Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, week of March 24-30, 2014

Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of March 24-30, 2014.  First off, I need to apologize for leading you astray last week in which Carson on TCM interviews were going to run.  Of course, it wasn't my fault; whoever keys in what goes to air on TCM keyed in the wrong set of interviews and aired the ones that were originally supposed to air this Tuesday.  So instead, the six that were supposed to air on March 18 will now be showing up Tuesday night at 8:00 PM, ending with Red Skelton, even though the rest of Tuesday night's prime-time lineup is going to be dedicated to Gene Kelly, the last of the interviewees from what was supposed to air this Tuesday.  But more on the Gene Kelly movies later.  We still have one more night of Mary Astor films, and one more Friday of Anthony Bourdain looking at food in the movies, as well as some other fun stuff.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

Imagine a movie like Three Coins in the Fountain, with its three young women in Europe search of husbands, only set ten years later and moved from Rome to moderately exotic Madrid.  The result might roughly be The Pleasure Seekers, which is airing at 4:00 AM Monday on FXM/the Fox Movie Channel.  Ann-Margret plays one of the women, a nightclub singer.  She's rooming with Carol Lynley, who's got a thing for her boss (Brian Keith), although the boss is married (to Gene Tierney).  Into all this comes Lynley's old friend from school, Pamela Tiffin.  Ann-Margret winds up getting involved with a doctor (Andre Lawrence) who would like to work with the poor, while Tiffin gets mixed up with playboy Anthony Franciosa.  This was shot on location so there's a lot of location shooting and vintage set design if they show a letterboxed Cinemascope print.  And, of course, there's no mention of the stifling political situation in Francisco Franco's Spain.

Monday night's TCM lineup includes several movies with sailors on shore leave, starting with The Fleet's In, at 8:00 PM.  Dorothy Lamour plays the Countess of Swingland, which here means a famously aloof nightclub singer at a club where all the sailors go when the navy docks in Frisco.  Eddie Bracken plays Barney, a sailor who tells all the other sailors that his shipmate and pal Casey (William Holden) is a lothario, having wound up in a photo with a Hollywood actress.  In fact, Casey is quite bashful, but Barney has bet the other sailors that Casey can get the Countess to kiss him!  Betty Hutton makes her big screen debut playing Lamour's roommate, and has wonderful chemistry with Bracken, so you can see why they were paired together again in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.  The senior set might remember the song "I Remember You", which would become a hit in the 1960s.

As I mentioned earlier, Carson on TCM this week was supposed to end with a Gene Kelly interview, followed by a bunch of his films.  The interviews will be different, but the Gene Kelly films will still be there, although the lineup is mostly non-musicals.  One of Kelly's earliest movies was The Cross of Lorraine, airing at 9:30 PM Tuesday.  In this one, Kelly plays a French soldier who is part of the army fighting Hitler at the beginning of World War II.  Of course, the French surrendered in June 1940, and the French soldiers were sent to POW camps   This having been made in 1943, it unsurprisingly shows the Nazis running the POW camp (led by Peter Lorre) as a bunch of preternatural brutes.  Some soldiers resist; others, like Hume Cronyn, collaborate with the Nazis.  Some try to save their skin, and when the chance comes to redeem themselves by leading an uprising against the Nazis, join in the fight the Resistance is waging.  There's certainly propaganda here, but it is a well-made movie.

Since I know how much you all like early talkies, I'll recommend another early talkie as part of Mary Astor's final week being TCM's Star of the Month.  This one is The Runaway Bride, at 4:45 AM Thursday.  Astor plays that runaway bride, who starts off the movie about to marry idle rich David Newell.  However, she discovers that he has no ambition, and decides not to marry him, but he locks her in the motel suite until he can get a minister to perform the wedding.  In the mean time, a jewel thief come into the suite, and before getting in a shootout with the cops, hides a whole bunch of jewelry in Mary's handbag!  Mary runs away, not wanting to have anything to do with the police, and changes her name taking a job as a cook for a rich guy.  And then more jewel thieves come around looking for the jewels that they just know Mary has to have, along with the woman who get Mary this job.  An odd little talke, directed by Donald Crisp, who wisely decided to focus on acting after making this movie.

