Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 11-17, 2013. Free Agency begins this week in the NFL, which brings the exciting question, "Where will Greg Jennings wind up?" Uh, that's not particularly exciting, and we all know it. So if you want a bit of excitement in your life, why not get it by watching some good movies? As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's first selection is The Light Touch, which is airing at 3:30 PM Monday on TCM. Made by MGM on location in Italy, the movie stars Stewart Granger as an art thief stealing a painting from a Sicilian church for an art-theft syndicate led by George Sanders. Granger, however, gets the brilliant idea of trying to double-cross everybody else. He's going to claim the paiting got lost, make copies, and then sell both the forged copies and the original! Of course, you need an artist for this, and Granger picks the lovely young Pier Angeli. You know there's going to be a problem, and that problem is that he falls in love with her and finds that she's got a conscience. George Sanders is good as always, and you've got character actors Norman Lloyd (still alive at 98!) and Mike Mazurki as members of the crime ring to go along with the location photography.
Greer Garson returns for another night of her turn as Star of the Month on Monday, and TCM is showing one which surprisingly doesn't get as much coverage as a lot of the other prestige pictures of the period: Madame Curie. Garson plays the title role, the Polish born science student who meets Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon), falls in love with him, and marries him. They start doing experiments together when a uranium sample is giving off energy in an unexpected way. The reason is the presence of the chemical element radium, the discovery of which makes the Curies famous. Pierre, however, would die tragically in a traffic accident, while Marie would get radiation-induced cancer. Watch for Van Johnson in a small role that's effectively a screen test: he was supposed to do A Guy Named Joe, but wsa in a car crash that required getting a metal plate in his head. So MGM gave him a brief role in this to see how bad he'd look with that metal plate. He passed the test, got the part in A Guy Named Joe, and went on to a long, successful career.
Moving ahead to Tuesday during the day, you coudl watch the strange Air Hawks, at 3:00 PM on TCM. Ralph Bellamy, who was usually the "other" guy in romantic comedies, plays the head of an airplane company trying to get a contract with the US government to deliver air mail. He's up against character actor Douglass Dumbrille, who owns a rival airline, and also has a secret weapon: a special energy ray that, when fired at an airplane, causes the engines to lose power, sending the planes crashing back to Earth. That's kind of a problem when you're trying to deliver air mail. Watch also for a brief appearance from Wiley Post. Today, he's best remembered as the pilot in the crash that killed him and Will Rogers, but back in the 1930s he was a popular and heroic pilot setting aviation records.
Tuesday night on TCM sees justice meted out as it supposedly was in the Old West. One of the most famous "judges" from that era was Roy Bean, who was played by Walter Brennan in The Westerner, which is airing at 10:00 PM Tuesday. Brennan plays Bean as a hanging judge who metes out a sentence of hanging for almost everything, including to presumptive horse thief Gary Cooper, a stranger in town. Bean also has a thing for acress Lillie Langtry, which Cooper uses to get his execution stayed. Some more quick thinking gets Cooper exonerated, and he leaves town, winding up at a farm run by some homesteaders, who are Bean's other bete noire, he being on the side of the cattlemen. The farmer's daughter (Doris Davenport), having seen Bean's attempt to mete out injustice on Cooper, uses her female charms to try to convince Cooper to stay around and help out the farmers, which you know he's going to do.
Wednesday night's spotlight on TCM is on independent director Lionel Rogosin. After seeing Italian neo-realist cinema and after a trip to Africa, Rogosin decided to become a filmmaker with an eye on social issues such as race relations and pacifism. His first work, On the Bowery (showing on TCM at 8:00 PM and repeated at 2:45 AM Thursday, looks at life on New York City's Bowery as seen through the eyes of the drunks who populate the district.
That's followed at 9:15 PM (with a second showing at 4:00 AM Thursday) of Come Back, Africa. Filmed in South Africa, this movie tells the story of the indignity faced by Africans under White rule through the eyes of one composite Zulu family in South Africa, where the Apartheid system was an omnipresent part of life.
