Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 28-April 3, 2016. I'm sorry for the one-week hiatus, but I woke up Friday morning with a terrible sore throat and running a fever, and by the time I got home Friday evening, I didn't feel like doing much of anything on the computer. So I spent much of the weekend in bed trying to recuperate, and only got around to writing synopses on two or three movies I would have recommended. Sorry for missing a week. We're going to be entering a new month, and that means we're going to be getting a new Star of the Month on TCM. There are good movies on other channels, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is putting the spotlight on actor Dirk Bogarde on Monday morning and afternoon. A movie that a lot of cinephiles claim is great is Death in Venice, at 4:45 PM. I have to admit that I've always been loath to see this one, since I've read the original story by Thomas Mann and found it incredibly creepy. Bogarde plays German Count Gustav von Aschenbach, the man whose death is announced at the beginning of the story, while on holiday in Venice. One day on the beach, he spots a family speaking a language he doesn't recognize although he presumes it's Polish. They have an adolescent son who is just impossibly handsome, and Gustav starts obsessing over the boy, following the boy and his family through the city and trying to steal glances whenever possible. I told you it was creepy. But people who love the movie say that it's not about repressed pedophilia, but really about the search for beauty and perfection, or some nonsense like that.
I don't think I've recommended Gene Autry very often; that's largely because I've never been a particular fan of the singing cowboys. But Autry shows up on Encore Westerns this week in Texans Never Cry, at 5:10 AM Wednesday. (They don't cry; they just complain about cankles.) This one has him as his usual good guy, getting involved first with a rancher who is on the verge of being swindled out of the ranch due to mortgage hijinks. It turns out that this time he's really up against a counterfeiter, whose real scheme is to produce phony lottery tickets. Of course, the baddies figure out just who is on their trail, and hire a gun to try to bump off Autry before he can get to them. Eh, it's formulaic stuff, but the singing cowboy stuff was never meant to be anything more than formulaic, plus an opportunity for the cowboys to sing a couple of songs. Autry of course gets top billing; second billing goes to his horse.
Most of you will remember Maureen O'Sullivan from the Tarzan movies. One of her non-Tarzan movies shows up on TCM at 2:15 PM Tuesday: Stage Mother. She's not the mother; that honor goes to Alice Brady. Brady plays half of a high-wire duo who gives up performing for a while when she gets pregnant (the baby grows up to be O'Sullivan). But then hubby dies in an accident and, to make ends meet, Mom leaves the baby with her Boston relatives who don't like performers. Mom eventually makes enough money from the behind the scenes part of the performing world to take custody of her daughter, at which point she starts to push her daughter into performing, becoming the ultimate stage mother. Mom even goes so far as to try to break up her daughter's romantic involvements (Franchot Tone early in his career plays a painter; the other boyfriend is Phillips Holmes whose career never quite went anywhere).
I've recommended some of Sam Fuller's work before, simply because he's so different that his films are always interesting to watch no matter how uneven they are. Such is the case with Shock Corridor, which you can catch at 6:00 PM Wednesday. Peter Breck plays John Barrett, a reporter out to get a Pulitzer Prize. There's been a murder in an insane asylum, and although there were witnesses, the witnesses were all patients at the facility. So John has a "brilliant" idea, which is to get himself declared insane so that he'll be sent to the same asylum, where he'll investigate the murder by interviewing the witnesses, and find out what really happened! Um, yeah. So he poses as the brother of his girlfriend (Constance Tower) having an "incestuous" relationship with her, and the proceeds to meet the various witnesses, while trying to keep safe from the other patients in the asylum. But as he begins to put the pieces of the murder together, he mught just be going insane himself....
Some of you will certainly enjoy Midnight Cowboy, which is on Encore Classics at 12:35 AM Wednesday. Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a young man from Texas who gets the bizarre idea that he's going to go off to New York City and become a male hustler making a pile of money that way. Unsurprisingly, when he gets to the big city he finds out that things aren't as easy as he first thought. Until he meets Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a small time con artist. Ratso has a place to stay even if it's not much, and can teach Buck the ropes. But even this life isn't exactly enjoyable, especially since it turns out that Ratso is really sick and probably dying, and needs to get the hell out of New York and down to someplace like Florida with a better climate. It's not as if the two of them are going to do much better if they follow Ratso's naive dream of getting down to Florida, though. I've always been left cold by this movie although a lot of other people swear by it and it did after all win the Best Picture Oscar.