On Thursday night, TCM is putting the spotlight on actor Don Murray.  One of his films that I haven't recommended before is Shake Hands with the Devil, which is on at midnight Friday (or 11:00 PM Thursday LFT).  Murray plays an Irish-American medical student in early 1920s Dublin, a time when the Irish Republican Army was fighting the occupying British soldiers.  Murray gets involved in the conflict courtesy of his professor (James Cagney) who moonlights for the IRA at night.  Eventually Michael Collins (played by Michael Redgrave) would sign a peace treaty with the UK, but some of the IRA didn't like that treaty, and continue to fight the now free Irish state.  Murray becomes conflicted when the IRA take Dana Wynter hostage, and he as a medical student vows to do no harm.  Cagney si quite good in a movie that doesn't romanticize the IRA.

March 28th is the birth anniversary of actor Louis Wolheim, who was quite successful during the silent era and making a successful transition to sound in films like All Quiet on the Western Front before his tragic death from a heart attack at the age of 50 in 1931.  TCM is showing a bunch of his films on Friday, including the excellent silent gangster film The Racket, at 12:15 PM Friday.  Wolheim plays Nick Scarsi, the gangster plying the city with booze in the 1920s, much to the consternation of police captain McQuigg (Thomas Meighan), who is the one honest cop on the force.  (Some things never change.)  Scarsi even gets McQuigg transferred out to a precinct in the rural part of the are.  But Scarsi has a problem, in the form of his kid brother Joe (George Stone).  Joe is a bit of a playboy and has a thing for fast cars and fast women, including a singer named Helen Hayes (played not by the actress of that name, but tragic Marie Prevost).  Joe gets in an accident in McQuigg's rural precinct, and that gives him a chance to get the goods on Nick.

Anthony Bourdain returns to TCM for one final Friday night of movies with food scenes.  The night kicks off with a movie to broaden the horizons of the philistines here: Babette's Feast, at 8:00 PM.  The scene is 19th century Denmark.  Two daughters of a Lutheran pastor in a small village feel a moral obligation to take care of him, and then eventually of his congregation, leading to their becoming spinsters and rejecting eminently good loves.  One of those becomes a successful opera singer in France, and when Babette, a cook he knows, suffers the murder of her husband and child, the guy sends Babette to the old Danish sisters to work for them as a cook and maid so she'll be safe.  It changes all of their lives.  Not just the cook, of course, and not even just the two sisters, but everybody in the village learns from her as she prepares the simple Danish dishes they know.  And then the time comes for her to return to France, so the villagers insist that Babette cook just one extravagant meal for them.  Wonderful cinematography meets a fairly simple story to make a true classic.

Bourdain, or whoever selected when to schedule the films, must have a vicious sense of humor, because the end of Friday night's lineup includes:
Soylent Green, which has a completely different type of food, at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT);
Night of the Living Dead, with human brains serving as food, at 1:45 AM Saturday; and
Bette Davis serving a memorable dinner on a silver platter to Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, at 3:30 AM Saturday.

Last week saw the last of the Hildegarde Withers detective movies on Saturday mornings, which means that TCM is moving to a new series: the "Mexican Spitfire" series.  Lupe Velez plays the "Spitfire", a daffy young woman from Mexico named Carmelita (in fact, the first of the movies, on this Saturday at 10:30 AM, is called The Girl From Mexico), who meets an American PR man (Donald Woods) and thanks to some meddling frmo his Uncle Matt (Leon Errol), winds up getting married to Carmelita.  That more or less is the plot of the first movie; future entries in this generic ethnic mismatch comedy series had Carmelita in various American locales, trying to bridge the baffling cultural divide.  This was originally not planned to be a film series, but the first of the movies was su popular at the box office that RKO decided to cash in.

We mentioned one film made in a mildly exotic location at the beginning, and we'll wrap up with another: Kangaroo, at 7:15 AM Sunday on FXM.  This time, as you can guess, the location is Australia, which wasn't nearly as accessible to Americans back in the early 1950s when the movie was made -- one of the first Hollywood movies made on location Down Under.  Maureen O'Hara wanted to make this story, a standard western-type about pioneers (her and Finlay Currie playing her father).  Into their homestead come Peter Lawford and Richard Boone.  They're a pair of conmen, with Lawford trying to get into Currie's good graces by claiming that he's Currie's long-lost son, which would make him O'Hara's sister.  This presents a problem when Lawford finds himself falling in love eith O'Hara.  Never mind the perception of a romance between a borther and sister, there's also the con game which you know thanks to the Production Code is going to wind up failing.