Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 9-15, 2016. We'll all be waiting for the Packers to go down to Dallas and destroy Jerry Jones' team, earning another great victory in that stadium:
While waiting, why not enjoy some good movies? I've used my good taste to select several movies I know you will all enjoy. There's more from Star of the Month Jane Wyman, more prison movies, and even a movie from '12. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
A movie that returns to FXM Retro after a long absence is The Roots of Heaven, at 3:30 AM Monday. Trevor Howard plays Morel, a man in French Equatorial Africa (now Chad; this movie is before the great wave of decolonization) who has decided it's a terrible thing that humans are hunting the elephants to extinction. So he's going to try to do something about it. It's a quirky quest, but he winds up with a bunch of equally quirky allies. There's Forsythe (Errol Flynn in one of his final roles), a former officer in the British Army; nightclub owner Minna (Juliette Greco); photojournalist Fields (Eddie Albert); American radio man Sedgwick (Orson Wells), and even some revolutionary leaders. But do they really believe in Morel's cause, or are they using him for their own ends? This is a film that doesn't quite add up to the sum of its cast, and has long been better known for the horrors of filming it on location – director John Huston should have learned from the hell he had making The African Queen.
For those who like old music in addition to old movies, you're in luck. At 12:30 PM Tuesday, TCM is showing Song of Love. Robert Schumann (Paul Henried) fell in love with pianist Clara Wieck (Katharine Hepburn) and married her, and maintained a friendship with other composers such as Franz Liszt (Henry Daniell). But Schumann's life was tragic, as a hand injury cut short is piano-playing career, and he also suffered from mental illness (which one is a matter for debate). Eventually he tried to commit suicide and spent the last several years of his life in an institution. Meanwhile, young composer Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker) met the Schumanns and fell in love with Clara, although she was devoted to her husband, and then to her own concert pianist career; she was every bit the equal to her husband or any other pianist of the day. The movie has a lot of classical music (Artur Rubinstein dubbed the actors' playing), although exactly how accurate the story is, who knows? Enjoy it for what it is.
The TCM monthly spotlight on prison movies continues this Tuesday night . Up first, at 8:00 PM, is Papillon. Steve McQueen plays the title character, French safecracker Henri nicknamed Papillon who is being sent to the French penal colony on Devil's Island off the coast of French Guyana after shooting somebody in a botched robbery. On the boat to Guyana he meets Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman), a wealthy forger. Henri and Louis agree that Louis will use his money back in France to try to help Henri escape, while Henri will use his influence to protect Louis. Of course, escaping from Devil's Island is ridiculously difficult, which is of course the point, and the first two escape attempts fail, leading to long stretches in solitary confinement for Papillon. Along the way, his friendship with Louis deepens, complicating the escape attempt.
Mae West once said, “A hard man is good to find.” You can find The Hard Man at 1:28 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. Guy Madison plays the titular hard man, a deputy sheriff named Burden who has a tendency to bring the people “wanted dead or alive” quite dead. One time, however, he's called to bring in a man who just happens to be an old friend. He shoots the guy, but as the guy is dying he gives the deputy a convincing story that he's really quite innocent and has been framed. So Burden tries to figure out what really happened. He winds up in a nearby town run more or less by evil cattle baron Rice Martin (Lorne Greene), who has a lovely wife Fern (Valerie French) and guards her jealously. That, and he guards the secret of how he got all those cattle, using hired guns to keep anybody from finding out. But of course Burden is going to find out, and Fern kind of wants out of the marriage anyway, leading to the inevitable climax….
You saw the Thin Man movies a few weeks ago on TCM. Star William Powell played a couple of other detectives as well, and one of them shows up on TCM this week, in The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, at 12:30 PM Thursday. Powell plays Dr. Lawrence Bradford, a physician who seems to be getting into it again with with mystery writer/ex-wife Mrs. Paula Bradford (Jean Arthur). Her constant attempts to get her husband involved with murder mysteries is what led to the divorce, and now she's using his lack of alimony payments to get him involved in another murder mystery. A jockey was leading in the big race, when suddenly he fell off his horse and dropped dead! The trainer suspsects there's something wrong, but nobody can figure out a cause of death, and then the trainer gets shot! So obviously there is something going on, and our good doctor is going to have to use his medical skills to figure out what happened, and the ex-couple are going to have to use their mystery skills to figure out whodunit. Powell is just as interesting here as playing Nick Charles.
