Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 31-April 6, 2014. I know you're all nervous waiting for Wisconsin in the Final Four, so why not calm down with some good movies? It's the first week of a new month, and a very special month for TCM, as it's their 20th anniversary. They're also holding their annual TCM Classic Film Festival, so the normal programming is going to go a bit out of the window in April. The Star of the Month is going to be over one week later in April, but this week we've got several birthday salutes. And there are good movies on other channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The first movie I'll point out is this week's Silent Sunday Nights feature: The First Auto, at midnight tonight on TCM. The title is self-explanatory. Hank (Russell Simpson) is a middle-aged man in a small midwestern city in the 1890s, running the local livery stable and having a wife and adult son. Hank loves his horses, and runs one at the county fair and loses another to illness, which is presented as a tragedy. Son Bob (Charles Mack), however, is not interested in the horses, but in this new-fangled thing called the "horseless carriage"! Dad believes it's dangerous, and we see one of those contraptions get in an accident. It leads to a falling-out between the two, until they get together again in the final reel at the climactic auto race and live more or less happily ever after, or at least until the airplane comes along. In real life, it wasn't happily ever after, though, as Mack was killed in a car crash on the way to filming. Watch also for William Demarest as the comic relief.
Monday night sees a special interview premiering on TCM: Eva Marie Saint, Live from the TCM Film Festival. It kicks off the night at 8:00 PM, and like most new-to-TCM interviews, will be getting a second airing later in the evening at 11:30 PM for the benefit of those of you out on the West Coast. I believe it was recorded at last year's Film Festival, and as you can guess by the title, will have Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint talking about her life and career. The rest of the Monday night lineup will include three of her movies:
On the Waterfront, the one that won her the Oscar, at 9:00 PM;
Raintree County, in which she supports Civil War-era southern lovers Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, at 12:30 AM Tuesday; and
North By Northwest, which sees Eva Marie Saint running around Mount Rushmore with Cary Grant, at 3:30 AM.
Tuesday is April Fools Day, so TCM is celebrating the day with a bunch of wacky comedies. One that I don't think I've mentioned before is The Disorderly Orderly, at 8:00 PM. Lewis plays a man who wanted to be a doctor, except that he failed medical school by being a complete klutz. So he's gotten a job as an orderly at a sanatarium courtesy of the head doctor (Glenda Farrell), who knew his dad, although the hospital administrator (Everett Sloane) wants him fired. Along the way, Jerry takes some of the patients' problems a little too seriously, while also falling in love with both one of the nurses and one of the patients. And, as with any Jerry Lewis movie, there's a lot of wacky physical comedy going on, such as a scene with a broken TV and a car chase.
Over on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel, they're actually bringing back a few movies they haven't shown in a while since it's the beginning of a new month. That includes The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, at 7:15 AM Tuesday. Don Ameche plays Bell, the British-born Canadian who works with the hearing impaired. He figures there has to be a way to use the technology of the telegraph to send the human voice over wires, which might help the hard of hearing hear better; of course, it winds up with his inventing the telephone with the help of his trusty assistant Watson (Henry Fonda). The telephone brings him fame, until it turns out that there's another inventor who claims to have invented the telephone earlier and wants patent rights that would bankrupt poor Alex. Him, and his in-laws too; Bell had married the hearing-impaired daughter (Loretta Young) of a prominent Boston businessman (Charles Coburn) and his wife (Spring Byington).
April 2 marks the centenary of actor Alec Guinness, who won a Best Actor Oscar for playing the British commander in Bridge on the River Kwai. TCM is honoring Guinness' birthday with 24 hours of his films, although not the one that won him an Oscar. One of Guinness' films that I haven't recommended before is All At Sea (also known as Barnacle Bill), at 4:30 AM Thursday. Here, Guinness plays Captain Ambrose, the latest in a long line of British naval officers (all played in an opening montage by Guinness). Unfortunately, the current Ambrose has a problem, namely that he's seasick, and so can't really serve at sea. So he takes his money and buys up a pier at one of those fading British seaside resorts of the sort you'd see in Laurence Olivier's The Entertainer, and tries to use naval efficiency to make the pier amd its attractions a going concern. The local authorities don't like what Ambrose is doing, and try to take the pier out from under him, so Ambrose tries to get it registered as a ship to defy them! This isn't the greatest of the comedies Guinness made for Ealing in the late 1940s and 1950s (that might be Kind Hearts and Coronets at 1:45 PM Wednesday), but it's still good.
