Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo, for the week of March 7-13, 2022. Daylight Savings Time starts overnight between Saturday and Sunday, so if you're going to watch anything next weekend, pay attention to the time change. (I was going to recommend The Year of Living Dangerously, at 3:45 PM Sunday on TCM, but it turned out I had enough other stuff to mention.) There's still no baseball, so that gives you more time to watch interesting movies, and boy have I found a bunch for you this week, from the silent era through the 1990s, and there's a lot more I could have picked. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start the week off with a silent film, and in fact, the movie that one the first Best Picture Oscar: Wings, at 8:00 PM Monday on TCM. It's 1917, just before the Americans are pushed into the Great War by Woodrow Wilson. In one of those smallish towns that populated movies back in the day, there's a love quadrangle: working-class mechanic Jack (Charles Rogers) loves Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston), but she's in love with wealthy scion David (Richard Arlen). Jack, meanwhile, is being pursued by Mary (Clara Bow), but he only sees her as a friend. And then the war comes, with Jack and David both signing up to become flyboys. They are of course enemies at first thanks to that romantic rivalry, but they're going to become friends out of necessity. They get sent over to France and wind up in the same squadron, where they find that air-to-air combat is an extremely risky business. It's filled with a lot of tropes, but this being the 1920s, those tropes weren't so old-hat yet. Watch also for a very young Gary Cooper who has one scene as a pilot in training.
Hollywood has a long history of remaking foreign films, for people who can't be bothered to read subtitles. One example is Sommersby, which will be on StarzEncore at 11:14 PM Monday. Richard Gere stars as Jack Sommersby, a southern farmer who went off to fight in the Civil War, eventually returning home to his wife Laurel (Jodie Foster). This is quite the surprise, since news had come that Jack was killed in action. The war seems to have changed Jack, too: before he left to fight, everybody thought he wasn't a very nice guy, and now he's acting like a much better person. This leaves some people to believe that this "Jack" might be an impostor, among them being Orin (Bill Pullman), the man who had become engaged to Lauren during the period when everybody figured Jack was dead. Eventually it results in a trial where the truth may just come out. This was based on a French film called The Return of Martin Guerre, starring Gérard Dépardieu and based on a true story from around 1600. The original is definitely worth watching if you can find it.
Noël Coward is generally remembered for his witty, erudite scripts, but one of his best scripts goes completely against type: that for In Which We Serve, airing at 6:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Coward plays Captain Kinross of the Royal Navy, and the HMS Torrin. Unfortunately, the ship gets sunk by the Nazis in an engagement just off the coast of Crete. Some of the surviving officers are able to get on a life raft, at which point they start thinking back to how they ended up on the Torrin. Capt. Kinross has a wife back in Britain (Celia Johnson) and thinks about her; he'd been captaining the Torrinsince the start of the war. Shorty Blake (John Mills) isn't an officer, but he's become more acquainted with the chief petty officer Hardy (Bernard Miles) since Shorty's girlfriend Freda (Kay Walsh) is related to Hardy's wife (Joyce Carey). The movie is based loosely on a real ship, the HMS Kelly, which was sunk off Crete and captained by Coward's good friend the Earl (later Lord) Mountbatten. Watch also for Richard Attenborough in his first film.
A movie that's absolutely worth watching, although the two showings of it this week are up against other movies I'm mentioning, is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The first showing is at 4:45 AM Tuesday on Epix Hits, with another at 12:20 AM Friday (so still 11:20 PM LFT) on Epix. James Stewart plays Ransom Stoddard, who at the beginning of the movie is on a train heading home from Washington DC, with his his wife Hallie (Vera Miles). Ransom has become a Senator and might get the nomination for Vice-President, but he's going back home for the funeral of an old friend, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Since I've mentioned the actor playing the dead guy, it should be obvious that we get a flashback to how Ransom and Tom became friends and Ransom became a senator. Many years back, when the state was still a territory, there was some debate about how to organize it. Ransom was a newly-minted lawyer who had come west, and Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) was an enforcer working for the cattle ranchers trying to prevent the advance of settlers who would close the range. Liberty beats up Ransom and terrorizes the town, and finally Ransom decides he's going to get revenge even though he doesn't know the first thing about guns. Filled with great character actors.
If you want to see a good non-English-language movie, you could do a lot worse than to watch Black Orpheus, showing on TCM at 10:00 AM Wednesday. Orfeu (Bruno Mello) is a streetcar conductor in Rio de Janeiro who is looking forward to the upcoming Carneval, when everybody dresses up in costumes and masks and has a giant street party. Orfeu is engaged to Mira, who has a friend in Serafina. Serafina has a cousin Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), who lives in a more rural part of Brazil but has come to Rio to see Serafina because she has this feeling of being stalked by somebody. Of course, this being based on the Greek myth, Eurydice is being stalked by someone, and she's going to meet Orfeu, who is going to fall in love with her. That somebody stalking Eurydice is Death, and when Death finally catches up to Eurydice, it breaks poor Orfeu, who wants to see Eurydice one more time. Of course, there are rules about it, and if Orfeu breaks those rules, it will mean eternal disaster. A beautifully filmed movie.