Thursday night brings a bunch of double agents to TCM. The night kicks off with a movie that I've recommended before, but I don't believe has aired on TCM, only the Fox Movie Channel: 13 Rue Madeleine, at 8:00 PM Thursday. James Cagney stars as a man training Americans to do espionage work during World War II. The first half of the movie is roughly in docudrama fashion, showing how the spies were trained. However, it's revealed that one of the people being trained might be a double agent. So, they feed that guy (played by Richard Conte) misinformation so that he'll out himself as a Nazi agent. That happens, but also results in the killing of another American agent, who had a vital role in an American mission. The only way that mission can be completed is if Cagney himself takes over the role. 20th Century-Fox made quite a few docudramas in the second half of the 1940s, including the excellent The House on 92nd Street, which follows at 9:45 PM.
George Brent was born on March 15, 1899. Since this Friday is March 15, TCM has taken the opportunity to show a whole bunch of Brent's movies. Most of them are with Bette Davsi, to whom Brent usually served as a foil. (Indeed, the day concludes with a Bette Davis documentary at 6:45 PM). One example of this is Housewife, at 8:45 AM. Davis and Brent play people who knew each other back when. Davis loved Brent, but he married Ann Dvorak. Years later, they meet again in New York where they're both working in the advertising world. Brent opens his own firm at his wife's insistence, and Davis is the one to save it by writing good advertising copy. So good that you'd think she could advertise herself to Brent and win him away from his wife. This is the sort of stuff that Bette Davis hated doing, and led to her running of to the UK to try to get out of her contract.
Over on the Fox Movie Channel, this week sees the return of a movie that I think hasn't shown up on the channel in four or five years: The Man Who Never Was, which you can catch at 6:00 AM Friday. The movie is based on the true story of Operation Mincemeat, which was a British plan to try to mislead the Nazis about the plans to invade Sicily during World War II. It was obvious to everybody that getting from Africa to Europe would be easiest through Sicily, since it's so much closer to Africa and the other fighting. As a result, the British wanted to try to get the Nazis to move some of their troops away from Sicily to Greece. The ruse involved fake documents that the Nazis should find telling of plans to invade Greece. But how to do that? British intelligence found a man who died of pneumonia, which could be mistaken for drowning, and made him up to look like a British officer, carrying documents of a personal nature that required a special delivery, and deposit the body off the coast of Spain. Clifton Webb plays the man who masterminds the operation; Robert Flemyng his second-in-command; and Gloria Grahame a woman who roomed with one of Webb's secretaries. Grahame's character is also roped in to the equally important scheme of convincing the Nazis (in the form of Stephen Boyd) that the dead guy they found is who the information on the body claims it is -- as the dead man's phony girlfriend.
Director Roberto Rossellini returns on Friday night on TCM. He and Ingrid Bergman caused a scandal when they fell in love while working on Stromboli (8:00 PM), in which Bergman plays a World War II refugee who's taken for a wife by an Italian living on Stromboli. It's a way out of the refugee camp for her, but she's in a loveless marriage. Anyhow, in fact, the rest of the night's movies are all movies directed by Rossellini that starred Bergman, whom he eventually married.
TCM's Essential this week is Tootsie, at 8:00 PM Saturday, in which Dustin Hoffmann plays a man who dresses up as a woman to get an acting gig. In fact, the entire Saturday night lineup on TCM is devoted to the films of Dustin Hoffman:
In Little Big Man at 10:00 PM, Hoffman plays a man who gets raised by Indians and then winds up fighting them;
in John and Mary at 12:30 AM Sunday, Hoffman and Mia Farrow meet at a bar for a one-night stand that turns into something more;
Hoffman is seduced by Anne Bancroft but winds up with Katharine Ross in The Graduate at 2:15 AM; and
Hoffman gets a messy divorce from Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer at 4:30 AM.
Sunday is St. Patrick's Day, when people pretend to be of Southern Irish descent mostly, it seems, by drinking a lot. TCM is marking the day with a bunch of Irish-themed movies that have a mostly doe-eyed view of the Irish and Irish-Americans, such as Three Cheers for the Irish, at 9:45 AM Sunday. Thomas Mitchell plays one of those great stereotypes, the Irish-American cop. He's got a daughter, Priscilla Lane, who has fallen in love, and intends to get married, to Dennis Morgan. There are a few problems, however. Mitchell, having reached 25 years on the force, is sent into compulsory retirement, and Morgan is his replacement. The bigger problem for Mitchell is that Morgan is Scottish. Horror of horrors. Can Mitchell learn to overcome his bigotry and like people of Scottish descent? Well, you should expect that the answer is yes, as this isn't the sort of movie the studios were making to be anything ut light-hearted fare.
Original Post
