Welcome to Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of May 19-25, 2014. This is the last full week of May, which means that the weekend is going to be Memorial Day weekend already. My how the time flies. At any rate, there's a very special guest on TCM this week showing some relatively recent movies, as well as the usual programming features. There's also interesting stuff on some other channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
David Niven was born on March 1, which is during 31 Days of Oscar, so he never gets a birthday salute on TCM. They're putting the spotlight on him on Monday, however, with a bunch of his films including one appropriate for the upcoming Memorial Day weekend: The First of the Few, at 10:00 AM Monday. The film was also released under the title Spitfire, which gives an indication of what the movie is about: the development of the British "Spitfire" fighter, which played a large part in the Battle of Britain, in which these fighters held off Nazi fighters. Leslie Howard, who also directed, plays Reginald Mitchell, a British aircraft designer who realized what the Nazis were up to with their aircraft building program, and persuaded the British government to start a building program. Mitchell died well before completion of the Spitfire, however. David Niven plays his test pilot. The movie was filmed in part at an RAF base, with actual RAF pilots as extras.
Mel Brooks is best known for his comic work as an actor and director, but he was also a producer. He produced the film The Elephant Man (8:00 PM Tuesday). Since it wasn't a comedy, he set up the production company Brooksfilms to make it and have his name, associated with comedy, not give people the wrong impression about the movie. TCM is honoring Brooksfilms on Monday and Tuesday night by showing a total of six films from the production company; TCM host Robert Osborne sat down with the 87-year-old Brooks to discuss the movies.
I've recommended several of the movies before, such as Fatso, which kicks off the salute at 8:00 PM Monday. Directed by Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft, Fatso tells the story of a man (Dom DeLuise) who loves food so much that it's made him fat and worries his sister (Bancroft) that it will lead him to an early grave; DeLuise then meets a woman and has to try to lose weight to win her heart.
The second night sees the remake of To Be or Not to Be, at midnight Wednesday (ie. 11:00 PM Tuesday LFT). Brooks and Bancroft star as the Polish husband-and-wife actors who, with the help of a flyboy from the air force in exile (Tim Matthieson) -- who's in love with the wife -- help foil a Nazi plot to get information from a traitorous Polish professor (JosÉ Ferrer). Charles Durning, playing an SS officer, was nominated for an Oscar.
Next up is Hold Your Man, at 6:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. Jean Harlow plays Ruby, who gets mixed up with a small-time con artist Eddie (Clark Gable) when he hides out in her apartment to escape the law. The two fall in love, but one of the con games oes wrong, leaving a dead body outside Ruby's apartment, with Ruby unmistakeable because, dammit, Jean Harlow was unmistakeable. Eddie makes a fast escape leaving Ruby in the lurch to take the rap; worse, when she goes to women's prison she finds that she's pregnant! While in prison, Ruby has an epiphany, thinking that Eddie has abandoned her, and that eventually leads to Eddie's also having an epiphany. The ending is kind of unrealistic, but what can you expect? Jean Harlow gets to smack a couple of women, and even sing a song. There's also a surprisingly prominent role given to a couple of black characters, in a film from 1933!
Like David Niven, Victor Moore (born February 24, 1876) is one of those people who doesn't get his birthday celebrated on TCM since it's during 31 Days of Oscar. So TCM is spending Wednesday morning and afternoon with Moore, in movies like We're on the Jury, at 7:15 AM. Moore plays one of the jurors, along with Helen Broderick, in a murder trial; the two knew each other from school as well. Broderick is the only one of the twelve jurors willing to vote "not guilty" in the first vote, and then uses every trick in the book (including some that would probably provoke a mistrail) to prove that the defendant is in fact innocent. Let's just say that this movie is not quite as powerful as 12 Angry Men.
A movie that I've never recommended before since I only saw it for the first time myself a month or two ago is Little Murders, which is on FMX/FMC twice this week, at 1:00 PM Wednesday and 3:00 AM Thursday. Marcia Rudd plays Patsy, who at the beginning of the movie is suffering all the indignations of New York City in the early 1970s, just before Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead. She hears a mugging going on in the yard outside her window, and when she tries to help him, she finds that the man, Alfred (Elliott Gould), doesn't care. In fact, that's how he makes it through life in this dystopian New York, by having no feelings. Patsy immediately falls for Alfred and gets engaged to him; he's about to join a crazy family; they're terrified of the random crime that's already killed their oldest son. Just as Alfred is finally about to have a feeling, there's another random crime that changes everybody. Vincent Gardenia is Patsy's father, while Donald Sutherland plays an atheist minister who officiates the wedding of Patsy and Albert and drops a bombshell at the unorthodox service in what is perhaps the film's best sequence. If you remember the 70s when Times Square was a hellhole, you may well enjoy this movie.
