Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 13-19, 2015. The Packers don't open training camp for another two and a half weeks, so there's no NFL to look forward to this week. As for you baseball fans, this week is the most worthless week of the season, with the All-Star Game, a concept that's past its time and should have been done away with 20 years ago. So spend some time with good movies instead. We've got more Shirley Temple, early Bette Davis, and a bunch of other interesting stuff. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is going to Japan on Monday, both with some Hollywood looks at Japan and some actual Japanese movies. One of the latter is The Bad Sleep Well, at 9:45 AM. The movie starts off with a bang. A corporate executive's daughter is getting married in a big tabloid to-do with all the press covering it. Out comes the wedding cake: and it's in the shape of corporate headquarters, with one window very clearly marked as the one out of which a mid-level manager jumped to his death! Indeed, there have been several suicides at the company, and Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) is out to prove that the suicides were in fact coerced, so they're technically murder and not suicides! But, the corruption reaches to the highest levels, so it's going to be difficult for Nishi to prove anything and get anybody to believe him. This turns out to be quite a good movie, although it's a bit long at two and a half hours.
The Shirley Temple movies return on Monday night with one that I think is a TCM premiere: Stowaway, at 8:00 PM. Little Miss Temple plays Ching-Ching, the daughter of American missionary parents in China. (She's so much more likeable than Tim Tebow, however.) This is the time of civil war in China, and the result is that bandits kill her parents! So Ching-Ching makes her way to China, where she meets wealthy but single American Tom Randall (Robert Young), eventually hiding in the trunk of his car, which is how she winds up as a stowaway on an ocean liner heading back to the States. Ching-Ching winds up hiding in the stateroom of Susan (Alice Faye), who is on the way to meet her fiancÉ in Bangkok. But you just know that Susan really ought to be with Tom, and that our child star is going to make that happen. Among the supporting cast is Arthur Treacher of fish and chips fame as Tom's butler, and Eugene Pallette as a passenger who likes to hit the bottle. Shirley gets a number in which she gets to do several impressions.
I mentioned last week that TCM's Star of the Month Shirley Temple doesn't have enough movies for TCM's salute to her to continue to the end of the prime time lineup every Monday night. Instead, they're finishing the wee hours of some Tuesday mornings with films from other child stars. This week, that film is Divorce in the Family, at 3:45 AM Tuesday. The child star is Jackie Cooper, who here plays the younger son of Lewis Stone (a few years before he started playing Judge Hardy) and Lois Wilson. The parents get divorced, which was a much bigger deal in 1932 than today, when it's much more common. Mom remarries the local doctor (Conrad Nagel), and tries to make the best of the situation with her blended family. But the kids are used to their old dad, and Stepdad doesn't quite know how to raise kids. That is, until the older son gets seriously ill, and Stepdad, being a doctor, is the only one who can cure him, in more ways than one. Yeah, so much of this is a product of the 1930s.
For those of you who like more recent movies, you could do worse than watch Every Which Way But Loose, which is on TCM at 6:00 PM Tuesday. Clint Eastwood stars as Philo, who is a truck driver by day and bare-knuckles brawler by night. He lives with his fighitng manager Orville (Geoffrey Lewis) and Orville's mom (Ruth Gordon), as well as Clyde, the orangutan he won in a fight. Then he falls for a country singer (Sondra Locke), and when she dumps him, he, Orville, and the orangutan head east to find her. Along the way they have to evade the cops and a bunch of biker gang members. Unsurprisingly, Clyde steals the show and made this a very successful film for Eastwood, even though it's rather different from what he had done up to that point. (If anything, I'd have thought it would have been more up Burt Reynolds' alley.)
I can't recall whether I've recommended the film Escape From Fort Bravo before, but it's coming up a couple of times this week on Encore Westerns, at 3:00 AM Thursday and 4:20 PM Saturday. William Holden stars as Captain Roper, who is stationed at the commander of Fort Bravo, in the Arizona Territory during the Civil War. Fort Bravo is being used to hold Confederate POWs, and Roper is proud of the fact that nobody escapes his prison, or at least if they try they get caught and brought back. Stopping at the prison is the lovely Carla (Eleanor Parker), who says she's there for her friend Alice's (Polly Bergen) wedding, but is really there to effect the escape of her lover, Confederate Captain Marsh (John Forsythe) and a couple of other prisoners. But she begins to fall for Roper along the way, complicating things. Sure enough the Confederates break out and Roper goes after them, but don't forget that this is also Apache territory.
