On Monday night, TCM is looking at the British Invasion -- that is, the music that took over American airwaves starting in 1964. The biggest group of them all was of course the Beatles, and they made the movie A Hard Day's Night, which gets what I believe is its TCM premiere at 8:00 PM Monday. There's not much plot here; it's just a story about four guys from Liverpool named John, Paul, George, and Ringo, who travel from Liverpool to London to do a TV show; or, what the Beatles' everyday life was supposedly like. Paul's grandfather (not his real grandfather, of course, but actor Wilfred Brambell) tags along for the ride, and finds that it isn't all it's cracked up to be while providing the comic relief. Along the way, the Beatles sing several of their songs, including the iconic scene of them escaping down a fire escape. All in all, an incredibly fun ride, and the music is pretty good, too.
Director Alain Resnais died earlier this year. One of his most famous movies was a documentary short: Night and Fog, which is airing at 6:45 AM Tuesday on TCM. Resnais starts the movie at the Auschwitz concentration camp as it was back in 1955 when he made the movie, in lovely color. And then Resnais proceeds to use black-and-white archive footage to show us all the atrocities that happened in the concentration camps, which people back in the 1950s didn't want to talk about at all. Even today, the images -- piles of hair shaved off of Jewish women's heads or bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves -- is shocking. It's definitely not a movie for the kids. One other note: TCM has this running in a 30-minute slot, with the next film, Resnais' Mon Oncle d'Amerique, scheduled to begin at 7:15 AM. But Night and Fog is listed as being 31 or 32 minutes by various sources, so you'll want to set your recording device to record a few extra minutes.
If you don't like foreign movies, or want something more recent, perhaps you could watch Out to Sea, which is on twice this week: 7:30 AM Tuesday and 4:05 AM Saturday, both on HBO Signature. Jack Lemmon is a recent widower. To try to comfort him, his brother-in-law (Walter Matthau) offers that the two of them take a cruise together, with Lemmon not having to pay anything. There has to be a catch, of course, and the catch is that Matthau, whose character is as usual a schemer and a gambler, has signed the two of them on as professional dance partners for the old ladies on the cruise; Mathau hopes he'll meet a rich old lady so he can get out of debt. Along the way he meets Dyan Cannon and her mom (Elaine Stritch), who are putting on airs of being rich although they're looking for a rich man themselves. Lemmon meets Gloria de Haven. All while they're trying to deal with their martinet boss, Lt. Data (er, Brent Spiner). Barney Miller (er. Hal Linden) and Donald O'Connor play fellow dancers, with O'Connor getting a dance solo to show up Spiner. It's fairly simple entertainment, but fun.
Tuesday night has TCM going out into space, with movies such as Destination Moon, at 1:00 AM Wednesday. As you can guess, this is a movie about an attempt to get Man to the moon; this one was made in 1950, several years before anybody had even put a satellite into orbit around the earth. The basic plot involves the US military realizing the importance of space, and so enlisting the help of private-sector rocketry companies to try to build a rocket powerful enough to get Americans to the moon before anybody else. They eventually do get to the moon, but find that getting back to earth presents a problem they hadn't considered. The movie is in color which is nice, and the science is reasonably good for a science-fiction movie from the early 1950s. Some basic physics lessons are displayed to the would-be astronauts through the use of a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.
On Wednesday night, TCM is putting the spotlight on Ursula Andress, the Swiss actress best known for playing Honey Ryder, the first of the Bond girls, in Dr. No. TCM don't have the rights to that one, so you'll have to settle for She, at 8:00 PM Wednesday. In British Palestine around the time Lawrence was in Arabia, an Army major (Peter Cushing), his valet, and his former subordinate Leo (John Richardson) They come into possession of an ancient coin that has an uncanny likeness of Leo, and then a map that purportedly leads to Kuma, a lost city where Leo's numismatic doppelgÄnger, a companion of Alexander the Great, supposedly was. So they set out for this lost city and when they get there they find the titular She Who Must Be Obeyed, Queen Ayesha (Andress), who realizes that Leo is the man on the coin brought back to life, and that the man on the coin was the love of her life. Ayesha can offer Leo eternal love, but it can only come at a price....