Returning to FXM Retro this week after a long absence is Untamed. You can catch it at 11:20 AM Friday and 11:45 AM Saturday. Tyrone Power plays Paul, a Boer leader in 1840s South Africa who travels to Ireland to buy some horses, which is where he meets feisty Katie (Susan Hayward). She's married but the two fall in love. Then the potato famine hits, and Katie and her husband emigrate to South Africa in search of new fertile land. So you know she's going to run into Paul again; this time, he's leading the Irish emigrés on a trek through the interior of the country to their new land. Unfortunately they're attacked by the Zulus and Katie's husband dies. But Paul is too concerned with his people's political situation to romance Katie. Meanwhile, Kurt (Richard Egan) develops the hots for Katie, but the feeling is definitely not mutual. You know that Paul and Kurt are going to have it out over Katie by the finale.... It's not the greatest, but there was some location shooting done which looks lovely in Cinemascope and color.
Friday is the first day of a new month, and that means no more Merle Oberon as Star of the Month. Instead, we're going to be getting Judy Garland, and her movies are going to be airing Fridays in prime time on TCM. Although Garland is known for all those MGM musicals she did in the 1940s, the month actually kicks off with her way down the bill at Fox, in Pigskin Parade at 8:00 PM, which is the story of one of those out of the way colleges finding a hick to be their star football player, giving them the chance to take on the big boys from the east.
That's followed at 9:45 PM by Listen, Darling, which has Judy playing the young daughter of a widow, and Judy and her boyfriend Freddie Bartholomew playing matchmaker for Mom (Mary Astor), after Mom announces she's going to marry a guy that the young folks just know Mom doesn't really love and who would be wrong for the whole family.
I can't recall the last time I recommended The Shootist, but it's airing again this week on Encore Westerns at 7:20 AM and 6:20 PM Saturday. John Wayne plays JB Books, who rides in to Carson City in early 1901 looking for an old doctor friend (James Stewart). Doc confirms the news JB heard from a doctor in another town: he's got a cancer, and this being the beginning of the 20th century, the Big C is most definitely terminal. JB was a noted gunman in his younger days, and now that he's dying just wants to die in peace and quiet and with his dignity intact. So he takes a place at the rooming house run by Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall) with help from her son Gillom (Ron Howard). Of course, news of Books' presence in town gets out, and all sorts of people want to meet him because they really want to be the ones to kill him. And then the other people don't want a man like this in their presence at all. The movie is probably better remembered as John Wayne's final film, but it stands on its own as a pretty darn good western.
Saturday night should see the return of The Essentials to TCM. Normally it begins in March, right after the end of 31 Days of Oscar, but when the time came in January for Robert Osborne and Sally Field to record the wraparounds for the series, Robert had a bad flu. And by the time he was better, Sally Field was out on the road so she couldn't record them. They couldn't get together until sometime in March apparently.
If you'd like something so bad it's good, stay tuned for TCM Underground this week. At 2:00 AM Sunday, you can see Abar, the First Black Superman. Predating Goalline by several years, the plot involves a black scientist who moves his family into an all-white neighborhood, only to find that every single white person around is the most incredible racist out there. So the father hires a bodyguard, Abar, to help deal with the racism and violent threats. Meanwhile, Dad in his laboratory is working on a serum that can make rabbits invincible, so Abar eventually takes the serum, and sure enough, turns into a superhero. Well, more or less. Abar is almost as much a moral uplifter as he is a superhero. The acting is awful; the budget is nonexistent so the superhero effects are terrible; and the plot doesn't even make much sense. But dammit, some of these low-budget failures are just so much fun!
Janet Gaynor's career didn't continue too long after her triumph in A Star is Born. Just a year later, she retired from the movies after making The Young in Heart, which TCM is showing at 8:00 PM Sunday. Gaynor plays the daughter in a family of con artists -- the remainder of the family is father Roland Young, mother Billie Burke, and son Douglas Fairbanks Jr. They get caught out on the French Riviera and instead of being jailed are given train fare to anywhere outside of France. On a train to London, the meet newly wealthy heiress Minnie Dupree, and save her life when there's a train crash. She's so grateful for this that she invites the family to live with them. The family sees this as their opportunity to scam the rich lady into making them the beneficiaries in her will, but she has such an influence on them that the family seems to be beginning to turn honest! This is all a comedy, so our con artist family is basically portrayed as reasonably good people. Richard Carlson plays Gaynor's love interest; Paulette Goddard is paired with Fairbanks. There's also a vintage concept car which motor heads will enjoy seeing.