Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 6-12, 2016. I've used my good taste to select a bunch of movies that I know you all will like. There's a new Star of the Month on TCM, as well as some other interesting programming features, and some movies returning to FXM Retro after a long break. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Now that we're into the first full week of a new month, we get the new Star of the Month on TCM: Marie Dressler. TCM will be showing Dressler's movies every Monday in June in prime time. Her movie career was fairly brief, since she died only a couple of years into the sound era. TCM is spending this first Monday with Dressler's silents. One that I don't think I've recommended before is The Patsy, airing at 11:15 PM Monday. Marie plays the mother in a family with two daughters, Marion Davies and Jane Winton. Mom looks kindly upon the older daughter (Winton), who has a boyfriend in Oliver Caldwell. Dad (Dell Henderson) and the younger daughter (Davies) are basically henpecked. But poor Marion has a crush on that boyfriend of her older sister's. So she decides to change her personality to get people to notice her. Watch for a scene in which she does her impressions of some of the great silent actresses of the era. If you've only thought of Davies as William Randolph Hearst's mistress who got her parts because of his bidding, watch this and she she really was quite talented.
I know how much you all like early talkies, so I'll recommend one this week: One Night at Susie's, at 10:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Billie Dove plays a chorus girl who has ambitions of becoming a bigger star. And she's found a guy who might be able to bankroll her: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Indeed, he's even written something to get her into a bigger part. However, he's the son of a gangster mother (Helen Ware), who doesn't like his choice of girls. Sure enough, Billie gets involved with a bad producer and kills him in self-defense, leading poor Doug to confess to a killing he didn't commit to keep his girl out of prison! And while in prison, Doug keeps writing star vehicles for Billie, but will anybody be willing to produce the play?
It's interesting material with a good cast, so in some ways it's a shame that this came along at the beginning of the sound era when people were still learning how to get around the technical challengs of sound film.
A film returning to FXM Retro after a long absence is Stanley and Livingstone, which you can catch at 7:15 AM Friday. You probably recognize the two names. Dr. David Livingstone (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) was a British missionary and explorer who went off to Africa in the mid 19th century to find the source of the Nile River, and presumably to proselytize those natives and turn them into good Christians. Well, communications being what they were in the day Livingston went unheard from for years, and people feared he was dead. Enter James Gordon Bennett (Henry Hull), an American journalist. He wanted to get the scoop of what happened to Livingstone, and to that end he hired and bankrolled Henry Stanley (Spencer Tracy), a British-born American reporter, to go to Africa and find Livingstone. Stanley does find him, as you'll all probably remember the famous line, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume", but will the British people believe his evidence?
A western that I think I haven't recommended before is Foxfire, which you can catch at 6:40 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Westerns. Jane Russell plays Amanda, a wealthy socialite from back east who goes out to Arizona for the spa cure. While out west, she meets Jonathan (Jeff Chandler), who is a mining engineer. More than that, however, Jonathan is also of mixed heritage, having a white father and an Apache mother. But of course Amanda and Jonathan immediately fall in love, and Amanda wants to run off with John even though he's not the easiest person to be around because of all the crap he's had to face from being mixed race. Of course, the fact that he's looking for gold in an abandoned mine, and all the riches that would bring, might be influencing Amanda's decision. Dan Duryea plays a doctor who falls in love with Amanda, and Mara Corday, who shows up later this week in another recommended picture, plays Duryea's nurse. Technicolor and location shootings are plusses.
I don't know how long it's been since I've recommended Night Must Fall, but it's on again on TCM this Wednesday at 11:30 AM, and it's well worth a watch if you haven't seen it before. Robert Montgomery plays Danny, woh comes to the country cottage of elderly, wheelchair-bound Mrs. Bramson (Dame May Whitty) to be her handyman. Her caregiver, niece Olivia (Rosalind Russell) takes a dislike to Danny at first, sensing there's something not quite right about him. This feeling is heightened because of his heavy hat-box. Apparently, there's been a murder nearby, with the victim having been beheaded, and that hat-box of Danny's seems to be just the right weight to be holding a human head! But Mrs. Bramson likes Danny, which makes things complicated. What's Danny planning to do to her? Robert Montgomery had done a lot of light romantic comedy roles, and this dark turn was a big change for him, earning him a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
Annette O'Toole and Michael McKean return on Wednesday night to present the second week of the TCM Spotlight: Stage to Screen. Every Wednesday in June, they're presenting great stage plays that Hollywood (for the most part; there are some non-Hollywood movies here) adapted for the screen. Then, on Thursdays in prime time, they're presenting musicals, mostly in chronological order. This week's plays sees another round of dramas, kicking off at 8:00 PM with A Streetcar Named Desire, which one Vivien Leigh her second Oscar for her portrayal of Blanche Dubois. On Thursday, the musicals are up to the 1950s, which means that we get stuff like The King and I at 8:00 PM, this being the Yul Brynner version of the story that was originally known as Anna and the King of Siam (which will be coming up later in the month). Brynner won an Oscar for playing the King.
