Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 7-13, 2014. For those of you who think the World Cup is no longer worth watching now that the Americans are out, why not watch some good movies instead? It's not as if there are any other meaningful sports going on besides the World Cup. This week's movies sees more Maureen O'Hara (I hope you can catch the brief interview Robert Osborne did with her at last April's TCM Classic Film Festival), more World War I, and a lot of other stuff too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We're going to start off with A Life of Her Own, at 8:15 AM Monday on TCM. Lana Turner at 30 is much too old to play this role of a young woman from Kansas who gets invited to New York City to try her hand at modelling, but since it's Lana Turner, we overlook the fact that she's too old. She gets mentored at first by alcoholic washed-up former model Ann Dvorak, and then meets and begins to fall in love with the wealthy and reasonably handsome Ray Milland. Milland got his wealth from copper mining out in Montana, and he really belongs out west, not in New York. That's not the only problem; the much bigger problem is that Milland's got a wife out west, and she's in a wheelchair from an auto accident he caused. Surely Milland and Turner can't find love together... or can they? MGM put quite a few of their B-listers into supporting roles, such as Louis Calhern and Jean Hagen, who were both also making The Asphalt Jungle at MGM in 1950.
Maureen O'Hara returns to TCM on Tuesday night with another night of her movies, starting at 8:00 PM with Dance, Girl, Dance. O'Hara plays Judy, a young dancer who dances ballet and wants to do serious art, money be damned. Of course, money is important, because you can't just live on dancing. So Judy takes a job with Bubbles (Lucille Ball). Bubbles is the star of the burlesque show, and she hires Judy to be the straight part of the act, doing the ballet that nobody wants to see so that everybody will clamor for Bubbles. Bubbles cares less about are, and more about money, so for Judy to take a job like this is a serious step down. If that's not bad enough, the two clash over the wealthy man (Louis Hayward) who is willing to bankroll their troupe. Ralph Bellamy plays the other man, the boss of the dance troupe. This movie was directed by one of the few female directors of the studio era, Dorothy Arzner.
A movie that I've recommended a couple of times before, but which is worth watching again, is Don't Bother to Knock, which is on FXM Retro twice this week, at 3:30 AM Monday and 10:05 AM Wednesday. Marilyn Monroe plays Nell, a young woman who had a nervous breakdown when her husband died in the war, so her uncle (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who works as an elevator operator at a hotel got her a job as a hotel baby sitter. One night when she's babysitting Jim Backus' daughter, airline pilot Richard Widmark in his room across the courtyard sees. He's been having a relationship with the lounge singer (Anne Bancroft), but that's on the rocks, so he gives her a call. It turns out that Nell isn't as well as her uncle thought she was, and during the evening she slowly begins to lose her grip on reality. She actually does quite a good job in the movie, since she in real like she wasn't a ditzy blonde.
Up against Marilyn Monroe on Wednesday on TCM are several lovely Italian actresses, including Claudia Cardinale, whose films include teh sex comedy Don't Make Waves, at 2:00 PM Wednesday. Tony Curtis plays a New Yorker out in California who gets mixed up with the aforementioned Cadrinale when she gets in a car accident with him, destroying his car and his stuff. So she lets him stay at her place, except that she's being supported by a wealthy man (Robert Webber), which leads to Curtis getting a job at Webber's swimming pool company selling pools for them. .Curtis gets involved with celebrities, as well as a bodybuilder and his girlfriend, the girlfirend being played by Sharon Tate. The movie itself isn't particularly great, but there's a fair deal of nice 1960s style here. And who wouldn't like a house like some of the houses here?
Wednesday night sees a bunch of comedies about servants, including On Again -- Off Again, at 1:00 AM Thursday on TCM. Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey aren't too well remembered today, but they were a big box office draw for RKO in the 1930s, making a series of zany, fast-paced comedies that, like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, usually had them as friends at heart but at times almost at each other's throats. This one has them a bit less friends, as they're partners in a pharmaceutical company who are constantly arguing. So their lawyer decides that the best way to solve the dispute is to have them arm wrestle for control of the company, with the loser having to be valet to the winner for a year.. Complicating matters is that their bickering and new relationshpi could bring takeover bids from other comapnies. To be honest, Wheeler and Woolsey were better in earlier movies like Girl Crazy, but then, Woolsey had health issues here that would cut his life short a year later at the age of 50.