Our Star of the Month for June is Rock Hudson, and his movies will be on TCM every Thursday in prime time this month. The first of his movies they'll be showing is The Last Sunset, at 8:00 PM Thursday. Kirk Douglas stars (his production company made the movie) as the bad guy, a villain who's escaped to Mexico, where he meets an old love of his (Dorothy Malone). She's married now (Joseph Cotten), and then to complicate matters, the sheriff who's been chasing him (that's Rock Hudson) shows up. The sheriff obviously can't do anything in Mexico, and our baddie can't exactly kill him where this family will know exactly who did it, so eventually a resolution is reached that has the sheriff and bad guy leading a cattle drive north to Texas -- back to US jurisdiction, and a chance for the two to resolve their differences. Things get complicated, though, when the husband dies along the way.
This being the start of a new month means there should be a movie or two coming out of the Fox vault to show up on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel. One that showed up again about a month ago is Good Morning, Miss Dove, which you can catch at 6:00 AM Friday on FXM/FMC. Jennifer Jones plays Miss Dove, a schoolteacher in one of those idealized small towns that showed up in sentimental movies of the Production Code era. She's known for being a bid of a cold, stiff taskmistress, and even on this morning when she feels ill, she doesn't want her students to know. It turns out that she's quite seriously ill, needing an operation. And so, in hospital, she has a series of flashbacks that explain how she ended up the way she did. The flashbacks also show that everybody in town -- and of course, this is one of those small towns where eberybody below a certain age was one of her students -- actually have fond memories of her. Robert Stack plays the doctor who was also one of her students; his girlfriend (Kipp Hamilton) and town cop Chuck Connors also learned important lessons from her when they were her students.
This month's Friday Night Spotlight focuses on pirate movies, presented by comic Greg Proops This first Friday in June kicks off with a pair of movies based on works by Italian author Rafael Sabatini. Tyrone Power swashbuckles in The Black Swan at 10:15 PM, but before that is the 1924 silent version of The Sea Hawk, at 8:00 PM. Milton Sills plays the hero, a retired privateer in Elizabethan England who wants the lovely Enid Bennett, but his half-brother does too, and royally screws things up. First, by killing her brother in a duel, and then by trying to get his brother captured by Moorish pirates and sold into slavery. Instead, Sills gets captured by the Spanish. Seeing how cruel the Catholic Spanish and his Protestant brother were, and how brave the Muslim fighters are, Sills converts to Islam, taking the name "The Sea Hawk" and vowing to gain revenge on the Spanish. The naval fighting scenes are so good that they were reused in many films, including the 1940 movie The Sea Hawk, which has a different story and will be airing on June 20. Wallace Beery plays the captain of the ship that's supposed to sell Sills into slavery only to be taken a slave himself.
You'll know Stephen Crane from his novel "The Red Badge of Courage". A movie taken from a different story of his is Face of Fire, which is on at 9:00 AM Sunday. James Whitmore stars as Monk Johnson, a popular man in a small town who is helping the town doctor (Cameron Mitchell) raise a son. The doctor's house catches fire, and Monk saves the boy from the fire. It comes at a cost, however: Monk's face becomes badly disfigured, and he also suffers brain damage in the fire. Monk, now having an ugly face and acting erraticly, no longer is a hit with the ladies but insteads frightens everybody by his physical appearance and strange behavior, to the point that they want to run him out of town. This low-budget film was actually filmed in Sweden with a bunch of English-speaking actors, including Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny) and character actor Royal Dano.
And now for a mention of a couple of shorts. TCM has been running the Carson on TCM interviews at 10:15 AM Saturdays, leading into the various movie series they've been running. This week's interviewee is Sammy Davis, Jr. He's oddly dressed because he had to come straight from the set of a TV movie he was doing where he plays the Devil, but delivers a funny interview in which he tells anecdotes about the problems entertaining in his ultramodern house.
The other interesting short, one I've mentioned a couple times before, is All Eyes on Sharon Tate, on a little after 2:30 AM Tuesday, or just after Hold On!, which features Herman's Hermits as part of the British Invasion movies. The short was made to promote Tate's movie Eye of the Devil, and has Deborah Kerr gushing about Tate's acting abilities, while showing Tate enjoying the night life in London. Of course, the people making this short had no way of knowing what was going to happen to Tate in a few years.
