Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 16-22, 2014. Even though the World Cup is going on there are still going to be a lot of movies worth watching, to help pass the time and clam the nerves while waiting for one's favorite team (definitely not Ghana) to play. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Back in the 1930s, the UK had a law that required a certain percentage of movies shown in British cinemas to be British-made. The Hollywood studios got around this by setting up production units in the UK and making decidedly B movies. One of the movies made by Warner Bros.' UK unit, Crime Unlmited, comes on TCM at 9:00 AM Monday. The plot is fairly simple: there's a gang of jewel thieves who have heretofore baffled the police. So the police commissioner (Cecil Parker) decides to try to infiltrate the gang with one of his own men, Borden (Esmond Knight). Borden meets Natacha (Lilli Palmer), a mall of one of the jewel thieves; she claims that she'd like to live honestly, and gets Borden to trust her. But is she really playing Borden for a fool...? This is B material to be sure, but it's fairly well handled.
FXM finally dumped the Fox Movie Channel brand, and replaced it with "FXM Retro", which at least as of last week still didn't have any commercials. One of the movies that shows up on FXM Retro this week that hasn' t been on in years, I think, is [URL= http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026180/]Cardinal Richelieu[/URL], at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Richelieu, played here by George Arliss, was a French cardinal in the early to mid 17th century, during the reign of Louis XIII (played by Edward Arnold), in many ways making France a European power as he was the power behind the throne. Being the power behind the throne naturally made Richelieu a whole bunch of enemies who try to bring Richelieu down, but he handles all of them with aplomb, much in the way Arliss' Disraeli did in the movies several years earlier. There's also a romantic subplot involving not Richelieu who as a cardinal was supposed to be celibate, but characters played by Cesar Romero and Maureen O'Sullivan.
This week sees the June Guest Programmer on TCM. Comic actor Gene Wilder sat down with Robert Osborne to discuss four of his favorite movies; that movies and their conversation will be airing Tuesday night in prime time. Interestingly, despite Wilder's being a comic actor, his selections most definitely aren't straight-up comedy.
First up, at 8:00 PM, is the romance Random Harvest, in which World War I veteran Ronald Colman gets multiple conks on the head that completely change his personality and screw with his memory; Greer Garson sticks by him through all of this.
Then, at 10:15 PM, you can catch the Ernst Lubitsch version of Franz Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow, with the main parts being played by Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald;
At 12:15 AM Wednesday is the Billy Wilder (no relation) mystery Witness for the Prosecution, in which Charles Laughton defends Tyrone Power against a murder charge.
Finally, at 2:30 AM, you can catch Dark Victory, starring Bette Davis as a socialite with a fatal brain tumor, who falls in love with the doctor who treats her (George Brent). Watch Humphrey Bogart put on a completely phony Irish accent.
Early sound movies can be interesting, but sometimes they're just a disaster, as happens with Captain Thunder, on at 2:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. Hungarian-born Victor Varconi plays the title character, a Mexican bandit similar to the Cisco Kid, robbing people in a small Mexican village. Juan wants to marry Ynez (Canadian-born Fay Wray), and can do so with the reward put up by the Mayor (Dutch-born Charles Judels). But Ynez meets Captain Thunder and admires him, so doesn't want to turn him in. Complicating matters is that there's an American who wants to marry Ynez, and he's willing to use Captain Thunder to make certain the marriage doesn't go ahead. None of the actors here is convincingly Mexican, but they all try to put on various accents, making the dialog a mess.
Wednesday night's prime time lineup on TCM is devoted to the movies of French director RenÉ Clair. I've recommended his Hollywood movie It Happened Tomorrow before; that one's airing at 2:45 AM Thursday. So instead, I'll recommend one of his earlier French films, Under the Roofs of Paris, which kicks off Wednesday night at 8:00 PM. Albert is the 1930s equivalent of a busker living in Paris. He meets Pola, friend of several petty crooks, and falls in love with her. However, Albert gets arrested and wrongly convicted. While he's in jail, his friend Louis also falls in love with Pola. And he's not the only guy after Lola; her original boyfriend Fred also still likes her. And then the guy who actually committed the crime for which Albert was sent to jail confesses, setting Albert free and setting up the conflict of who's going to end up with Pola and whether the guys can still remain friends. Clair used a limited amount of sound in this early talkie, but did so for deliberate effect.
