Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 17-23, 2014. We've got another night of Carson on TCM, more films with Star of the Month Mary Astor, more films with famous food scenes, and more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is St. Patrick's Day, when people Blair Kiel and Goalline make dubious attempts to try to be Irish for a day. TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with a whole bunch of Irish-themed movies, although I have to admit that I tend not to care for such movies from Hollywood because of the overly romanticized view of the Irish-Americans. However, I would like to point out that TCM is showing two of the Traveltalks shorts. James A. Fitzpatrick first visited Ireland for MGM back in 1934, which resulted in one of his earliest Technicolor shorts, Ireland, "The Emerald Isle" at 7:12 AM, or following The Key (which starts at 6:00 AM and runs 71 minutes). The other one is from much later -- 1949, and has Fitzpatrick visiting another part of the island: Roaming Through Northern Ireland, which comes on at about 3:07 PM, or just after Rising of the Moon (beginning at 1:45 PM and running 81 minutes). I always enjoy the Traveltalks shorts for the window into the past they present.
Monday night brings March's Guest Programmer to TCM. This month, it's George Pelecanos, who is a writer of detective fiction who has also worked on screenplays, such as for the HBO TV series The Wire. He's selected a lineup of four movies, two crime films and two westerns:
First, at 8:00 PM is The Outfit, which has Robert Duvall trying to avenge the murder by the Mob of his brother;
Next, at 10:00 PM is The Seven-Ups, which is set in the early 1970s NYPD as they try violently to hunt down a cop killer
In Monte Walsh at midnight Tuesday (11:00 PM Monday LFT), Lee Marvin plays an aging cowboy trying to cope with the changing west; and
Joel McCrea also finds the west is changing when he guards a shipment of gold in Ride the High Country, at 2:00 AM Tuesday.
If you want to see another interesting western, stay tuned to TCM, as at 2:30 PM Tuesday they're going to be showing Rancho Notorious. Arthur Kennedy plays Vern, a man whose lady was killed in a bank holdup. Vern wants revenge, so he decides to go after the people who did it, even if he's not quite certain who did it. The clues lead him to the Chuck-a-Luck, which is the titular notorious ranch/casino. It's run by Altar (Marlene Dietrich at 50), together with her partner/lover Frenchy (Mel Ferrer). The Chuck-a-Luck is a place where outlaws can go, and Altar won't care what they've done in the outside world -- they can have a bit of sancutary here. So Vern goes into the employ of Altar, trying to find which of the outlaws here were responsible for his woman's death. Odd little western (even if Dietrich had already done a western in Destry Rides Again), directed by Fritz Lang of all people.
Tuesday night continues with another round of vintage interviews in Carson on TCM. Another six interviews will be shown, followed by a night of films starring the last of them:
First up should be Lucille Ball, from 1977.
That's followed by Carol Burnett from 1979;
Candice Bergen is interviewed in 1984, follwed by
Don Adams in a 1980 interview.
Jack Benny, in 1973 near the end of his life, shows up, and finally is
Red Skelton in 1983.
The rest of the evening is given over to the films of Red Skelton, which you may or may not find funny; I know a lot of people find his humor an acquired taste.
Wednesday morning and afternoon on TCM are given over Betty Compson, a nearly forgotten actress who made 100 or so movies in the silent era, and then continued to work through the 1930s in lesser productions. And when I say "lesser", there's some pretty bleak stuff out there, such as The Gay Diplomat, at 2:45 PM. Ivan Lebedeff, who made a career out of playing bit-part Slavic characters, actually gets a lead here. He plays Orloff, a count who is sent to Bucharest to try to find a mysterious Romanian lady spy. What does he find? A whole bunch of glamorous women, any of whom could be the spy. Will he find the spy? Will she use her feminine charms to turn him against his country? Eh, there's a reason why Lebedeff was a bit player, and watching this movie will reveal that it's because he wasn't that much of an actor.
This week sees Star of the Month Mary Astor in another mix of movies, from famous stuff like The Palm Beach Story at 8:00 AM, to a relatively unknown early talkie: A Successful Calamity at 6:45 AM Thursday on TCM. Astor plays the second wife to George Arliss, who is a successful businessman with two children (Evalyn Knapp and William Janney). However, everybody around Arliss takes him for granted after he's gone to Europe to do government work after World War I: the son would rather play polo, the daughter has a society boyfriend but really loves the polo coach (a young Randolph Scott), and the wife has been promoting a piano player. How to get his family to notice him again? Why, Dad tells all of them that his business has gone belly-up! Immediately, everybody in the family changes their ways, but will they really be able to handle being poor? George Arliss is sadly generally forgotten even though he always gives lively performances even if the material is a bit stuffy; he's marvelous here.