Thursday night on TCM sees a night of "Bob's Picks", or basically what you might get if Robert Osborne were a Guest Programmer, except that he doesn't sit down with anybody else to present them. One of his selections is The House on 56th Street, at 9:45 PM. Kay Francis stars as Peggy, a woman who in the first decade of the 20th century is a chorus girl. She marries wealthy Monty (Gene Raymond), and bears him a son, when previous boyfriend Fiske (John Halliday) finds he's terminally ill and wants Peggy to spend the brief rest of his life with him. Fiske then tries to commit suicide, and the gun goes off accidentally, sending Peggy to prison on a manslaughter rap. She gets out 20 years later during Prohibition and winds up involved in an illegal casino in the old family home, at which point her daughter (Margaret Lindsay) shows up, obviously unaware of who her mother is. There's a lot of fast-moving melodrama here.
For those of you weirdos who only like more recent movies, there's one in the Friday night spotlight of Aussie movies: Muriel's Wedding, at 3:30 AM Saturday on TCM. Muriel (Toni Collette) is a recent school graduate in a crappy little backwater town in Australia in a family that would be considered fairly unsuccessful except that Dad is one of the local panjandrums. But she dreams of having a storybook wedding. So she absconds with some of Dad's money and goes off to Sydney with her only real friend, where she gets involved in a scheme to be the bride in a marriage of convenience to a South African swimmer who needs Australian nationality for the Olympics, these being the days when there was still a boycott on South Africa. It gets her the wedding she wants, but also causes her to lose that only friend. And her family's life gets even worse.... It's not bad, although large parts of it have the serious vibe of a chick flick.
TCM is going to be showing about three dozen war movies in its Memorial Day Weekend marathon, which starts at 9:00 AM Saturday. FXM/FMC will be showing a few war movies too, such as The Blue Max, on Saturday at 3:00 AM and again at 10:30 AM. George Peppard plays a lowborn German man in World War I who gets the opportunity to be a part of the Air Corps. For him, it means one thing: if he can kill 20 enemy pilots, and he'll be awarded the titular "Blue Max", which means a decided rise in social standing, the thing he's really after. The other pilots don't like him because they're all born aristocrats, but his boss the general (James Mason) does, because Germany needs a hero of the people. Meanwhile, the general's wife (Ursula Andress) also takes an interest in Peppard, but for different, if obvious reasons. And that causes a dilemma for the general.
TCM's salute to Memorial Day is going to include a bunch of service comedies on Sunday, such as See Here, Private Hargrove, at 8:30 AM Sunday. Robert Walker stars as Hargrove, who starts off the movie as a not particularly successful newspaper reporter. He's saved from being fired, however, when he receives his draft notice, and goes off to book camp, figuring he can write about his experience. On the way, he meets fixer-type Keenan Wynn who's also been drafted and the two become friends. But Hargrove is totally unsuccessful at boot camp, not for lack of trying, but because he's just incompetent. And then his buddies, as a prank, hook him up on a blind date with a lovely young woman (Donna Reed), and that gives Hargrove the motivation to do better. Although this was released in 1944, you'd be hard pressed to know that there's an actual war going on. The movie was successful enough at the box office to make a sequel, What Next, Corporal Hargrove, transferring Walker and Wynn to France. That sequel comes on at 10:15 AM Sunday.
If you want another service comedy, there's one coming up on, of all places, Encore Love Stories. That movie is Stripes, at 3:30 PM Saturday and repeated at 11:00 PM. Bill Murray plays Winger, a cab driver who hates his job; his friend Ziskey (Harold Ramis) is a teacher who hates his job too. All on one day, Winger loses his job, his car, his apartment, and his girlfriend. So he convinces Ziskey that he should quit his job too, and the two of them should join the Army. All hell breaks loose, of course. They're not the only two nutcases in their outfit -- obese John Candy joined the Army in an attempt to lose weight -- and they get stuck with a Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates), the drill sergeant from hell. But they also meet a pair of female MPs (PJ Soles and Sean Young) and fall in love. And then they get transferred to Europe, where they get involved in a mission that goes wrong and creates an international incident but, being a service comediy, all works out in the end, more or less.
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