We'll start with this week's TCM Import, one that they haven't shown in a couple of years: Kapò, at 2:00 AM Monday. Susan Strasberg stars as Edith, a Jewish teenager living in Paris circa 1940. Unfortunately, those damn Nazis occupy France, and since they intend to commit genocide against Jews, it's danger for Edith, who eventually gets rounded up with a bunch of Paris' other Jews and sent to a concentration camp. Desperate to figure out a way to survive, which includes fraternizing with a German guard and becoming a "kapò", a collaborator who helps keep discipline among the prisoners in exchange for better treatment from the Germans. And then a bunch of Soviet POWs are interned in a camp immediately adjacent to the concentration camp, and despite the rules, Edith is able to strike up a relationship with one of the Soviet POWs. Edith's friend Terese is played by Emmanuelle Riva, who was just nominated for a Best Actress Oscar last year.
There hasn't been any meaningful football since the Packers lost in the Divisional round back in January. Hell, even the Packers are wasting their time in camp playing dodgeball.
If you're so starved for football that you'll watch anything that looks football-related, then you can watch TCM on Monday morning at 7:45 AM, when they're showing Over the Goal. William Hopper (son of Hedda) plays Ken, a college football player who's just as whipped and wimpy as Jay Cutler, because when he gets injured and his girlfriend Lucille (June Travis) says she doesn't want him to play any more, he agrees. And then everybody at the college goes nuts -- the program must be as corrupt as that at any SEC school. Lucille and Ken relent, but Ken has difficulties getting back in the game when gangsters with a betting interest kidnap him! There were a lot of sub-par college football movies in the 1930s, and unfortunately this is as sub-par as the others, although it's interesting to recall a time when the college game was bigger than the pros. (Those of you who live in places like Jacksonville probably still know the feeling.)Eleanor Parker's movies show up on TCM again this Monday night into Tuesday morning, starting at 8:00 PM with her Oscar-nominated performance as an inmate at a women's prison in Caged. However, the movie I'm going to mention this week is the 1946 version of Of Human Bondage. Based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham and immortalized in film by Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, this is a story of Philip, a medical student (played in the 1946 version by Paul Henried) who is also a sensitive failed artist. So when he meets waitress Mildred (Parker), he falls for her even though she's all wrong for him and even though he's got another woman who is right for him (Alexis Smith). Still, Philip continues his relationship with Mildred even though it's a love-hate relationship, and even though it's causing him serious problems in his life. Until her lifestyle catches up with her....
If you have DirecTV, you'll have Cinémoi on channel 259; I don't know how many other providers carry it. They've got a relatively small lineup of movies. But some of them are pretty good old films, such as Indiscreet, which is on several times next week, inclduing Tuesday at 6:30 PM and Thursday at 11:00 PM for those of you on the west coast. Ingrid Bergman plays an aging actress who, thinking she won't find love, has returned to her London flat for the winter. She doesn't want to go out with her sister and brother-in-law (Phyllis Calvert and Cecil Parker)... until Cary Grant walks into the flat. He's an American diplomat that Parker is trying to get to stay on with NATO, but who has also been offered an exciting business opportunity in Mexico. Grant and Bergman hit it off, but he tells her he's got a wife who won't give him a divorce back home. But it turns out that he's lying, and Bergman decides she's going to get revenge on Grant. There's not much to the plot, but Cary Grand and Ingrid Bergman are stars who can make this sort of fluff well worth watching.
Tuesday night on TCM sees several movies about working women who decide at the end of the movie that the married life might not be such a bad thing after all. A good example of this is Front Page Woman, airing at 4:00 AM Wednesday. Bette Davis stars as a lady reporter who's got a friendly rivalry with George Brent and his photographer Roscoe Karns. The two sides will stop at almost nothing to get a scoop, including feeding misinfomation to each other. Brent, meanwhile, is in love with Davis, who won't marry him until he admits that women can make just as good reporters as men. She gets her chance to prove this when a fire at an apartment building results in the possible murder of a gangster. There are some serious plot holes (Brent listening in on the jury?!), but Brent and Davis work well off of each other.