Elsewhere, you can catch the excellent western The Gunfighter any of three times on Encore Westerns: at 6:50 AM and 12:35 PM Wednesday, and again at 1:40 AM Thursday. Gregory Peck stars as Jimmy Ringo (no relation to anybody you might know) a man who comes into a saloon in some small, God-forsaken western town, and his presence immeditately ges everybody at the bar to perk up. It turns out that once upon a time, he was the fastest gun in the west, and that's a reputation he just can't get away from. It cost him his wife (Helen Westcott) and kid, but now he's back, trying to convince them to go with him to start a new life in California. Unfortunately, everywhere Ringo goes, there are also adolescent boys who look up to him for his skill, and want to be like him, even though they don't know what that would do to their lives. And in this town, there are also the brothers of a man Ringo once shot, who would like to get their revenge....
Thursday is the birthday of Doris Day. TCM and some news sources are claiming she's turning 90, although Wikipedia and many other sources I've seen over the years say she was born in 1922, making this her 92nd birthday. Like Guinness, Day is also getting a 24-hour salute from TCM, with one of her movies that I don't think I've ever recommended before being Send Me No Flowers, midnight Friday (or 11:00 PM Thursday LFT). Doris Day plays suburban housewife Judy, married to George (Rock Hudson). Unfortunately, George is a hypochondriac, and on one visit to the doctor he hears talk about another patient that he thinks is about him, leading him to believe that he's going to die. Thinking he's not got much time to live, Goerge tries to settle his affairs, which includes buying three cemetery plots: one for him, one for Judy, and one for Judy's next husband. Oh yeah, George is going to try to find another husband for Judy so she won't be left a destitute widow. Of course, this search leads Judy to believe that George is trying to cover up an affair of his own, leading to all sorts of complications. Tony Randall plays the next-door neighbor.
Since I know all of you like old movies, you'll be happy to see that Miss Pinkerton is airing on TCM at 7:00 AM Friday, as part of a lineup honoring 1930s screenwriter Nevin Busch. Joan Blondell stars as a nurse who finds hospital work boring, so she's thrilled to get the chance to be a private nurse at a mansion for a little old lady. The only thing is, that little old lady found a dead body that was presumably a suicide but the police think might be murder, so the police (in the form of detective George Brent) want somebody on the inside to find out what's going on, which is why Blondell was picked for the job. The only thing is, this is one of those creepy "old dark house" style mansions, where you have to expect that danger lies behind every wall. Blondell tries her best, but George Brent wasn't as good a leading man for her as James Cagney was most of the time.
If you're sick and tired of the winter, spend a little time on a tropical isle. Or at least, Hollywood sets designed to pass for the tropics, in Honolulu, at 8:15 AM Saturday. Robert Young plays an actor who has dificulties with overeager fans, and wants to get away from it all. When he meets his doppelgÄnger, who owns a pineapple plantation, the two decide to switch places. On the ship to Hawaii he meets dancer Eleanor Powell and falls in love with her. This is a bit of a problem in that he's under a false identity, but there's a bigger problem. The pineapple baron apparently didn't tell the actor that he had a fiancÉe (Rita Johnson), and that he also had some problems with the fiancÉe's father. Providing comic relief are Gracie Allen and her husband George Burns, although the two rarely show up together.
Finally, there's They Drive By Night, at 8:00 AM Sunday on TCM. George Raft and Humphrey Bogart play Joan and Paul Fabrini respectively, a pair of independent truckers hauling cargo up and down California and barely making ends meet. Along the way they pick up a hard-boiled waitress (Ann Sheridan) who falls in love with Joe. Bad news is that an accident with the truck while the brothers are trying to ferry their cargo as quickly as possible results in Paul's losing his arm. Joe goes to work for Carlsen (Alan Hale), who has become wealthy running his own trucking company, but hasn't outgrown his background, much to the chagrin of Mrs. Carlsen (Ida Lupino), who wants a more refined life and is falling for Joe too. Mrs. Carlson comes up with a plan to kill her husband, at which point the movie turns a bit ludicrous. Lupino gets a hammy finale worthy of Bette Davis. But overally it's still a pretty good movie.
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