Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of June 19-25, 2017. Amazingly, life has imitated art this past week, with a high-rise fire, a celebrity sex trial, and a crashing blimp. So why not get away from the nuttiness of the real world with some fun movies? Once again, I've used my discerning taste to select a series of movies I know you'll all like. And as always, times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
If you want a nice frothy comedy you could do worse than to watch Slightly Dangerous, at 11:30 AM Monday on TCM. Lana Turner plays Peggy, a shop girl who leads a boring life in her small town. She's wanted to escape, so one day she just up and leaves, heading for New York, where she plans to change her looks and her name. However, before she's able to go through with all that, a mishap causes her to get conked on the head by a ladder, which leaves the New Yorkers to think this stranger in their midst is suffering from amnesia. This is actually perfect for Peggy, who's learned about a rich family's daughter who disappeared ages ago, and she'd be just about the same age. So she decides she's going to be that heiress! Yeah it's a daft idea. Unsurprisingly, the father (Walter Brennan) and grandmother (Dame May Whitty) are going to be tough to convince, especially because he's already been faced with a bunch of frauds. And then Peggy's old boss (Robert Young) shows up from the small town and threatens to spill the beans.
Hollywood casting makes strange cases of family members. A good example of this is the three brothers in Gun For a Coward, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 7:24 AM Monday. The three brothers here are the Keoughs, eldest brother Will (Fred MacMurray), middle brother Bless (Jeffrey Hunter), and youngest Hade (Dean Stockwell, about 25 years younger than MacMurray). They're running the family ranch after Dad died. Will runs it hard, because that's the only way to do things and survive out in the west. Bless is a shy, retiring type who blames himself for his father's death, while Hade is a hothead. Will doesn't care for Bless' seeming cowardice, and to make things more complicated, there's the requisite romantic triangle involving Aude (Janice Rule). Things come to a head when the ranchers head out on a cattle drive with Hade getting involved in a shootout and killed, with Bless having done nothing to save his kid brother. Everybody considers him a coward, so he's going to have to come up with some way to prove to them all that he isn't.
We've got another early Audrey Hepburn movie with her in a small role this week as part of her turn as TCM's Star of the Month. This time, it's in Secret People, which will be on TCM at 1:45 AM Tuesday. The star here isn't Hepburn who plays dancer Nora; it's Valentina Cortese who plays Nora's elder sister Maria. The two are children of a pacifist in an unnamed country that has a dictatorship; Dad sends the two daughters off to England to save them since it's unlikely he can save himself. Sure enough Dad does get executed, but after several years pass Maria takes a short trip to Paris, which is where she meets her old boyfriend Louis (Serge Reggiani). Louis is working in the resistance to the dictator in their home country, and Louis has a job for Maria. The dictator is going to be visiting London, and Maria could help in ending the dictator's brutal reign of terror by passing a bomb to a suicide bomber that would be detonated on the dictator's trip to London. Maria isn't certain what to do since her father was a pacifist. And of course things go even more wrong than that.
I think I might have mentioned The Racket back when Robert Ryan was star of the month. That movie was a remake of a 1928 silent, and the silent is going to be on TCM at 9:45 PM Tuesday as part of a salute to actor Louis Wolheim. Wolheim plays gangster Nick Scarsi, who seems to rule the city with the cops in thrall to him. This pisses off the one honest cop, McQuigg (Thomas Meighan), who does everything he can to try to stop Scarsi. But it only results in his getting banished to a suburban precinct where little happens and there's no way for him to get at Scarsi. Things begin to look up for McQuigg, however, thanks to Nick's kid brother Joe (George E. Stone). Nick doesn't want Joe involved in the illicit gang business at all, and Joe has responded by taking up a playboy lifestyle, to the point that he gets drunk and involved in a hit-and-run in McQuigg's precinct. This enables McQuigg to put the screws on Nick by putting them on Joe. Tragic Marie Prevost plays a nightclub singer (or, she would be a singer in a talking picture).
A search of the site claims that I haven't recommended Bedazzled before. It's coming on on FXM Retro a couple of times this week, at 10:00 AM Wednesday and 9:35 AM Thursday. Dudley Moore plays Stanley, who works as a short-order cook at a London restaurant, and is attracted to Margaret (Eleanor Bron), a waitress there. However, she doesn't notice him, and he's such a milquetoast that he can't ask her out himself. Just as he's about to attempt suicide, he's approached by the stranger George (Peter Cook). George, it turns out, is actually the Devil in disguise, and George offers Stanley seven wishes in exchange for Stanley's soul. Stanley unsurprisingly wishes for Margaret. But George being the Devil, there's another catch. George unly fulfills Stanley's wishes insofar as Stanley was specific about them. Any way that Stanley left things open-ended, George is certain to interpret those in a way that isn't what Stanley had in mind at all. On top of all that, George is an inveterate prankster. A young Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) plays Envy, while Raquel Welch plays Lust.
