Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 14-20, 2014. After Germany wins the World Cup, we're all going to be so excited that we're going to need a good way to come down from that high, and what better way than by watching some good old movies? There's another night of Maureen O'Hara movies; another day of World War I movies, and more on some of the other channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off this week with a movie in which Hollywood looks at Hollywood: Inside Daisy Clover, at 3:00 PM Monday on TCM. Natalie Wood stars as Daisy Clover, a teenager in the 1930s who is plucked out of nowhere to become the next Hollywood star. Under the guidance of studio boss Swan (Christopher Plummer), however, she discovers that Hollywood isn't all it's cracked up to be. Swan arranges for her to get married to matinee idol Wade (Robert Redford), which is supposed to be good for both of their images, but the marriage fails because Wade is gay. It goes on like this. Unfortunately, Natalie Wood was 10 years to old to be playing a teenager although she tries hard, and everything in this movie screams 1960s even though it's set in the 1930s, so the result is a bit of a muddled mess from what should be an interesting picture looking at the dark side of Hollywood.
TCM is showing several Kay Francis movies on Monday night, starting with For the Defense, at 8:00 PM. Francis plays Irene, an actress in love with bitter defense attorney William Foster (William Powell). Bitter enough that he has no plans to marry Irene, even though she wants marriage. So she starts seeing Jack (Scott Kelk), but when she takes him for a ride to talk about marriage, his drunken behavior accidentally causes her to hit a pedestrian. Jack decides to take the rap, on the condition that Foster defend him, because Foster gets everybody off, and because he doesn't want Foster to know that it was Irene driving the car. Foster finds out, however, which causes a conscience of crisis for the first time in his life. Never mind that the prosecutors are also looking for a chance to get Foster for all those slimy defendants he's gotten acquitted of charges in the past.
Over on FXM Retro, we have the World War II comedy In the Meantime, Darling, at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Jeanne Crain stars as a daughter in a well-to-do family (that's Eugene Pallette as dad) in World War II. And then she marries a serviceman (Frank Lattimore). He goes off to do his training, and accommodation is hard to come by, so our new wife winds up in a boarding house with a bunch of other war brides, a place that's much beneath her normal standard of living. She wants to get a trailer so she can live independently and try to get hre husband not sent to Europe, but this was made during World War II when such selfishness would have been terrible, so she has to learn about sacrifice, which she does when she finds that another of the wives at the boarding house is actually a war widow, having made the ultimate sacrifice by losing her husband to the war.
Thursday marks the birth anniversary of James Cagney, so it's unsurprising that TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with him, mostly with the movies he made before the Production Code cracked down, such as Taxi!, at 6:00 AM Thursday. Cagney plays Matt, a taxi driver who's up against a big taxi company that's trying to drive little guys like him out of business, by force if necessary. After Pop one of the little guys (Guy Kibbee) fights back, the other drives form a union to fight back themselves, and Matt falls in love with Pop's daughter Sue (Loretta Young), who despite having other ideas about how the little guys should deal with the violence, marries Matt. Sue's attempts to stop the violence cause problems for the marriage when somebody tries to stab Matt but gets his brother instead. There's a lot of stuff going on in a movie that runs under 70 minutes.
If you want to see James Cagney later in his career, you're in luck, as TCM is showing These Wilder Years at 3:15 PM Wednesday. Cagney plays a wealthy industrialist, but one with a dark secret: 20 years ago he was a wild young man, to the point of knocking up a young woman. She had to give the child up for adoption, and now, 20 years later, Cagney wants to connect with the kid. So he goes to the agency that handled the adoption. But the head of the agency (Barbara Stanwyck) informs him that adoption records are sealed, as was commonly the case back in those days. Cagney is rich and used to getting his way, so he isn't about to take no for an answer, and brings in his lawyer (Walter Pidgeon) to try to get Stanwyck to reconsider. Things change, however, when Cagney meets a young woman (Betty Lou Keim) who is pregnant out of wedlock, just as happened to the girl he knocked up all those years ago.