Jane Wyman returns for another batch of her films as TCM's Star of the Month on Thursday night running into Friday morning. Wyman is interestingly cast in Bad Men of Missouri, airing at noon Friday. The titular bad men are the Younger Brothers, who were working with Frank and Jesse James (here a small role played by Alan Baxter) at one point. The plot of this movie has them returning from the Civil War to find that an evil banker Merrick (Victor Jory) is responsible for their father's death, and has been dispossessing farmers of their land. So the Younger brothers: Cole (Dennis Morgan), James (Arthur Kennedy), and Bob (Wayne Morris) go an a bank-robbing spree to get back the money for the farmers to allow them to reclaim their land. As for Wyman, she plays the girlfriend of James Younger; she's used as a lure to get Jim into town and arrested, with the other two brothers breaking him out of jail. Dennis Morgan also gets to do a bit of singing.
On Friday night, we get a bunch of movies about Cleopatra on TCM. There have been several versions of Cleopatra's life put on film, with probably the two most famous being the Liz Taylor boondoggle (airing at 10:00 PM) and the 1934 Claudette Colbert version (8:00 PM). Silent vamp Theda Bara did a version back in 1917, but unfortunately that version is considered lost, so there's no way we're going to see that one. There was an even earlier silent version, in 1912, and TCM will be running that one at 6:30 AM Saturday.
TCM is spending Saturday night with the films of Warren Oates (no relation to Daryl Hall). One that I'm really looking forward to is Private Property, which will be on at 10:00 PM. Oates plays Boots, a mentally slow drifter who meets up with Duke (Corey Allen). Together, they rob a Los Angeles-area service station, and then carjack a man forcing him to follow another car, driven by pretty Ann (Kate Manx, then wife of the film's director). Eventually they wind up in the suburbs, where the two criminals squat in an unoccupied house, spending their time ogling Ann. Duke also taunts Boots because Boots has apparently never had a real sexual conquest. And then Ann's husband goes off on a business trip, so of course Duke thinks it's a good time to put the moves on Ann and as for Boots, well, this all puts a strain on his newfound friendship. Ann, meanwhile, has ideas of her own.
I see that A Bridge Too Far is back on this week, airing on StarzEncore Classics at 5:45 AM Sunday. This one is based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, who chronicled World War II's Operation Market Garden, a daring operation to secure several bridges across the Rhine River which would enable the Allies easier passage into Germany to try to end the war earlier. As we know from history, however, the operation was ultimately a failure, as the last bridge, at Arnhem, could not be secured. Director Richard Attenborough used more stars than there are in the firmament to play various military officers; this thread would go on much too long if I mentioned all of them. Of course, using so many stars also makes for an exceedingly long movie, with this one running nearly three hours. The story itself is an interesting one, and this was all done before CGI effects, but sometimes it really does feel overlong.
I know it's going to be up against the Packers' crushing of the Cowpies (purrrrrrr), but TCM is running All About Eve at 3:30 PM Sunday. Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is an award-winning Broadway actress, and we learn the story of how she got there. A few years earlier, she showed up in New York as a big fan of stage actress Margo Channing (Bette Davis), to the point that she eventually worms her way into Margo's life and becomes indispensible. Meanwhile, a playwright (Hugh Marlowe) whose wife (Celeste Holm) is one of Margo's friends has written a new play for Margo, while Eve thinks the main role would be just perfect for her. And then there's critic Addison De Witt (George Sanders, at the time Mr. Zsa Zsa Gabor). He knows more about Eve's past than anybody else save Eve, and more than he's letting on. Playing Margo's boyfriend is Gary Merrill, who would go on to marry Bette Davis in real life. Marilyn Monroe has a small role as an ingenue, and Thelma Ritter livens up the first half as Margo's dresser although she's largely written out of the second half.