Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 3-9, 2013. It's the first full week of a new month, so we've got a new Star of the Month on TCM as well as a new Friday night spotlight. Of course, there are other good movies in between all of that, as well as some interesting movies on other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is the birth anniversary of actress Paulette Goddard, so TCM is marking the occasion with several of her movies. Perhaps she's best known for the movies she made with Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times, which is airing at 6:00 AM; and The Great Dictator, which you can see at 11:15 AM. However, the movie I'd like to recommend this week is Pot O' Gold, which is on at 3:00 PM Monday. James Stewart plays the son of a music store owner, which has the problem that it's not a very successful business. So Stewart reluctantly takes up his uncle's (Charles Winninger) offer of a job with his food processing plant. In the new town, Stewart meets Goddard and her family; she's a singer for a swing band and her mom is the cook/surrogate mother. Stewart and Goddard are obviously going to fall in love, but there's a catch: Mom doesn't like the food plant, and Stewart's uncle hates the musicians. Part You Can't Take It With You, part musical; interesting if not great, although if you like musicals you'll probably have a much better reaction to this film.
TCM's Star of the Month for June 2013 is Eleanor Parker. Her movies will be showing up every Monday night in June. This first Monday in June sees a bunch of Parker's early work, starting at 8:00 PM with her very first movie, Busses Roar. Released in 1942 against the backdrop of the early days of World War II, Busses Roar deals partly with the nighttime denizens of a bus station, and partly an Axis plot to get a time bomb aboard one of those busses; a bomb that's set to blow as the bus is passing an oil refinery, which will tell the Japanese in a submarine off the coast where to shoot. Seems a bit farfetched nowadays, but this was early 1942 when there was a lot of fear in America over how close the Nazis and Japanese might be able to get. Of course, complications ensue in the bombing plot, which serves to make this B-movie a lot more exciting. It speaks to the professionalism of Hollywood back in the day that they were able to make a 60-minute filmi like this crackle.
Some months back, I mentioned a Lionel Barrymore movie called Sweepings. The movie was remade in the late 1930s as Three Sons, which is getting an airing at 10:00 AM Tuesday. Edward Ellis (you'll remember him as the murder victim in the original Thin Man) is the star, as a man who sees opportunity in Chicago just after the Great Fire or 1871, He starts a department store, and through hard work the store becomes successful; so successful in fact that Dad is able to provide his children with a well-to-do upbringing. There's a problem, though, which is with family life. Dad, having spent his whole life building up the department store, wants to see his children continue the family tradition, but they don't care, and instead are more concerned with their lives as the idle rich. What's a dad to do?
If a dad is wrongly killed, however, the son can try to avenge Dad's death, as happens in Young Jesse James, which shows up at 11:45 AM Wednesday over on the Fxo Movie Channel. You can probably guess that this is about Jesse James (played here by Ray Stricklyn). The movie opens during the early stages of the Civil War in Missouri, a border state that had a lot of southern sympathizers. Union troops hand Jesse's father, so he joins his brother Frank (Richard Dix's son Robert) in Quantrill's Raiders to try to kill the officer who hanged Dad. Unfortunately, once Jesse gets a little bit of war in him, he can't get it out of him, much to the consternation of his girlfriend (Jacklyn O'Donnell). Eventually the war ends, but the amnesty goes wrong, and Jesse winds up with the outlaws again, to go off to infamy which is left to other movies. It's not the best movie, but since most of the Jesse James stuff focuses on the bank robberies and the getting shot by Robert Ford, it is a nice change of pace.