If you're not so into Mary Astor, you could flip over to FXM/the Fox Movie Channel, and watch Champagne Charlie, at 4:50 AM Thursday. This is a perfect example of the sort of B movies Fox was making in the mid-1930s: short, with few recognizable stars. The movie starts off with a guy getting murdered on a ship. Two people -- ship's bartender Fipps (Herbert Mundin, whom you might remember as Much from The Adventures of Robin Hood), and a woman named Linda (Helen Wood -- both claim to have committed the murder. What really happened? The story, such as it is, is told in flashback which is how we learn about Charlie (Paul Cavanagh), who had connections with both of the people who are confessing to the murder. One other name you might recognize is Minna Gombell, who was Mimi, one of the subjects in the first of the Thin Man movies.
Friday night on TCM continues with Anthony Bourdain presenting the Friday Night Spotlight on movies about food, although this week only sees movies with famous food scenes as opposed to cooking in general. The night begins at 8:00 PM with Oliver!, the musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist in which all of the orphans ask for more gruel.
That's followed at 10:45 PM by The Gold Rush, which has Charlie Chaplin eating his shoe. Unfortunately, I have a feeling this isn't going to be Chaplin's original version of the movie, but a re-direction he did in the early 1940s in which he added voiceover, which I think reduces the impact of the film.
Then, at 12:15 AM Saturday, Rod Steiger is a glutton of an embalmer in The Loved One
Finally, at 2:30 AM Saturday, Paul Newman eats 50 hard-boiled eggs in one sitting in Cool Hand Luke.
TCM Underground brings a bigger movie, in having terms of name stars, that really does belong here: Zardoz, at 2:00 AM Sunday. In some future dystopia, Sean Connery plays Zed, one of a tribe of bandits who get their weapons from a giant stone head that spews the weapons from its mouth. Zed gets it in his mind to find out where the head comes from, so he stows away in its mouth. He winds up in a place that seems rather better off, where people live forever and can communicate telepathichally, but where all the men seem impotent. Zed, on the other hand, is quite virile, and perhaps can solve the fertility problem of the other world. Meanwhile, he starts learning about this other world and what "Zardoz" actually means. It's bizarre, it's got atrocious dialog, and it's got Sean Connery and his body hair to rival Blair Kiel going around wearing next to nothing. What a bizarre film.
Generally when you think of gorgeous Jean Harlow, you think of comedy, but she could also handle drama, as she did in Wife vs. Secretary, airing at 8:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Harlow plays the secretary to Clark Gable; Myrna Loy plays the wife. Gable is a successful businessman who sincerely loves his wife, but an important business deal is causing him to spend more time working with his secretary. His Mom (May Robson) puts it into the wife's head that she really should know what it means when a boss starts "working" more with the secretary, even though we know the secretary is really in love with James Stewart. Eventually, Gable has to head to Havana to complete that big business deal, and he needs his secretary to do all that typing and dictation. But by this time she's begun to fall in love with her boss. Everybody is good here, although Stewart is underused. This is the only movie he and Gable were both in, and they don't get any dialog together, only showing up close to together in one scene at a company party at a skating rink.
It's hard to believe, but it's closing in on two decades since Waterworld was first released. Considered a bomb when it was first released, it's showing up again on Encore at 4:00 PM Sunday, so you can judge for yourself how bad it is. The movie is set in a near-future dystopia in which the earth's polar icecaps have melted, causing a sea level rise that has inundated most land, leaving people to live on boats and trade with each other, trying to avoid pirates called "Smokers". Enter Kevin Costner, playing a "mariner" with gills; his mutant nature causes people to want to kill him. But he's helped by a woman and her daughter who believe he can take them to a mythical place called "Dryland"; the Smokers are after the girl because she's got a tattoo that's supposedly a map leading to Dryland. The acting is bad and the budget is monstrous, but you could say that about a lot of effects-driven movies being made nowadays.
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