TCM is running a couple of low-budget sci-fi creature movies on Friday afternoon. One that I don't think I've recommended before is The Black Scorpion, which you can catch at 2:00 PM. As you can guess, it's scorpions that are the enemy here, and not for that awful "Wind of Change" song. No, these are the real arachnids. They've been living under central Mexico since time immemorial, but are brought to the surface thanks to a volcanic eruption and an earthquake, which together open a fissure to their subterranean world. Some of the good people of Mexico go missing, obviously killed by the scorpions, and it's up to scientists Hank (Richard Denning) and Artur (Carlos Rivas) to figure out what happened. Along the way, Hank falls in love with ranch owner Teresa (Mara Corday). The finale is in a soccer stadium in Mexico City. The scorpions were provided not by Ray Harryhausen, but by his predecessor Willis O'Brien, who had done King Kong 25 years earlier.
Another, much more bizarre, film, is back on FXM Retro: The Day the Fish Came Out, at 3:00 AM Sunday and again at 1:15 PM Sunday. Made in the late 60s and set in the near future of the early 1970s, the story deals with a British fighter plane carrying a secret nuclear weapon. That plane is forced to ditch just off an obscure Greek island, and the two pilots (Tom Courtenay and Colin Blakely) try to find that secret weapon. Meanwhile, the British government sends out an expedition to find the weapon, disguising the soldiers as people from a tourism company scouting out new locations for a tourist result, thereby explaining the bizarre costumes. Complicating matters is the discovery of ancient Greek artifacts, which brings in an archaeology crew and Candice Bergen. Meanwhile, the weapon has been found by a peasant goatherd; he's found this big, heavy, radioactivity-proof box, and is trying to figure out exactly what's in it. This is a strange little movie but a lot of fun; unfortunately the last time FXM ran it, they ran a bad pan-and-scan print.
On Friday nights in June, TCM is running a salute to the great director Billy Wilder. This Friday night looks at some of the movies Wilder directed in the 1950s. First up, at 8:00 PM, is Sunset Blvd., starring William Holden as a writer who gets roped into trying to save the screenplay of faded silent screen star Gloria Swanson;
At 10:00 PM you can catch Ace in the Hole, with Kirk Douglas as a shady journalist who comes upon a man trapped in a mine and milks the story for all it's worth;
at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT) there's Stalag 17, which has William Holden again trying to figure out who's spying on the soldiers in a POW camp so he can save his own skin; and
The Spirit of St. Louis at 2:15 AM Saturday, with James Stewart playing Charles Lindbergh, who made the first solo non-stop crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by airplane.
Alexander Hamilton has had a renaissance of popularity because of some recent Broadway musical about him. If you want to see a different look at the man, watch the film Alexander Hamilton, which is airing at 8:00 AM Sunday on TCM. First of all, the filmmakers took the daring step of having Hamilton played by a white guy, George Arliss. Hamilton, at the time of the events in the movie, was in his 30s; Arliss was in his early 60s. Well, some of the events, since the movie conflates a bunch of events in Hamilton's life. Hamilton, as the first Secretary of the Treasury, wanted the federal government to assume the states' debts. Hamilton's opponents, in an attempt to bring this plan down, set up a honey pot in the form of married Mrs. Reynolds (June Collyer). Not that the real-life Hamilton needed any encouragement to stray from his wife (played here by Doris Kenyon). But of course Hamilton beats them all. Dudley Digges plays a made-up Senator who hatches the honey pot plan, and Alan Mowbray plays George Washington. Arliss is good, but the material is f***ed up.