), a counterfeiter who supposedly has a lot of money his wife will be able to get to him. So Papillon comes to an agreement with Dega that Papillon will provide protection for Dega against the brutal conditions of the island prison, while Dega will help to fund their escape attempt. Of course, it's going to be extremely difficult to escape, which is the whole point of having the prison on an island an ocean away from metropolitan France. Charriere was a real person and this movie is based on his memoirs (which included multiple escape attempts), although how much the movie or the book are true to what really happened is a good question.
On Thursday nights in prime time this month, TCM is running a bunch of "sword and sandal" movies, epics (well, not all of them) set in the ancient world and named for the costuming the actors wore, especially the tunics that showed off quite a bit of arm and leg. Two of the best known, Ben-Hur and Spartacus, already aired last week. Eventually, the Italians, since they had the glory that was Rome, decided to get in on the act and made a bunch of these movies much more cheaply, hiring American leads who were second tier, or athletes who were there for their muscular bodies more than their acting abilities. One in the former category is former decathlete Bob Mathias, who is appearing in The Minotaur, this Friday at 2:45 AM.
If you want to see a movie with a better reputation than The Iron Sheriff, you should catch The Ox-Bow Incident, which is showing at noon Saturday on TCM. Gil (Henry Fonda) and Art (Harry Morgan when he was still being credited as Henry) are a couple of drifters returning to the town where Gil's girlfriend lives. They find that there's been some cattle rustling going on, and with the sheriff absent, the townsfolk are forming a "posse" to go out and find the person or persons responsible for stealing the cattle. Gill shrewdly realizes that this is really a braying mob out for justice, so he and Art join it in order not to arouse suspicion since as drifters they'd be suspects, and to try to blunt the bloodlust the mob will have when they find a suitable suspect. Eventually, the mob does find their suspects, in new rancher Don Martin (Dana Andrews), who swears he bought the dead guy's cattle; a ranch-hand; and the Mexican Juan (Anthony Quinn). The mob would like to declare these three guilty right then and there; Gil becomes the leader of the faction trying to keep the three alive long enough to have a trial back in town.
For those of you who like more recent movies, there are several chances to watch the 1980s version of Brewster's Millions, including 6:34 AM Sunday on StarzEncore Black. Richard Pryor plays Montgomery Brewster, who in this version is a failed minor-league baseball player with buddy Spike (John Candy). One day he's approached by a man who takes him to a fancy law office in Manhattan, where he learns that his long-lost great-uncle Rupert (Hume Cronyn) has died and left him a bundle of money. There's one catch, however: in order to inherit the $300M, he has to learn the value of money by wasting $30M in one month; otherwise the trustees get the money. (Alternatively, he could take a flat $1M "wimp" payout.) Oh, and one of the catches is that he can't tell anybody why he's burning through this money like there's no tomorrow. Monty takes the challenge, although he finds wasting money is harder than it seems. It doesn't help that the trustees don't want him to succeed. This was the seventh or eighth version of the movie, dating back to the silent era. Supposedly, there's yet another remake floating around Hollywood.
I mentioned Noir Alley earlier in the post, so I should mention the movie that's this week's Noir Alley entry: Lured, at 10:00 AM Sunday. Lucille Ball plays taxi dancer Sandra, an American in London. There's a serial killer on the loose who lures his victims, all women, by taking out personal ads. (Perhaps the women should have offered piña coladas.) Sadly for Sandra, the latest victim is one of her co-workers, and when the woman goes missing, Sandra turns to Scotland Yard for help. Inspector Temple (Charles Coburn) comes up with an interesting idea: why not use Sandra to respond to the personal ads and lure the killer? She accepts, although at first the attempts to find the killer turn out to be hilarious misfires of people who clearly weren't the killer. Then she meets wealthy Robert (George Sanders), and as she gets closer to him, she gets the distinct feeling that he might be the killer, as there's a lot of mystery between him and his business partner Julian (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). Lucille Ball shows here that she was a lot more than just a zany ditz.