Back on TCM, Wednesday night sees several westerns directed by Anthony Mann. Mann might be best known for his collaboration with James Stewart, and Wednesday night does indeed kick off with Mann directing Stewart in The Far Country, at 8:00 PM. Stewart plays a fortune-hunter in the 1890s who at the start of the movie is herding cattle northwest along with Walter Brennan. They know about the Klondike gold rush, and are in fact planning to herd the cattle all the way up north to Alaska in order to sell them at a big profit, after which Stewart plans to stake a claim and make money striking gold himself. Along the way, however, they get waylaid by corrupt Skagway, Alaska lawman John McIntire, who is trying to cheat the gold miners himself. The miners, in fact, would like to elect Stewart to be the law in Dawson and protect them from McIntire. Rounding out the cast are Ruth Roman as a saloon owner in Dawson, and Corinne Calvet as a French-Canadian woman who's gone northwest to make money off the men.
Thursday is June 6, the anniversary of the Allied D-Day invasion of Normany in World War II. TCM is marking the occasion with a number of war movies dealing more specifrically with D-Day. The most interesting of Thursday's movies, though, is the one that doesn't deal directly with D-Day: Resisting Enemy Interrogation, at 3:30 PM Thursday. This one was made byt the US Army Air Force's Motion Picture Unit, which means that it wasn't a standard Hollywood movie for domestic consumption. Instead, it was deadly serious, trying to teach flyboys about the devoius methods the Nazis would use to extract information from Allied prisoners. But, being the Motion Picture Unit, there are still a number of recognizable names: Lloyd Nolan plays the narrator and a debriefing officer; Kent Smith is a double agent; Mel Tormé is a pilot, as is Arthur Kennedy. There's actually a plot too; it's not just instructional propaganda: the Nazis isolate each of the crewmen of a downed plane and proceed to play to each man's weaknesses as they try to get information about the locations of upcoming bombing raids.
This month's Friday night spotlight on TCM is film noir, presented by noted noir expert Eddie Mueller. The first night of the retrospective isn't quite noir, instead looking at the influence of writer Dashiell Hammett on the genre. Perhaps the most interesting of the night's selections is Satan Met a Lady, at 4:30 AM Saturday. Warren William plays detective Ted Shane, who gets approached by mysterious lady Valerie (Bette Davis), who it eventually turns out is one of several people looking for a medieval ram's hom that's supposedly filled with precious stones. If this story sounds familiar, that's because the movie is a thin re-working of The Maltese Falcon, which had already been turned into a movie in 1931 (that version is airing at 8:00 PM Friday), and would be more famously remade in 1941 (airing at 2:30 AM Saturday). Satan Met a Lady is probably the weakest of the versions, as, having seen the success of the original The Thin Man movie, Warner Bros. decided to inject more comedy into the story.
A lot of you whinge and moan that I only mention older films. For those of you who like overlong movies full of special effects and people cast more for their looks than their acting ability, you could do worse than to watch Troy, at 11:00 AM Saturday on Cinemax. Based on Homer's Iliad, this is the story of the war started over Paris' (Orlando Bloom) romance with Helen (Diane Kruger), who had the "face that launched a thousand ships". Brad Pitt plays Achilles, the putative son of the gods who was dipped in the river to make him invulnerable, except of course on his heel where his mother (Thetis, played by Julie Christie) held him. Worth watching is Peter O'Toole as Trojan King Priam. But this is the sort of movie that was made for its battle scenes, which to me look no more realistic than what Hollywood was doing on soundstages decades earlier -- it's just that with CGI, we get a different sort of unrealistic.
Finally, on Sunday night, TCM is giving us a number of comic crime movies. I've recommended, and blogged about, all of them before.
The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with this week's Essentials Jr. selection,The Lavender Hill Mob, in which Alec Guinness tries to steal gold bullion from the Bank of England and smugle it out of the country in the form of miniature Eiffel Tower souvenirs;
A Slight Case of Murder at 9:30 PM, in which Prohibition beer baron Edward G. Robinson, on finding out post-Prohibition that his beer is crap, retires to a vacation home, only to find a murder (of which he is completely innocent) has been committed there;
and A Slight Case of Larceny at 11:00 PM, which has war veterans Mickey Rooney and Eddie Bracken siphoning gasoline from a rival gas station to try to make their business profitable.
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