We'll start off with a film that I don't think has been on FXM/FMC for a while: Chad Hanna, at 6:00 AM Monday. Henry Fonda plays a young man in western New York in the early 1940s who at the beginning of the movie helps a fugitive slave in his attempts to get to Canada and evade the slave trackers. So now the slave trackers are after him, and to escape he joins the circus, which he kind of wanted anyhow since he's seen lovely bareback rider Dorothy Lamour. Eventually also joining the circus is Linda Darnell, who is the daughter of the slave-tracker, but is trying to escape Dad's abusive ways. You kind of expect there to be sparks between her and Fonda too. Meanwhile, the circus itself, run by Guy Kbbee and Jane Darwell, faces all sorts of problems of its own, from sick animals to a rival circus trying to drive it out of business. Nothing earth-shattering here, but it's entertaining and helped by lovely Technicolor.
If you want a film set a bit later in the 19th century than Chad Hanna, you could watch the 1933 version of Little Women, at 6:00 AM Monday on TCM. This story of the March sisters as they try to make their way through the Civil War while their father is off fighting stars Katharine Hepburn, and is being shown as part of an entire morning and afternoon of her movies on TCM. Little Women would be remade in the late 1940s at MGM, in a color version starring Star of the Month June Allyson, as well as Elizabeth Taylor. That version is going to be on TCM at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Little Women was remade again in 1994, by Australian director Gillian Anderson; that version can be seen multiple times on Starz Family, including 9:20 PM tomorrow and 7:10 AM Sunday.
Joan Blondell was a big thing at Warner's in the early 1930s, but by the end of the decade, she was getting put in lesser stuff such as Off the Record, at 6:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Here, she plays a reporter who, in trying to get a story, finds an adolescent orphan (Bobby Jordan) who's working for his older brother (Alan Baxter) enforcing the pinball racket. The story gets big brother sent to jail, and kid brother sent to reform school, which gives Blondell pangs of conscience. So she convinces her editor boss (Pat O'Brien) to marry him so that the two of them can adopt the kid and get him out of reform school, which isn't good for him. The kid, however, has ideas of his own, until his new guardians give him a camera and get him a job on the paper as a cub photographer. And then big brother escapes from jail with the intention to get revenge on the head gangster who framed him, complicating things for the kid brother.... Everybody's reasonably good here, but it's decidedly pedestrian material.
In the mid-1930s, actress Anna Sten was brought over to the States to be groomed to be the next great European actress. It didn't quite succeed, but you've got a chance to see her for yourself on Tuesday night on TCM. Among her films is We Live Again, at 9:45 PM Tuesday. Based on the novel Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, Sten plays a servant at the country estate of a wealthy family including Fredric March, who at the start of the film is a young army officer at the bottom of the officer ranks. They fall in love, he knocks her up, and since this relationship is inappropriate she loses her job and has to turn to begging and crime to survive. Fast forward several years. Sten is now on trial for murder, and who just happens to be on the jury, but March, now a rather higher-ranking officer. He realizes that it was his knocking her up that led to her horrible life, and that he has to atone for his sins. (This being Tolstoy source material, you should know there's a heavy dollop of moral twaddle.) Sten gets sentenced to exile in Siberia -- and March eventually follows her! Sten isn't so bad, it's just that the story is so groan-inducing.
Van Heflin is an actor who doesn't get the credit he deserves. He gives yet another fine performance in the movie Count Three and Pray, which you can catch on TCM at 2:00 PM Thursday. Heflin plays a man who fought for the Union in the Civil War, despite being from the South. Seeing a man of the cloth get killed in battle, and claiming the man's bible, changed him from a trouble-making sinner into somebody determined to spread God's love even though he's a lousy preacher. So he returns to his hometown to rebuild the parsonage, only to find that an orphan (Joanne Woodward) has taken up residence there, and no way is she going to move out, despite what everybody is going to say about the two of them living together. Making life difficult for the new would-be preacher Heflin is Raymond Burr, who is now more or less running the town for nefarious purposes and si anxious to see that Heflin doesn't get a congregation of a place of honor in the town.
