Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of June 13-19, 2016. We've got another week of interesting movies, which I have used my impeccably good taste to pick out for you. There's Star of the Month Marie Dressler, the spotlight of stage plays turned into movies, and a lot more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
On multiple occasions I've recommended the 1951 Ethel Barrymore movie Kind Lady. What I don't know if I've mentioned is that that movie is a remake; TCM is running the 1935 version of Kind Lady at 1:00 PM Monday. Aline MacMahon takes the title role, an older lady who lives alone (well, with her servants) in a big house filled with all sorts of fine artwork. One Christmas Eve, she meets the starving artist Henry (Basil Rathbone), and invites him into her house since she's interested in fine art. Henry sees all that work, and wants it for himself. So he gets together a gang to take over the servants' jobs, and has his wife feign illness so that she has to stay at the old lady's house; the gang then plan to have the lady declared incompetent while they loot the place of all its fine art. Will anybody be able to stop them? Both versions of the movie are quite good, so you'll probably want to catch this one to compare it to the Ethel Barrymore verstion.
Star of the Month Marie Dressler returns on Monday night with another evening of her movies. Dressler only gets third billing in The Vagabond Lover, at 1:00 AM Tuesday. Top billed, and making his movie début, is Rudy Vallee. Who plays Rudy, an aspiring singer who wants to go to Long Island to meet the famous bandleader Ted Grant. Enter socialite Ethel (Marie Dressler). She sees Rudy, and thinking he's actually Grant, figures his band is just the thing for the society party she's hosting, since she wants to put on a better party than her rival Mrs. Whittington Todhunter (Nella Walker). Complications ensue, including run-ins with the police, and Ethel's niece Jean (Sally Blane, the real-life sister of Loretta Young) falling for Rudy. Vallee wasn't much of an actor yet, and his singing style may be dated. So at least we have Marie Dressler to watch, who is one of those thespians who makes everything she's in worth watching.
I'm not certain when the last time is that I recommended Whirlpool, but it's airing again on FXM Retro at 11:15 AM Tuesday. Gene Tierney plays Ann, the socialite wife of prominent Dr. Sutton (Richard Conte). However, she's also a kleptomaniac. So when she gets caught one day at a department store, she finds that she might actually be in luck. Also there is the hypnotherapist Korvo (José Ferrer), who claims he can help Ann. Of course, Korvo has ideas of his own, and things get messy when one of Dr. Sutton's former patients (Barbara O'Neil) is found murdered, and the evidence leads to Ann! The only thing is, she has no memory of where she was or what she did! The plot starts to veer out of control, since Hollywood has never had a good grasp on what hypnosis can or cannot do. But Gene Tierney puts in another good performance, with a nice supporting cast around her. Watch also for Charles Bickford as the police detective investigating the murder.
This week sees the TCM Guest Programmer for June 2016: Candice Bergen, who is probably best remembered for the TV series Murphy Brown as well as being the daughter of ventriloquist Edgar Bergan. As always, she's selected four of her favorite movies, and sat down with TCM host Robert Osborne to discuss them; they'll be airing Tuesday in prime time. Bergen's selections are:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at 8:00 PM, starring Humphrey Bogart as a man who finds that the search for gold makes people greedy;
The Graduate at 10:15 PM, in which Dustin Hoffman is seduced by his hoped-for girlfriend's (Katharine Ross) mother (Anne Bancroft);
The Earrings of Madame De… at 12:15 AM Wednesday, about what happens when you sell off something to pay a debt; and
The French Connection at 2:15 AM, in which Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider go after drug dealers.
A western I think I haven't recommended before is Posse From Hell, which you can catch on StarzEncore Westerns at 5:30 AM Wednesday. Vic Morrow (Crip) and Lee Van Cleef (Leo) lead a band of death row escapees who go into the town of Paradise and shoot up a bank, killing a couple of people and taking Helen (Zohra Lampert) hostage. Among the people who were killed was the town's marshall, so his friend Banner (Audie Murphy in yet another western) rounds up a posse and goes after the four criminals. The problem is that the posse isn't all that competent and you wonder whether some of them even want to be on the posse. And then there's Seymour (John Saxon), a representative from the bank who has come from the east and doesn't particularly care for western life, never even having been on a horse! But he's got to get back the money that was deposited in the bank….
