Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 15-22, 2015. Unfortunately, TCM only has shorts scheduled through Wednesday morning, so I don't have any good shorts to recommend. However, there are enough featurs showing up as always: a foreign film; Star of the Month Ann Sothern, and Audrey Hepburn looking stylish as a thief in Givenchy, among others. And as usual, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Fire is the theme of Monday's movies on TCM, and one of the best is The Wages of Fear, at 1:45 PM. Yves Montand plays one of a group of men stuck in some backwater South American town with no prospects of getting out, as the only road leads to the oilfields, nd they don't have jobs to earn the money for a plane ticket. But then opportunity strikes when one of the oil wells catches fire. In order to put the fire out, the oil drillers need nitroglycerine that they can only get from town, so our four stranded men can transport that and earn the money. However, there's a catch, and it's a mighty big one. Nitroglycerine is highly explosive if not handled properly, and the trucks they'll be driving aren't particularly well-equipped with safety features. And, they have to drive over treacherous, twisty, poorly-maintained mountain roads. Nice work if you can get it.
Tuesday is St. Patrick's Day, the day when people get drunk and pretend to be Irish-American. TCM is celebrating the day with several Irish- and Irish-American themed movies, including The Flying Irishman at 9:15 AM. The title refers to Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, who actually plays himself in the movie. Corrigan was an Irish-American who restored a plane and planned to fly it first across the US, and then over the Atlantic. Due to questions over the safety of the aircraft, the authorities wouldn't let him fly over the Atlantic, so when he took off from New York to go back west, he simply turned the plane around, flew east, and when he arrived in Ireland, said golly gee, I was flying over the clouds and my instruments weren't working properly. I had no idea I was flying over the Atlantic. Yeah riht. But it earned him the nickname "wrong way" and the sort of fram that the Kardashians earned from their sex videos. At least Corrigan's fame was brief.
Somebody whose fame lasted quite a bit longer is English King Henry VIII. He story is told fancifully in The Private Life of Henry VIII, airing at 6:30 AM Wednesday on TCM. Henry (Charles Laughton in an Oscar-winning performance) is famous for being the free-range a**hole who wanted to divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragon when she wouldn't bear him a son an dhe was in love with Anne Boleyn (Merle Oberon). So he broke off from the Catholic Church and formed his own branch of Christianity that allowed him to divorce. The romance with Boleyn was relatively short livedwhen he met Jane Seymore (Wendy Barrie) and then three more wives. Boleyn of course was beheaded; the wife he liked best according to this movie is wife #4 Anne of Cleves (Elsa Lanchester, his real life wife). But the movie belongs to Laughton, not the wives. Laughton gives a thoroughly entertaining performace as the spoiled king.
You may recall Katrina and the Waves walking on sunshine. TCM Star of the Month Ann Sothern, on th eother hand, will be Walking on Air at 3:00 AM Thursday. Sothern plays the adult daughter of a wealth man (Henry Stephenson) who has a fiancÉ her father doesn't like. So she takes out a classified ad to look for another man to play the part of a prospective fiancÉ even worse than the one Dad already dislikes. A guy (Gene Raymond) shows up for that assignment, but without realizing that his roommate is taking a job with the Dad as a sort of bodyguard who is to keep Sothern from eloping. Mistaken identities abound. Rounding out the cast is Jesse Ralph as Sothern's spinster aunt. This is the sort of comedy that was being made frequently, so there's not much new here, but it's all pleaant enough.
A film that sounds like it took some of the same plot elements off the shelves that Walking on Air did is Fifth Avenue Girl, airing at 4:30 PM Friday on TCM. Here we have a disgruntled wealthy man (Walter Connolly) who has a wife (Verree Teasdale) and kids who don't show any interest in him. So he hires the unemployed Ginger Rogers to play the part of a girlfriend, if only to show the rest of his family that they're not the only ones who can make waves around the place. Rogers proceeds to have an effect on the entire family. Eventually Dad sees one of his original goals achieved when he gets his son to take a more active role in the family business. But things get a lot more complicated when the son (Tim Holt) proceeds to fall in love with Rogers and also objects to Dad's affair with her, not realizing that it's a phony affair for show.
