Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the weke of Jund 30-July 6, 2014. It's the first week of a new month, which means that we're going to get a new Star of the Month and a new Friday night spotlight on TCM. But more on those in a bit. We've also got mvies for the Independence Day holiday, and enough good movies to watch while you're nervously waiting for the USA's World Cup quarterfinal match on Saturday. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Eli Wallach died last week, which you all know because you read the obituary posts I write religiously. TCM has changed their programming lineup to honor Wallach with five of his movies, on Monday morning and afternoon:
In Kisses for My President, at 9:00 AM, Wallach plays a Latin American leader who hopes to get the first female US President (Polly Bergen) to sell arms to him;
Wallach has a smaller role in Act One (11:00 AM), about a playwright in 1930s New York.
Wallach is one of the many, many stars who tell us the story of How the West Was Won at 1:00 PM.
The Misfits (3:45 PM) tells the story of several people in Nevada trying to capture wild horses (it was the final film for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe); and
Out-of-towner Wallach goes to Mississippi and falls for Karl Malden's wife Carroll Baker in Baby Doll at 6:00 PM
On Monday night, TCM is highlighting the music of Quincy Jones. Although better known as a producer of pop music, Jones did score several movies, such as The Italian Job, at 4:15 AM Tuesday. Michael Caine plays a relatively small-time crook who gets the plans to a big heist from master criminal NoËl Coward, still behind bars. The idea behind this heist is to rob an armored car transporting £4 million worth of gold during the confusion caused by rush hour in Turin and the presence of a big soccer match between England and Italy. However, it's not just the Italian police who want to stop this plot: the Mafia don't want foreign criminals muscling in on their business. After they actually steal the gold, we get the famous escape sequence which involves driving a bunch of Mini Coopers through the streets and other places of Turin to get to the bus which is going to take them to Switzerland and safety. This is definitely more comedy than drama, as the presence of Benny Hill and one of the men Caine recruits shows.
Tuesday is July 1, and this first Tuesday in July is the first of five nights dedicated to TCM's Star of the Month, Maureen O'Hara. One of this week's films is, I believe, a TCM premiere: The Forbidden Street, at 2:15 AM Wednesday. O'Hara plays the daughter in a moderalely wealthy family in Victorian London who watches the goings on in Britannia Mews, slum district that's just opposite her family's townhouse. She goes to the Mews against her parents' wishes, and meets artist Dana Andrews. She falls and love with him and marries even though her parents are against it, and it's an unhappy marriage in the Mews since he can never make ends meet. He dies accidentally in a drunken fight with her, and one of the Mews locals blackmails her. In comes Dana Andrews again, playing an entirely different character; this one discovers the puppets that the first Andrews character had been making. These might offer O'Hara a way out of the Mews....
Ronald Reagan often gets derided for being a B-movie actor, but when he appears in those old Warner Bros. B movies, he's generally the thing that makes it worth watching. A good example of this is Nine Lives Are Not Enough, airing at 11:15 AM Wednesday on TCM. Reagan plays a reporter in trouble with his editor (Howard Da Silva, the bartender from The Lost Weekend) for getting his previous story wrong. So, when a local millionaire dies, he wants to get it right. The authorities say it was suicide, but our reporter has reason to believe it was murder. And, together with the millionaire's daughter (Joan Perry), he's going to prove eveyrbody else wrong. Reagan played quite a few affable characters who won't let anything get him too down in these B movies, and it's a character type he always pulled off well, even if the plot isn't the greatest.
Thursday, July 3, marks the birth anniversary of actor George Sanders (1906-1972). TCM is marking the occasion with several of his movies, the most intriguing of which might be The Moon and Sixpence, at 11:15 AM Thursday. Based on the novel by Somerset Maugham, the movie tells the story of an artist much like Paul Gauguin, here named Charles Strickland (played by Sanders). Strickland starts the movie as a respectable middle-class man in Victorian London, living with his wife and kids. But he's got dreams of becoming an artist, so he abandonds them and moves to Paris to become an artist. His old friend Geoffrey (Herbert Marshall) tries to get him to go back to his wife, but after constantly using people, Strickland goes off to the South Seas, which is where we get the stunning Technicolor finale. Sanders is excellent as the self-absorbed jerk who in many ways is only a jerk because he has to be true to what he believes, with the other people around him not believing the same things.