El-Ka-Bong bitches about the old movies I recommend, so I'm making it a point to include a really old movie: Why Worry?, at 8:00 PM Thursday. Harold Lloyd stars as a wealthy young man who is also a hypochondriac. In order to take a cure, he travels with his nurse (Jobyna Ralston in one of the first of her films with Lloyd; what with his previous leading woman having become Mrs. Harold Lloyd) to a nameless Latin American country. The only problem is, the country is in the middle of a revolution, which is obviously even more hazardous to his health than any of the conditions Lloyd's thinks he may have. He gets imprisoned with a giant, and in escaping prison and helping put down the revolution he learns to overcome his hypochondria and get the girl at the end. This being a Harold Lloyd film, rest assured that it's filled with clever sight gags.
RKO's B movies never had quite the polish that MGM's or Warner Bros.' had. Something that doesn't look nearly as good as the previously mentioned Off the Record is Cross-Country Romance, airing at 7:00 AM Friday on TCM. Wendy Barrie plays an heriess, daughter of Hedda Hopper, who is scheduled to get married to boring George Huntley in a marriage that Mom organized, and daughter wants no part of. On the wedding day, doctor Gene Raymond stops by. Apparently the mother of the bride had made a bunch of donations to the hospital where Raymond had worked, and he's delivering the official thank you before heading off by car to San Francisco and then China to do charity doctor work. the would-be-bride senses an opportunity: she can escape in the trunk of the doctor's car! As with all the other runaway heiress movies, you know that the heiress is going to fall in love with the person she's hiding out with, but the story here is pedestrian.
The last two Friday nights of Australian cinema on TCM have begun with movies set around the turn of the last century. This Friday is no different, with the first Australian movie being My Brilliant Career, at 8:00 PM. Judy Davis plays Sybylla, a young woman circa 1900 who unfortunately has become an orphan with the death of her parents. This sees her moving around among various relatives as well as having to work as a servant at one point, but all along she claims that she's never going to marry and have a "brilliant career", something which would have been considered slightly scandalous back then as women were expected to marry and become mothers. Sybylla's plans are called into question, however, when she meets neighbor Harry (Sam Neill), who is both good-looking and wealthy, and obviously right for Sybylla. What's Sybylla going to do? One of the earlier movies of previously-mentioned director Gillian Anderson.
I don't know how true it is, but FXM/FMC is showing The True Story of Jesse James, Sunday at 9:15 AM. Robert Wagner stars as Jesse James, who you'll recall fought as a teenager for Quantrill's Raiders on the Confederate side in the Civil War, and then after the war teamed up with his older brother Frank (Jeffrey Hunter) and the Younger brothers (Skipper Alan Hale, Jr. and Biff Elliot) to rob a bunch of banks and strike terror into the hearts of banksters and railroad operators throughout the plains states, until he was shot by Robert Ford. This version romanticizes Jesse somewhat, positing that he was scarred by what happened to his mother (Agnes Moorehead) and girl (Hope Lange) during the war to keep up his struggle against the United States. Unfotunately, the last time I saw this on FMC, it was a panned-and-scanned print.
It's a bit too seriously-made to be a true underground picture, but TCM Underground this week is including the British horror film Burn, Witch, Burn, at 3:30 AM Sunday. Peter Wyngarde plays Norman, a college professor dedicated to debunking the occult, who is looking to be promoted at the mildly creepy looking college where he teaches. There's one small problem, however: there are others who want the job, and his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) has been known to do a little dabbling in the black arts ever since the two of them took a vacation to the Caribbean and learned about voodoo. So Norman has Tansy get rid of the stuff. Sure enough, things start to go badly for Norman soon after that. Is it just coincidence, or is somebody trying to cast a dark spell on the professor? If you catch the trailer on TCM, it makes the movie look like a campy laugh-fest, ut it's actually more serious than that, and not bad.
Finally, a brief mention of what I think is the TCM premiere of one of Fox's Best Picture Oscar winners, Gentleman's Agreement, which will be on at 8:00 PM Sunday. Gregory Peck plays a journalist who, in order to do a story on discrimination against Jews, pretends to be Jewish himself, changing his name from Green to Greenberg and finding out that in 1940s America, being Jewish wasn't a bed of roses. It puts a terrible strain on his girlfriend (Celeste Holm who won an Oscar), while his old army buddy (John Garfield, excellent as ever an a smallish role), who actually is Jewish and knows what prejudice is, tells Peck not to do it.