Sean Connery made a lot of interesting, if not always great, movies after finishing his stint playing James Bond. Among these later movies is Highlander, which will be on Thriller Max at 3:16 PM Thursday. Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) is living in New York City in the present day (1986) but has a past. He grew up in Scotland, and in a battle between his clan and another, he was fatally stabbed by Kurgan (Clancy Brown). Except that what would be a fatal wound for anybody else wasn't fatal for Connor. As Ramirez (that's Connery) informs him, the two of them as well as Kurgan were born to a race of immortals, more or less. There is one way to kill an Immortal, which is by beheading, which is why mere stabs elsewhere weren't enough to kill Connor. Indeed, there's eventually supposed to be an Armageddon-like final battle of the Immortals, in which only one will survive, and it's increasingly looking like that battle is going to come in 1986 New York. In the three dozen years since its original release, Highlander has become a cult classic.
The second airing of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is on against a movie about principles that's still relevant today: A Man for All Seasons, at 11:15 PM Thursday on TCM. In England circa 1530, Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) is king, married to Catherine of Aragon. But she hasn't borne him a male heir, which is a huge problem. So he wants to annul the marriage and marry Anne Boleyn. But, he's Catholic, and the Pope is an ally of Spain who will never approve. Henry's idea, having seen the Lutheran breakaway in northern Europe, is to break away from Rome himself and declare a new church, with him as the head which will allow him to divorce Catherine. However, he's going to need his Chancellor, Thomas More (Paul Scofield) to support the decision for those nobles who still remember the Wars of the Roses. More is still a devout Catholic, and doesn't believe that even a king can just take on the mantle of God. This puts More in grave legal danger. The scene in which More tells Will Roper (Corin Redgrave) that the rule of law is for everybody, and boy does he mean everybody, is a classic:
Robert Altman may not be for everybody, something you might notice when you watch his film Quintet. It's on this week at 8:25 AM Friday on FXM. Paul Newman plays Essex, who lives in some sort of post-apocalyptic world that resulted in nuclear winter, as global warming wasn't a fear when the movie was made in 1979. He and his Vivia (Brigitte Fossey) arrive in the city looking for his brother after the seals that they hunted for sustenance have died out. Essex learns that there aren't many people left in the city, and they spend the days awaiting their fate, drinking some sort of alcohol and playing a board game called "Quintet". Essex's brother is supposedly good at the game, but Essex is the one who gets roped into playing it. The only winning move is not to play, however, as it turns out that the people who get killed in the board game also get killed in real life. The movie is so unrelentingly bleak that it's easy to see why it was a box office dud.
It's been quite some time since I've mentioned Julia. It returns to TCM this Friday at 6:00 PM. Vanessa Redgrave plays Julia, a woman who was friends with playwright Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda). Julia goes off to Vienna to study psychology under Sigmund Freud while Lillian goes back to America and Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards) to write The Children's Hour.Once Lillian becomes a successful writer, she hears from Julia, who has been caught up in the Nazi rise to power since she's an ardent anti-fascist. Lillian is on her way to a writers' conference in Moscow, and Julia would like Lillian to help smuggle a bunch of money into Nazi Germany to help the anti-Nazi cause. Lillian agrees, and obviously finds that it's going to be difficult to do so an that things have gotten much more complicated. This is based on a story in one of Hellman's memoirs, but as actor Kevin McCarthy's (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) sister Mary wrote about Lillian, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." That comment was based on this movie, and a psychiatrist in New York would later come out and claim it was her story that Hellman was telling.
Some movies can be shown during 31 Days of Oscar because they earned an Oscar nomination in the Original song category. You Light Up My Life(yes, that song) is getting its first TCM airing since late 1994 this Friday, and it's one I'm looking forward to finally seeing. Not having seen it, I'll have to mention another movie that picked up an Original Song Oscar but also picked up an acting Oscar: Arthur, at 10:15 PM Saturday. Dudley Moore plays ArthurBach, a loutish playboy and heir in a very rich family living in one of those Long Island estates. He's supposed to be married to Susan (Jill Eikenberry), whom he doesn't really love, so his family, led by his grandmother matriarch (Geraldine Fitzgerald), comes up with an ultimatum: marry Susan or be disinherited. And then while on one of his shopping sprees, Arthur sees a woman Linda (Liza Minnelli) about to be arrested for shoplifting. Arthur, being rich, pays Linda's bill, and the two begin to fall in love despite their extreme class differences. There's also the question of whether a love like theirs can truly endure in the real life as opposed to a Hollywood movie. Christoper Cross' song won the Oscar, but so did John Gielgud, playing Arthur's valet.