For those of you who like more recent movies, you might like Brubaker, which is on Encore Drama at 12:45 PM Thursday and 6:10 AM Friday. Henry Brubaker (played by Robert Redford) is the new warden of a prison farm in Arkansas. But in order to find out what life in the prison is really like and so his underlings won't BS him, he first goes undercover as a prisoner. What he finds shocks him: namely, that there's all sorts of corruption invoving the guards and the corrections service bureaucracy, including prisoners being used in the local community as cheap labor, and being killed and surreptitiously buried. So, once Brubaker comes out and reveals his true identity, he's determined to use his power as warden to change what he can. Needless to say, the powers that be don't like the idea that he's going to reveal all the terrible things they've been doing, and they try to stop him.
On Thursday evening, TCM is showing a bunch of documentaries, most of which I haven't seen before. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Salesman, which is about the world of door-to-door Bible salesmen, selling overpriced bibles to poor Catholic families.
That's followed at 9:45 by The Times of Harvey Milk, which as you can guess is about Harvey Milk, the gay man elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisor before he and the mayor (George Mosconi) were both shot and killed by a rival supervisor.
Lionel Rogosin had to lie about what he was doing in South Africa when he made his apartheid-themed documentary Come Back, Africa (11:30 PM).
French director Louis Malle looks at Calcutta as it was in the late 1960s at 1:30 AM
The Friday night spotlight on TCM is World War I movies, presented by retired general Wesley Clark, but the World War I movies will actually be on all day Friday, including such films as Suzy, at 6:15 PM Friday. Jean Harlow stars as Suzy, a chorus girl in London in 1914. The show closes down, and she meets Terry (Franchot Tone), who she thinks is rich, although he's only an Irish inventor. Still, they get married, until a few weeks later he gets shot in some intrigue, having discovered there might be spies in the factory where he works, and Suzy runs off to Paris even though she's quite innocent because the lady who shot Terry dead pointed the evidence to frame Suzy. At this time the war breaks out, and Suzy meets AndrÉ, a pilot with the French Air Corps. They have a whirlwind romance, and get married... and then Terry shows up, quite alive, and already good friends with AndrÉ.
As for World War II movies, you could do worse than to watch Tora! Tora! Tora!, which gets two airings on Encore Action this week, at 5:35 AM Thursday and 5:05 AM Sunday. This movie is a docudrama, looking at the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941 that led to the US getting involved in World War II. Actually, it's a bit less about the attack itself, which only comes toward the end of the movie, and more about the goings-on on both sides of the Pacific that led up to the attack, which included a lot of inadvertent blunders and some fortuitous luck, as well as the extensive planning on the Japanese side. (A fair amount of the movie is in Japanese with subtitles.) When the movie gets to the actual attack, it's very well done, considering that effects were still fairly limited in 1970. The movie may seem a bit slow at times, but then, life doesn't move at the speed of movies.
If you like the comedy stylings of Bob Hope, you'll definitely like My Favorite Brunette, which comes no at 7:15 AM Saturday on TCM. In this one, Bob plays a baby photographer whose office is in the same building as a private detective (Alan Ladd in a bit part). As a result of this, Bob wants to be a detective himself, but the most our real detective will let him do is answer the phones while the detective is out of town. So, wouldn't you know it, a client (Dorothy Lamour) comes walking into the office looking for a detective while it's Bob Hope in the office. She obviously thinks he's the detective, and this is his chance to show everybody he could actually be a detective. As if it's going to work out that way. Hope gets involved with every detective movie clichÉ out there as he spoofs the genre. Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney Jr. are among the villians, while Bing Crosby shows up for a brief cameo.
Original Post