Wednesday night brings us a night of Lana Turner in the 1950s, when she was at the height of her beauty and fame. The one of her movies airing that night that I don't think I've ever mentioned before is Latin Lovers, at 4:45 AM Thursday. Lana plays an heiress who's always been worried that suitors have been more interested in her money than in her, even though current suitor John Lund is worth more than she is. Still, when he runs off to Brazil to look for some polo ponies to buy, she's worried she's going to lose him too. So she follows him to Brazil, which is where she meets the Latin lover, played by a suave Ricardo Montalbán. What neither of them realize is that they've both been worrying people are only interested in them for their money, something he's been hiding from her. You know this sort of piffle is going to have a happy ending, though. Louis Calhern of all people plays Montalbán's grandfather, while Jean Hagen plays Turner's secretary and Beulah Bondi her shrink.
Esther Williams died last week, as you'll know frmo the obituary threads I post in the Off Topic section. Also, as I posted at the start of this thread, TCM has set aside its regular programming from 8:00 PM Thursday night to 8:00 PM Friday in order to honor Williams with a 13-film salute. Esther Williams was most famous as a swimmer. Or, as Fanny Brice said about her, "Wet, she's a star. Dry, she ain't." So it's only natural that most of Williams' movies have her swimming. One of the most famous scenes has her swimming with Tom and Jerry in the movie Dangerous When Wet, which is airing in the wee hours at 1:45 AM Friday. Nominally, the plot is about Esther trying to swim across the English Channel.
For those who don't care so much about Esther's swimming, you can see her in The Hoodlum Saint at 9:15 am Friday, in which Williams plays a socialite who's one of the love interests of William Powell, a World War I veteran/journalist who's turned to making money from stock shenanigans. The other love interest is Angela Lansbury.
One other interesting film si Williams' first, Andy Hardy's Double Life at 3:30 AM Friday, which has Andy Hardy (yet again played by Mickey Rooney) off at college and finding girls interfering with his studies.
Satuday night on TCM sees a couple of films with Rudy Vallee. I've recommended this week's Essential, The Palm Beach Story (8:00 PM) before, so this week I'll mention Gold Diggers in Paris, at 9:45 PM, instead. Set against the backdrop of the Paris International exposition of 1938, the story involves the organizers of the exposition looking for dance acts from all over the world to have a competition at the expo. In the US, expo board member Hugh Herbert goes into Vallee's club, the Club Ballé, and thinks it's a ballet company, so he brings them to Paris! They get a real ballet instructor (Fritz Feld) and a dancer (Rosemary Lane), but complications ensue when the real American Ballet Company shows up in Paris. There's a Traveltalks short on the Paris Exposition that would be a good companion to this, and there is enough time in the schedule between The Palm Beach Story and Gold Diggers of Paris to show it. But it's not in the schedule yet, and it's not on Youtube either.
Sunday is Fathers' Day. So if your father is still alive, give him a call and thank him for knocking up your mother and producing you! And if you're close enough to visit him, you could sit down and watch some good movies about fatherhood on TCM.
Glenn Ford plays a recently widowed father of Ronny Howard in The Courtship of Eddie's Father at 8:00 AM; Howard realizes that Shirley Jones, who lives in the apartment across the hall from them, is just right for Dad, and will stop at nothing to see that Dad ends up with her instead of the drip of a girlfriend he's going out with.
Then, at 10:00 AM, Spencer Tracy is the father in Father of the Bride, with Elizabeth Taylor playing the bride. Everybody who's had to deal with the wedding of a close family member (in my case, my two sisters) will recognize the bride wanting everything to be perfect, and parents going nuts over how everything will turn out.
William Powell is the late 19th century father in Life With Father at 10:15 PM, which is more a slice of life story than anything else, but a worthwhile story. Irene Dunne plays the mother, and Elizabeth Taylor returns to play a young woman who falls in love with one of the sons.
If you want something different on Fathers' Day, you might wish to watch Stanley and Livingstone, at 6:00 AM Sunday on the Fox Movie Channel. You may know the basic story of Henry Stanley (played here by Spencer Tracy) finding David Livingstone (Cedric Hardwicke) in deepest, darkest Africa -- that famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" quote -- but it's a bit more complicated than that. Livingstone was a Scottish missionary and explorer trying to bring Christianity to the natives who wasn't heard from in years and feared dead. So, Gordon-Bennett, a Scottish-American newspaper publisher (Henry Hull) scrounged up the money to send one of his journalists (that would be Henry Stanley) on an expedition to Africa to find out what's happened to Livingstone. Stanley of course finds Livingstone, but when Stanley returns to Britain he can't get people to believe him, at least not until Livingstone's body is brought back, where it's interred in Westminster Abbey. Stanley's later life might make the basis of an interesting movie, but it wouldn't have fit in with the reverent tone of this movie.