Remakes are nothing new in Hollywood. A good example of this is Crime School, which is airing on TCM at 8:15 AM Thursday. This 1938 movie is a remake of 1933's The Mayor of Hell. In this update, Humphrey Bogart gets second billing as deputy prison commissioner Mark Braden. Mark investigates a juvenile hall and discovers that Warden Morgan (Cy Kendall) is treating the place like his own personal fiefdom, brutally lording it over the youths for profit. As for those youths, they get the star billing, as it's the "Dead End Kids", fresh off their success in Dead End. Anyhow, Braden is liberal for the 1930s and wants to reform juvenile justice, so he takes over the job of warden himself. Of course, the ousted warden doesn't like this and there are interests who want things the way they were, so Morgan gets the kids to hold Braden at gunpoint and effect an escape of one of their number. Unfortunately, the Production Code had come into effect in the five years since The Mayor of Hell was made, so Crime School doesn't get to pack quite the punch. But Humphrey Bogart was good in an early good-guy role.
Thursday night on TCM sees a bunch of films from the end of John Wayne's career. The first of these is Brannigan, airing at 8:00 PM. Brannigan, obviously played by Wayne, is a Chicago police officer. He's been chasing Larkin (played by Dean Wormer -- er, John Vernon) since Larkin committed a bunch of crimes, but Larkin was able to flee Chicago and make it to London. So Brannigan goes to London, where he meets Scotland Yard Commander Swann (Richard Attenborough) to take custody of Larkin and bring him back to the States for trial. Except that Larkin escapes from the British police and now Brannigan and Swann have to track him down together despite the clash of cultures. Judy Geeson (one of the students in To Sir, With Love) plays Brannigan's British go-between, while Mel Ferrer plays Larkin's attorney.
Saturday night brings a bunch of movies about politics to TCM, with the one I haven't recommended before being The Dark Horse, at 12:15 AM Sunday. There's an election for Governor coming up, and the Progressive Party is at a deadlock as to whom to nominate. So they compromise on Zachary Hicks (Guy Kibbee) because he's so stupid they figure they can control him. But secretary Kay (a young Bette Davis before her breakout roles) suggests they hire her boyfriend Hal (Warren William) to manage the campaign. The only problem is, he's in prison for not having paid alimony to his ex-wife. Still, the party hears him give a good speech in prison and springs him, and he proceeds to turn Hicks into a contender, at which point the ex-wife comes out of the woodwork. William and Kibbee were both well-cast in their respective roles, but Davis they just didn't know what to do with yet. Not that she's bad, mind you.
It's been a while since I've recommended it, but Half Angel is back on the FXM Retro schedule, at 6:00 AM Sunday. Loretta Young stars as nurse Nora, who is happily engaged to boyfriend Tim (John Ridgely). However, she has a problem. She sleepwalks. And while she walks in her sleep at night, she meets lawyer John (Joseph Cotten). Not only that, but sleepwalking Nora falls in love with John. Meanwhile, awake Nora during the day has no idea of what her sleepwalking half has done. Moreover, daytime Nora hates John. Or at least, that's what she claims; it won't take a genius to figure out from the plot that she's repressing her real feelings for John. It all results in a trial that has all the tropes of Hollywood's thoroughly inaccurate look at the law: lovers cross-examining each other, evidence that comes out of nowhere, chlarges that make you wonder how the case even made it to court, and so on. I suppose movies like this are part of the reason Loretta Young decamped to television a few years later.
And now on to the shorts. First up is Equestrian Acrobats, at about 11:35 PM Monday. This one is a Pete Smith short, looking at the Cristiani family, a circus family who do horse stunts. This involves things like running and jumping onto a horse's back, standing up as opposed to sitting in a saddle. Frankly, when I watched this short, I found myself feeling bad for the poor horses.
Warner Bros. had a "Sportscope" series in the early 1930s looking at the less well-known sports; MGM had the "Sports Champion" shorts. One of the latter, Bone Crushers, shows up at 11:35 AM Wednesday. As you might be able to guess from the title, this is a short about professional wrestling, if you want to call it a sport. People like Jesse Ventura, however, would bristle at the use of the word "fake".
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