Warner Bros. had the best B-movies, I think. An example of how other studios' product was inferior is One Crowded Night, which TCM will be showing at 7:30 AM Thursday. The one combines elements of the MGM prestige movie Grand Hotel with a really good Warner Bros. B movie, Heat Lightning. All three movies are about hotels or motels and how the stories of the various people their intertwine, but Heat Lightning and One Crowded Night are both set at motor hotels out in the Mojave Desert. You've got a family who came to own the place because they were trying to escape from a past in the big city (Anne Revere, who would go on to win an Oscar for Gentleman's Agreement, plays the mother), and various guests who show up and find that their own personal problems get caught up in the problems that the owners have, all for to end up getting resolved rather suddenly. Unfortunately, RKO made this one and couldn't get the sort of cast Warner Bros. could for Heat Lightning, so Revere and future TV star Gale Storm are the two biggest names here.
Some of you like baseball, and you all enjoyed Bob Uecker's calling the game. So you'll all enjoy the fact that Major League is on this week at 1:10 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Somewhere along the way the owner of the perpetually-failing Cleveland Indians married a trophy wife, and now he's died, leaving her (Margaret Whitton) as the owner of the team. She would frankly like to move the team down to Miami, so she decides to assemble a team even worse than normal to completely turn off the fans and make it easier to move the team. To that end, she gets a catcher (Tom Berenger) with bad knees; a wild pitcher (Charlie Sheen), a third baseman who doesn't want to dive (Corbin Bernsen) and so on. (Wesley Snipes and Dennis Haysbert are among the other players). But wouldn't you know, the players figure out what's going on and fight back by actually winning, to the point that Cleveland might win the pennant. Bob Uecker plays the play-by-play man, giving us lines like “Juuuuust a bit outside”. Somehow I can't imagine Major League Baseball approving the use of MLB properties in this way today.
I briefly mentioned a movie (not airing this week) called Heat Lightning above. It starred Aline MacMahon, who can be seen 30 years later in a small role in I Could Go On Singing, which will be on TCM at 7:45 AM Friday. The star here is Judy Garland (in her final movie), playing Jenny, an American singer who got knocked up by British doctor David (Dirk Bogarde) 15 years ago and left him with custody of the child so she could pursue her musical career. Well, she became a success and now, all these years later, she's doing another series of shows in the UK, and has decided she wants to see the son she never raised. That kid knows nothing about who his mother really is, and is in boarding school, so when Dad takes Mom to meet the kid (not telling the truth about her), he's infatuated. But Jenny is just as temperamental as she was back then, which is part of why Dad doesn't want the kid to find out the truth. The aforementioned MacMahon plays Jenny's dresser, while the always underrated Jack Klugman plays Jenny's manager.
If you liked Nanook of the North, then you'll probably enjoy Man of Aran, which will be on TCM at 7:00 AM Saturday. Made by the same director as Nanook, this one is about the Aran Islands, which for those who don't know are a series of islands just off the west coast of Ireland known for their harsh environment. Flaherty went tot he island in the early 1930s and filmed the islanders, crafting a thin story line about their lives along the way. This isn't really a documentary, as the way of life depicted here isn't really what the islanders were experience by the 1930s – shark hunting hadn't been done in years, but putting it on screen was just too damned cinematic to pass up. Still, what does wind up on screen is visually interesting, and consists of a cast of non-professional locals, not actors.
Finally, I notice that The Snake Pit is on TCM again, at 10:00 PM Sunday. Olivia DeHavilland plays Virginia, married to Robert (Mark Stevens). Except that something has gone seriously wrong with her, as she's suffered a breakdown and has wound up in the state mental hospital for women, which is an absolutely unpleasant place. Slowly but surely, the doctor (Leo Genn) starts to figure out what exactly went wrong with Virginia, while Virginia deals with the other patients, who are in varying states of mental illness. Virginia, thankfully, isn't so bad off that she can't provide at least a modicum of comfort for those worse than her. But can Virginia be truly cured? And will the frightening new (at least new at the time) electroshock therapy really help her? Some of this will seem a bit over the top now, but back in 1948 when the movie was released it was shocking (no pun intended) material for an audience who didn't know the horrors of mental institutions.