A movie that I haven't seen in a while returned to FXM Retor this month: Island in the Sun. It's airing this week .at 7:20 AM Thursday and 4:00 AM Friday Set on a fictitious island in the British West Indies, James Mason plays Fleury, one of the island's most prominent white citizens who thinks he can take a prominent place in society in the period leading up to and beyond independence from Britain. One of the indepence leaders, involved with the sugar workers' union, is Boyeur (Harry Belafonte), who is carrying on an affair with a white woman (Joan Fontaine). Meanwhile, Fleury is scared that his wife is being pursued by new arrival Carson (Michael Rennie), and their daughter (Joan Collins) is being pursued by the colonial governor's son. Rounding out all this steamy love is that the governor's (white) aide is carrying on a relationship with the lovely but black Dorothy Dandridge. Into all this there's a secret revealed about the Fleury family.... Island in the Sun is an overheated mess at times, but has lovely location shooting.
Also on FXM Retro is How to Steal a Million, Thursday at 3:30 AM and 12:55 PM. Audrey Hepburn plays Nicole, a stylish woman driving through the streets of Paris who hears about a piece of art being auctioned off from her father's (Hugh Griffith) collection. This is a problem, because she knows her father is really a forger! Complicating matters is that when she goes to be, she's woken up by a would-be thief named Simon (Peter O'Toole) trying to take one of the family artworks that's actually a forgery, and she can't really prosecute him for all the obvious reasons. Dad's planning to show the family's prozed Renaiisance sculpture at a museum, which is also a forgery, but Dad's not known for forging sculpture, and doesn't have any insurance on it. The museum, however, wants to insure themselves, and when Dad co-signs the insurance, that sets the clock in morion for having the sculpture inspected. So Nicole gets Simon to help her steal the family's own sculpture from the museum. Rounding out the cast is Eli Wallach as an art-crazy man who falls in love with Nicole, and Charles Boyer as O'Toole's boss.
Ferrari will be happy to know that his favorite actor will be showing up in a movie on TCM: Don Ameche. That film is the horror movie Picture Mommy Dead, at 3:15 AM Friday. Ameche plays Mr. Shelley, whose wife (Zsa Zsa Gabor) died tragically in a fire, leading to the traumatization of their daughter (Susan Gordon) and the daughter's spending years in a mental hospital. In the meantime, Dad has remarried, to the daughter's former governess (Martha Hyer)! Daughter, upon returning to the house, wonders whether she might have been responsible for her mother's death. The step-mother, meanwhile, isn't helping matters any. She's trying to drive her step-daughter insane because the step-daughter has the other half of the dead mother's estate; stepmom having spent her way through the half that Dad got. Shades of any number of older movies (Gaslight and Strait-Jacket, anybody) in this fun piece of schlock.
Those of you who like westerns may enjoy Gun Fury, airing at 1:35 PM Saturday on Encore Westerns. Rock Hudson plays Ben, a man engaged to Jennifer (Donna Reed). He's taking the stagecoach west to marry her and set up a homestead, having fought in the long Civil War that he hated. He's not the only one who hated the war; you've got all those southerners who lost. Frank (Philip Carey) leads a gang of disaffected Confederates who have decided that they're still going to do their part to fight the war by holding up stagecoaches. The pick the one in which Ben is riding, and shoot him and leave him for dead. Frank sees Jennifer, and he wants her. This is a step too far for one of the other members of the gang, especially since Jennifer doesn't care for Frank. Never mind the fact that Ben didn't actually die (they wouldn't kill off Rock Hudson in the first reel now, would they?) and is looking for revenge. The movie was originally shot in 3-D, which will explain why so many characters seem to be throwing things at the audience.
Our last feature for this week has two aging stars, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. That movie is the last of the four they made together: Critic's Choice, at 6:15 PM Sunday. Bob Hope plays the critic Parker Ballantine, a man who is divorced from first wife Ivy (Marilyn Maxwell) and now on wife #2 Angela (Lucille Ball). It seems a happy marriage, until Angela gets the idea that she could be a writer too! And following that old adage to write about the things you know about, Angela writes a play about her experiences with her family, which of course presents problems because her two sisters and mother are still very much alive. Further complications ensue when Parker insists on doing the review for the play, and finds that it's not very good. Meanwhile, Angela is also experiencing the "joys'" of getting her play produced, and that ex-wife is still around.
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