Another actor named George -- George Montgomery -- shows up in the B western Riders of the Purple Sage, which is on FXM Retro at 6:00 AM Thursday. Montgomery plays Jim Lassiter, whose niece Jane (Mary Howard) was supposed to inherit some land, but who was screwed over by the local judge Dyer (Robert Barrat). Meanwhile, the judge's nephew Adam (Kane Richmond) is pursuing Jane. Judge Dyer has been using the vigilantes who would normally be formed into a posse for his own ends, those ends are no good. It's going to be Lassiter to the rescue in a rousing set-piece finale in which Lassiter gets rid of the bad guys without shooting them. It's a reasonable enough B western, but interesting because it's loosely based on the prominent western novel by Zane Grey. In the original novel, however, the baddies are Mormon polygamists trying to force Jane into marriage.
Friday is Independence Day, and TCM is celebrating the day during the morning and afternoon with classic movies appropriate for the occasion. However, there weren't too many movies made about the American Revolution, so it's pretty much the same movies we get every year. On the bright side, in the late 1930s Warner Bros. made a series of two-reelers in Technicolor showing various incidents in American history. A couple of these deal with the revolution, and natrually, TCM is showing those.
First, at 6:00 AM Thursday, is Give Me Liberty, which dramatizes the story of how Patrick Henry (John Litel) came to believe independence was the right move for the colonies, and then delivered the famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech.
At 8:45, you can catch Sons of Liberty, in which Claude Rains plays Haym Solomon, a Jewish man who helped finance the colonial army against the British
Finally, The Declaration of Independence (1:00 PM) posits that it was a close call whether a majority of the Continental Congress would support Jefferson's (there's John Litel again) declaration; the pro-declaration side had to spirit one of the delegates past the British to get him to Philadelphia.
The Friday Night Spotlight on TCM is the 100th anniversary of World War I, the "war to end all wars". (Oops.) This first Friday in July starts with Sergeant York, at 8:00 PM. Gary Cooper plays Alvin York, a poor farmer in the backwoods of Tennessee supporting a widowed mother and younger siblings who eventually turns devout Christian when he attends the church of Pastor Walter Brennan. (OK, there's some odd casting.) So far, so good, until World War I comes. York gets drafted, and doesn't want to go, to the point of trying to claim conscientious objector status. It doesn't work, and York gets shipped off to Europe, where he would become the most decorated American soldier in the war. June Lockhart, later of the TV show Lost in Space, plays York's kid sister, and child star Dickie Moore his kid brother.
As we know, Blair Kiel likes Nancy Drew. He'll be thrilled to know that the next movie series in the Saturday morning at 10:30 time slot on TCM is the four Nancy Drew movies from the late 1930s. The first, Nancy Drew: Detective, is on this Saturday at 10:30 AM. Bonita Granville plays the girl detective, who has the money and time to do her sleuthing thanks to her wealthy lawyer father (oh, there's John Litel again). The plot here, such as it is, involves a wealthy old lady who goes missing after making a big donation to Nancy's school. She and her boyfriend Ted (Frankie Thomas) investigate, and the investigation leads to a bunch of gangsters -- at least, it does after a bunch of improbable coincidences. The film is reasonably well made, even if the plots aren't so hot.
If we're going to have Blair Kiel on Saturday, then we're also going to have to have Lionheart, which is on Showtime Extreme at 8:45 AM and 4:00 PM Saturday. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Lyon, a member of the French Foreign Legion somewhere in Africa who gets word that his brother in the USA has been murdered. So Lyon deserts his post and heads for the US, with Foreign Legion MP chasing after him. He also needs money to get to Los Angeles where his brother's family lived, so when he comes upon a street fight for money, he takes part. Since he's Jean-Claude Van Damme, that's the one thing he can actually do (as opposed to, say, acting) he's good at street fighting, and soon he's in LA and the underground street-fighting scene, where he engages in a variety of fights in odd locations with odd opponents. But of course, that's why you go to see a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. Someone will chock, but it won't be him.
Original Post