Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 14-20, 2022. The NCAA basketball tournament begins this weekend, and I assume a lot of you will be pulling your hair over Wisconsin's underachieving. So take some of the stress out of your life by watching a bunch of good movies. Heck, I've even included a baseball movie since I know a lot of you like that sport. We've got stuff from the 1930s through the late 1980s, and even a movie that will give you some good ideas for dinner. As always, all times are ni Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Norma Shearer was the wife of MGM producer Irving Thalberg, but he very famously didn't want her to do the role that won her the Oscar, in The Divorcee. (At least, not at first.) You can see it at 9:15 AM Monday. Shearer plays Jerry, part of a group of bright young things in the era just before the Depression who enjoy living the good life. She marries Ted (Chester Morris) and has a good friend in Don (Robert Montgomery), while tragic Paul (Conrad Nagel) gets in a car crash and marries the woman he disfigured instead of Jerry whom he really loved. Meanwhile, Ted starts stepping out on Jerry with other women. Jerry decides that if Ted can do that to her, then dammit, she's going to do the same thing to Jerry by stepping out with Don. However, this being the late 1920s, there's a decided double standard in which men can commit adultery and women can't. Ted is pissed and banishes Jerry, who starts living it up until she runs into Paul who is now thinking of divorcing his wife.
Showing up in the FXM rotation is Young Frankenstein. It's got two airings on Monday, at 4:00 AM and 1:10 PM. Gene Wilder plays Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, who at the start of the movie is a med school professor in the US. But he finds out that he's inherited the family estate in Transylvania, where his grandfather supposedly did the experiments for which the Frankenstein family is known. Frederick leaves his fiancée Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn) behind and goes off to Transylvania, where he discovers that Grandpa did indeed try to reanimate the dead. And Frau Blücher (Cloris Leachmann) is trying to get Frederick to start up those experiments again. Assistant Igor (Marty Feldman) gets a brain, but screws up and gets the wrong brain to put into the monster (Peter Boyle), so while the reanimation works, it produces a monster who isn't quite stable, especially having a severe fear of fire. And, needless to say, the townsfolk are terrified of the new monster.
Apparently, the baseball season isn't going to be canceled after all. But for those of you who can't get enough of the sport, you might want to watch The Stratton Story, at 6:00 PM Tuesday on TCM. James Stewart plays Monty Stratton, a Texas farm boy who because of his size is a pretty darn good baseball picture. This gets him a tryout with the Chicago White Sox. There, he meets Ethel (June Allyson), and the two fall in love, although the separation is going to be difficult when Monty makes the team. Monty eventually pitches for four years in the majors. But in November, 1938, he has a hunting accident on his farm in which pellets sever an artery in his leg forcing doctors to amputate it. Monty, despite not being able to transfer weight to his prosthetic leg, still coaches baseball players and tries to develop a style that will allow him to pitch effectively. Eventually, he makes it back to the minors, although it's in classes that no longer exist today -- they used to have classes below single-A. If it seems ridiculous, note that it's actually based on a true story.
It's been quite some time since I've seen National Lampoon's Vacation. It'll be on StarzEncore Classics at 9:45 AM Wednesday. Chevy Chase plays Clark Griswold, father in a stereotypical American middle-class family who has a wife Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) and two teenaged kids Rusty and Audrey (Anthony Michael Hall and Dana Barton respectively) and lives in suburban Chicago. He decides that the family's summer vacation is going to be to Wally World, one of the great American amusement parks, out in California. Despite his wife's plea to take the family by plane, which will give them more time at the park, Clark insists on taking an epic road trip, which will also give the family more time to bond together. However, Dad is well-meaning but incompetent, and everything that could go wrong along the way does, to an even more extreme extent than what most of us who have taken long road trips have personally experienced. The movie was successful enough that multiple sequels were made.
We've got a couple more foreign films this week, starting with Mon Oncle, at 2:00 AM Thursday on TCM. French mime Jacques Tati reprises his role as M. Hulot, a Mr. Bean-like character, except that we see he has a family in the form of a married sister, Madame Arpel (Adrienne Servantie). She's married to Charles (Jean-Pierre Zola) and has a young son Gerard (Alain Becourt). Mom is way overprotective, so Gerard loves spending time with his uncle, a good-hearted but aimless sort who you ask yourself how he's going to live in his retirement. Dad runs a plastic family and the family lives in an ultra-modern house, so Dad gets the idea of offering Hulot a job at the factory, along with being able to live with the rest of the family. Mom, meanwhile, decides to hold a big party to introduce Hulot to the Arpels' set, especially since one of the neighbors is single and might be a suitable match for him, at least in Mme. Arpel's mind. Yeah right. Things don't quite go the way she planned, but things also have a way of working out in the end.