On Thursday night, TCM is showing a pair of 1930s crime movies, as well as their remakes. First up is the 1931 version of The Criminal Code, at 8:00 PM. Walter Huston stars as a district attorney who, like William Powell in For the Defense, is zealous in his job, albeit on the other side. So when young Phillips Holmes gets in a fight at a nightclub and accidentally kills the guy, our DA still sends him up the river for 10 years. Fast forward several years, and Huston is no longer DA, but named prison warden. Unsurprisingly, it's a prison where many of the inmates were put there by Huston, including Holmes. The now-warden tries to reform Holmes, getting him lighter work and letting Holmes meet his daughter. But then Holmes' cell-mate (Boris Karloff) kills another prisoner, and Holmes faces the dilemma of ratting out his cellmate and facing a reprisal, or losing his chance for an early parole. A bit of trivia: this is the movie Boris Karloff's character in Targets was watching on TV. He was actually quite a capable actor before he got typecast as a horror star.
The other original is Scarface, with ehe 1932 original starring Paul Muni coming on at midnight Friday (11:00 PM Thursday LFT), and the obscenity-laden 1983 version starring Al Pacino following at 2:00 AM.
The World War I themed movies return on Friday. If you recall your history, you'll remember the spy Mata Hari from that war. There was a movie ostensibly about her made, and that's showing up next week. Anothe rone about an exotic lady spy is Stamboul Quest, which is on TCM this Friday at 12:30 PM. Here, that German lady spy, called Frau Doktor, is played by Myrna Loy, in that part of here career when she was still playing exotic vamps. She's sent to Istanbul by Lionel Atwill to determine who's passing secrets to the Ottomans. On the way, she meets George Brent, an American medical student. He falls in love with her, which understandably complicates the situation as she's used to using sex to get the things she wants out of he rmale targets. For once, Brent isn't all that wooden. A younger Leo G. Carroll shows up as a double agent.
This week's TCM Essential, at 8:00 PM Saturday, is The Sugarland Express. Steven Spielberg's first feature-length film, it stars Goldie Hawn as a small-time criminal in Texas who's just gotten out of prison, and is going to visit her husband (William Atherton), who is also a small-time crook. The problem is, she's just found out that the state is going to let the foster parents who had been caring for her child while she was in prison adopt it, and she doesn't want that. So she breaks her husband out of prison to get the two of them to their son and rescue him. Things hit a snag when the car they've hitched a ride in gets stopped by the police, so Atherton takes it and eventually winds up taking a rookie cop hostage and leading a whole line of police cars towrds Sugar Land, the town where their son is in foster care. It's part comedy, part drama, and a whole lot of fun. Supposedly it's based on a real case, but the way the movie goes I have to think a lot of liberties were taken with the truth. (Certainly Spielberg gets the geography of Texas badly wrong.)
Essentials Jr., on Sunday night, has several two-reel silent comedies. Unfortunately, TCM's schedule lists all four of them as starting at 8:00 PM, so I don't know precisely which order they'll be in. According to the TCM schedule, the first of the four is The Immigrant. Charlie Chaplin plays the title role, a man on a ship bound for America who meets fellow immigrant Edna Purviance (Chaplin's real-life girlfriend at the time) and helps her out when she and her mother have their money stolen. Eventually the ship gets to America and everybody goes their separate ways, but Chaplin and Purviance meet again by chance at a restaurant. Perhaps this is Chaplin's chance to get the girl, but he's going to need some money to do it.... I personally prefer Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd to Charlie Chaplin, but that's just a matter of taste. The Immigrant is certainly a well-made short, and people who like Chaplin will especially like it.
For those of you who like movies more recent than The Immigrant, you can watch A Very Brady Sequel, airing on Cinemax's HD Movie Max channel at 1:05 AM Saturday, and then on More Max at 5:25 AM Sunday. If you remember the first of the Brady Bunch movies in the 1990s, you'll recall Shelley Long and Gary Cole as Carol and Mike Brady, leading a blended family that was still stuck in the early 1970s, which was most of the point of the movie. The sequel has a bit more of a plot, involving Carol's dead first husband (Tim Matheson) finally returning after 20 years, although it's not her dead husband but the husband's business partner back in the day, who is trying to dupe the Bradys out of a statue that they don't realize is worth millions. This ultimately leads to the family going to Hawaii, as they did in a memorable three-part episode back ni the day (sadly, Vincent Price had died so he wasn't available for a cameo). Along the way, they spoof several old episodes from the original TV series, notably the one in which Jan makes up a boyfriend named George Glass.
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