For those who like 80s movies, you can watch the so-bad-it's-hilarious Flash Gordon at 11:45 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Classic. Sam Jones plays football hero Flash Gordon, who with his girlfriend Dale (Melody Anderson) crashes into the compound run by mad scientist Dr. Zarkov (Topol). Zarkov believes the natural disasters plaguing Earth are actually the result of alien influence, and to prove he's right, he plans to kidnapt Flash and Dale and take them to the source of those aliens, the planet Mongo! There, the three find ruler Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow), who is in fact causing those natural disasters and even plans to do away with our little planet altogether! It's up to Flash to stop him, and save his girlfriend in the process. Bad acting and terrible special effects abound. But there's also a soundtrack by Queen.
TCM's spotlight on “Stage to Screen” returns for its third week on Wednesday night; this time the plays are comedies. A very good early screen comedy taken from a stage play is the 1931 version of The Front Page, which comes on at 5:45 AM Thursday. Adolphe Menjou plays editor Walter Burns, who has a problem. There's a big story with the impending execution of Earl Williams (George Stone), and Burns wants to get his best reporter, Hildy Johnson (Pat O'Brien), to cover the execution and possibly get an interview with Earl after Earl escapes. Hildy, however, is planning to quit the journalism racket, as he's engaged to Peggy (Mary Brian) and is going to go to New York to become an adman. Walter uses every trick in the book to get Hildy to keep working on the story. If the plot sounds familiar, that's because the plot was redone in 1940 as the classic His Girl Friday, with a gender switch: Hildy was made a woman reporter going off to marry a man, and who had had a relationship with Walter. Both of the movies are well worth watching.
Since I know how much you all enjoy early 1930s movies like The Front Page, I'll recommend another one: The Big Gamble, which will be on TCM at 2:45 PM Friday. William Boyd, who would later play Hopalong Cassidy, stars as a man with a heavy gambling debt to Warner Oland (later Charlie Chan). Boyd is willing to commit suicide, but Oland has a better plan: Boyd will take out a $100,000 insurance policy, which will be claimed in a years' time, and will be paid to Boyd's wife. Of course, he doesn't have a wife yet, so Oland supplies the wife (Dorothy Sebastian), and has a hitman (James Gleason) follow Boyd to make certain he doesn't commit suicide, since what life insurance policy pays off on suicide? Well, you can probably guess what happens next: Boyd falls in love with Sebastian, and decides that he really doesn't want to die.
A year before making The Gang's All Here, several of the supporting members also appeared in another Fox musical: Springtime in the Rockies, which FXM Retro is showing at 11:50 AM Saturday and 4:28 AM Sunday. The leads, however, are different. Here we have Betty Grable, playing the woman in a song and dance act who can't get her partner (John Payne) to marry her; he seems more interested in being able to play the field. So she runs off to Lake Louise in the Alberta Rockies, where she meets her former partner Cesar Romero and starts working with him again. Payne realizes how wrong he was, and follows Grable to Lake Louise to try to win her back. But along the way, he manages to wind up having Edward Everett Horton as a valet and Carmen Miranda as a secretary, the latter leading Grable to continue to believe Payne still wants to play the field. Miranda, for her part, wants Horton, which is some interesting Hollywood casting. Fox's Technicolor musicals of the World War II era are never less than interesting.
Sunday is Fathers' Day, so TCM is marking the occasion with a whole bunch of movies about fathers. One movie that I think I haven't recommended before, but which has a very familiar plot, is Vice Versa, which comes on at 8:15 AM. Roger Livesey and a very young Anthony Newley play a father and son who are a bit dissatisfied with their current situations. Dad, a stockbroker, wouldn't mind if he could be young again, while the son doesn't like some things about the boarding school he goes to and wishes he could be older. Of course, the two make their wishes known while holding a magic stone from India, so sure enough, the two wind up switching bodies! Needless to say, complications ensue. Future pop star Petula Clark, whom we'll recall was a juvenile actress in several British movies of the late 1940s, plays the daughter of the boarding school headmaster. Directed by Peter Ustinov.