Thursday is St. Patrick's Day, and normally TCM would run a bunch of Irish-themed movies. But since they're doing 31 Days of Oscar this March, they can't. So a movie like The Quiet Man gets relegated to Epix2 at 8:00 PM Thursday. John Wayne plays Sean Thornton, an American arriving in Ireland and looking to get to Inisfree. Both of Sean's parents have died, so Sean wants to go back to the old country and find out what happened to the farm his mother came from. The widow Tillane (Mildred Natwick), who now owns the land, might be willing to sell it, but Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen) also wants to buy it. Will also has a spinster sister Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara), and Sean falls in love with her, but Will doesn't want to let Sean marry her because of the land dispute. Eventually Sean is going to have to fight Will to earn his rightful place in Inisfree society. John Ford directed a lot of this on location in Ireland, and lays on the doe-eyed view of the old country extremely thick.
Friday on TCM brings films from the 1970s. Turning Neil Simon plays into movies was big in the 70s, and we get a string of them on Friday afternoon, with the last being The Sunshine Boys at 6:00 PM. Walter Matthau plays Willy Clark, a crotchety old actor who was big in the vaudeville days but is now reduced to trying to get work in TV commercials with the help of his agent and nephew Ben (Richard Benjamin). But a big opportunity comes up with a TV producer wants to do a special on the history of comedy. Willy Clark was part of an act with Al Lewis (George Burns), and the producer would like them to team up again to do one of their old skits. The problem is, the pair, like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, had an acrimonious breakup, and when Willy and Al meet each other again for the first time in decades, that hatred comes immediately back to the fore -- it's easy to see why they broke up. Getting the two to reconcile is going to take quite some work. Burns is great and won the Oscar for his deadpan deliveries that constantly drive Matthau up a wall, and the movie gave Burns another 15 years of a career.
If you look at lists of Oscar winners, one of those acting winners that doesn't show up so often is Paul Lukas for Watch on the Rhine. TCM will be showing it at 10:00 AM Saturday. Lukas plays Kurt Muller, a German engineer married to American Sara (Bette Davis) has has been working in Europe for most of their married life. But the film opens in 1940, which is of course just after the start of World War II in Europe. Since Kurt is an anti-Nazi and has actually been working with Germany's underground resistance. The family returns to Washington DC and the home of Sara's socialite mother Fanny (Lucile Watson). Among the family's frequent houseguests are Romanian Count de Brancovis (George Coulouris) and his wife Marthe (Geraldine Fitzgerald). The count wonders why Kurt has a locked briefcase; the count, being a Nazi sympathizer, decides to work with the Nazi attachés in Washington (remember, the movie is set when the US was still a neutral country) to try to discover the truth about Kurt.
I'm not certain if I've mentioned the movie Joe Dakota before. It will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 1:24 AM Saturday, so this week it gets a mention. TV cowboy Jock Mahoney plays Joe Dakota, who comes riding into the town of Arborville, CA, looking for somebody called "The Old Indian". Everybody in town claims that one day, this guy just up and sold the land that comprises Arboville to Cal Moore (Charles McGraw), but it seems from the way nobody really wants to answer Joe's questions that they are being less than fully truthful with him. Oil has been struck in Arborville, and that means big money, so you can see why people would want the land. The only person who seems to be at all amenable to Joe is Jody Weaver (Luana Patten), daughter of the town's general store owner. Everybody else harbors a resentment that's liable to wind up in violence, such as the Grant brothers (Claude Akins and Lee Van Cleef), the town's enforcers.
The 80s movies on TCM Saturday night conclude with a really good foreign film, Babette's Feast at 5:00 AM Sunday. In Denmark in the middle of the 1800s, two sisters, Filippa (Bodil Kjer) and Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) are adult daughters of a minister who practices an austere sect of Lutheranism in a remote village on the northwest coast of Jutland. Philippa meets an opera singer Achille who loves her, while Martine is pursued by Swedish military officer Löwenhielm (Jarl Kulle). However, Dad nixes both romantic relationships. Fast forward to 1870; Dad has died and the two sisters are trying to keep the religious community going, when Babette (Stéphane Audran) shows up in the village looking for the sisters. She was Achille's mistress in Paris, and when the Franco-Prussian War broke out she was in danger, so Achille sent her here. She's a cook and willing to be a servant to the two sisters, also having a big effect on the religious sect. Decades later, the sisters are looking to commemorate the centenary of Dad's birth, when Babette informs them her subscription to the French Lottery has paid off, and she'd like to plan a feast for the religious community. Babette's Feast is one of those movies where it feels like not much happens, but under the surface, it's surprisingly profound.