Thursday night is the third night of Rock Hudson movies in his turn as TCM's Star of the Month. This Thursday night sees Rock in several comedies, such as Man's Favorite Sport? at 3:45 AM Friday. In this one, Hudson plays Roger, a man who works in the sporting goods department at Abercrombie and Fitch in the days before it became a clothing store for thin, trendy twentysomethings. He's heard a lot from his custormers about fishing, and used that information to write a book on the subject even though he's never fished and hates fish. Still, that book has led people to believe he's an expert on fishing. So the PR department, led by Abigail (Paula Prentiss), gets Roger's boss to enter him in a big fishing contest. Oops. Now Roger has to defend his reputation, and since Abigail got him into this, she's going to have to help him. Of course there's also going to be romantic tension.
There are also a couple of interesting shorts on TCM on in between the Rock Hudson movies. First is Every Girl's Dream, at 9:46 PM Thursday, or just after Pillow Talk (8:00 PM, 102 min). Every girl's dream is apparently to go to Hollywood, and the girl in this dream is 1966's Queen of Cotton from the folks organizing the Cotton Bowl. She got to go to Hollywood and take a tour of MGM, all while showing off the latest in cotton fashions. No mentoin of the thickness of her ankles.
And for those who like the Traveltalks shorts -- and who the hell doesn't? -- one of the earliest and most exotic color shorts is on this week: Colorful Islands: Madagascar and Seychelles, just after Man's Favorite Sport? at 5:51 AM Friday. James A. FitzPatrick visits Madagascar and the Seychelles just off Africa's southease coast; both of them were still French colonies at the time. There's a bit of interesting history and a lot of interesting visuals.
Two weeks ago, I mentioned the silent version of The Sea Hawk. The better-known Errol Flynn version of The Sea Hawk is on this Friday at 11:45 PM as part of the Friday night spotlight of pirate movies. Flynn plays Thorpe, a privateer in Elizabethan England preying on Spanish shipping, since Spain was England's mortal enemy at the time. Unfortunately, one of those raids results in the capture of the new Spanish ambassador (Claude Rains) and his niece (Brenda Marshall), which ticks off Elizabeth enough to make Thorpe no longer a privateer. But not enough to call on him when she determines that there's a traitor among her advisors; she sends Thorpe on a mission to Spain to determine what's going on. He gets taken prisoner and eventually swashbuckles his way to freedom; along the way that niece falls in love with him. The plot is closer to Fire Over England than the silent version of the movie, but it doesn't matter since it's an Errol Flynn swashbuckler.
For those of you who like more recent movies, you could do worse to watch Secrets and Lies, which will be on Encore Drama at 10:15 AM Thursday and repeated on Starz Cinema at 9:00 AM Sunday. Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste)is a black professional in the UK whose parents have recently died. Knowing she was adopted, she finally decides to go to the adoption agency to have the files on her adoption unsealed so she can find out about her biological parents. What she finds shocks her: her biological mother, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is white. Cynthia is also decidedly working class, with a difficult relationship with her teen daughter Roxanne and her photographer brother Maurice. Cynthia wants her daughter to learn that she's got a half-sister, but having produced a daughter by a relationship with a black man? That's going to be a bit difficult to swallow.
This week's Essentials Jr/ movie is Godzilla, King of the Monsters, at 8:00 PM Sunday. Of course, you know the story of Gojira, as he was called in Japanese, that of the monstrously large animal living deep in the sea brought back to life as it were by those atomic bomb tests; Gojira is determined to wreak vengeance by destroying shipping and cities! The original was a hit in Japan, but Hollywood didn't think a Japanese movie dubbed into English wouldn't sell well, so they filmed a bunch of scenes with Raymond Burr as an American newspaper reporter in Tokyo who winds up on the story of Godzilla, and edited those in, also changing some of the plot points along the way. It's not quite as dark as the Japanese original, but it's still pretty good. And, to be fair, it's certainly not as if the kiddies were going to read 90 minutes of subtitles.
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