Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of May 20-26, 2013. This week brings Memorial Day weekend in the US, which means a bunch of war-themed movies starting Saturday morning. For those outside the US, this weekend also brings the UEFA Champions League final, in which Bayern München are going to avenge last year's horrific loss, much to Goalline's consternation. If you've got nevous anticipation of the CL final, and don't we all, why not relax with some good movies in the meantime? As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is the birth anniversary of James Stewart, so TCM is marking the occasion with several of his movies on Monday morning and afternoon. One that I don't think I've recommended before is Carbine Williams, which you can see at 2:00 PM. This is based upon a true story, of one David Williams (naturally played by Stewart) who in the early days of Prohibition was a moonshiner in the backwoods of North Carolina and killed a federal agent, possibly in self-defense. Williams was sentenced to a long prison term, but after time on the chain gang it was discovered that he had a great mechanical aptitude, which the prison's warden (Wendell Corey) allowed him to use. Eventually, all this led to improvements in gunmaking which would result in the M-1 Carbine rifle, an important weapon in helping the US win World War II. Jean Hagen plays Stewart's wife; Williams himself served as technical advisor.
The tough-guy movies return to TCM on Tuesday night, kicking off with one of the earliest in the genre: Little Caesar, at 8:00 PM. Not the first gangster movie but the seminal one, it stars Edward G. Robinson as Rico "Caesar" Baldelli. At the start of the movie, he's just a small-town thug. But he moves to the big city, where he becomes a member of the Mob, and slowly rises his way up the organization by being exceedingly ruthless. In fact, he's only got one true friend, dancer Joe (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). Unfortunately, that friendship is what's going to bring down Caesar, as Joe witnesses one of Caesar's murders, and Joe would rather side with his girlfriend Olga (Glenda Farrell) instead of Caesar. Poor Caesar can't bring himself to kill his best friend. It's dated compared to later gangster films, and has some silly dialog ("Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?") but utterly compelling thanks to the performance from Edward G. Robinson.
World War II brought the US, for a few brief years, to be allies with the Soviet Union. This resulted in several Hollywood films that were in no small part propaganda as they heroically portrayed Soviets fighting the Nazis. An interesting example of this is The North Star, which TCM is showing at 1:30 PM Wednesday. The scene is a Ukrainian village, where life is supposedly peaceful, even though in real life Stalin had tried to starve the Ukrainans just a decade earlier. Anyhow, they all live happily until the evil Nazis invade, killing lots of people, and eventually occupying the village. The adult men go on to become guerillas; the women and young folks get terrorized by Erich von Stroheim. In fact, the entire cast is all stars. Anne Baxter plays adolescent villager Marina; Dana Andrews and Farley Granger (in his first film) play brothers from another village family; Walther Huston is the town doctor; Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay, and the music was provided by Aaron Copland and Ira Gershwin! (There's a lot of singing and dancing before the Nazis arrive.)
Moving ahead to Wednesday night, TCM is bringing us a night of movies with Robert Duball in the cast. One that I haven't recommended before is The Rain People, which concludes the night at 4:15 AM Thursday. Shirley Knight is actually the star here. She plays a suburban housewife who finds out that she's pregnant, but also isn't certain whether she's cut out for the suburban mom thing. So she gets in her station wagon and drives off! She picks up a hitchhiking James Caan, who plays a former college football star who took one too many knocks in the head back in the day, and is now slightly brain damaged as a result. (His character should probably sue Roger Goodell.) The two continue across the country, with Robert Duvall coming into the picture out farming country when he pulls her over for speeding, and decides he wants something more from her, which is going to lead to problems for all three characters.
Once we're finished with the Robert Duvall movies, TCM switches to something completely different: early talkies. The day kicks off at 6:00 AM Thursday with a documentary about lady screenwriter Frances Marion, who was at the top of the profession at a time when it wasn't uncommon at all to have female screenwriters. Indeed, Marion wrote the screenplay to stuff as masculine as the seminal prison drama The Big House, which is airing earlier in the week, at 4:30 AM Wednesday as part of the salute to tough guys. The afternoon also concludes with a documentary, Complicated Women, about the women in pre-Code movies, at 7:00 PM
Anyhow, I've recommended The Big House before and even blogged about it, so better to put the spotlight Thursday on something I don't think I've ever mentioned here before: The Secret Six, at 5:30 PM. Wallace Beery stars as a gangster hired by bootlegger Ralph Bellamy(!). Beery soon becomes the muscle of the gang, but the brains of it is Lewis Stone(!!) who is not Judge Hardy at all, but a Mob lawyer instead. Beery eventually pushes Bellamy out, and runs the gang, and the city's underworld, in a particularly brutal manner, leading to a "secret six" of masked businessmen to go after him. They use reporter Clark Gable (without his moustache) to get at the gang. Gable, however, is competing with fellow reporter Johnny Mack Brown to get the story. The two are also competing for the love of a young and gorgeous as always Jean Harlow.
If you have a problem with early talkies, you could switch over to the Fox Movie Channel and watch The Racers at 9:30 AM Thursday. Kirk Douglas stars as an Italian bus driver who dreams of being a racecar driver. Really. He's even got his own racecar. In Monaco, he gets in an accident trying to avoid Bella Darvi's poodle, for which Darvi has a previous lover give Douglas a new car, which he takes to rise up the European racing circuit, treating everybody along the way like dirt. This one has an interesting cast. Douglas is basically playing the same character he did in Champion several years earlier. Darvi couldn't act, but she was sleeping with Darryl F. Zanuck at the time, which might explain why she got the role. Cesar Romero plays a competing driver, who is married to Katy Jurado. Also playing another driver is Gilbert Roland. And there's Lee J. Cobb as the manager of the racing team Douglas winds up on.
We had early talkies on TCM on Thursday morning; on Thursday night we go back even further ni time to an evening of Harold Lloyd movies. They're showing three of Lloyd's feature films: Safety Last!, which has the iconic shot of Lloyd hanging from a clock as he climbs a building, kicks things of at 8:00 PM.
At 11:00 PM, you can see The Freshman, which has Lloyd trying to become popular on campus and winding up winning the big game for the football team; and
The Kid Brother is on at 1:45 AM Friday, in which Lloyd plays the "weak" younger brother who finally gets to prove to his brothers and father that he's just as much a man as they are.
There are a lot of shorts in between. However, TCM's schedule lists a couple of start times, and then lists several of the shorts all beginning at that time, before going on to the next feature. So trying to figure out when any one particular short is going to begin is a bit difficult.
Memorial Day weekend kicks off on Saturday morning on TCM. This year, they've decided to kick off the salute with a morning and afternoon of films about submarine warfare. The first of these is Hell Below, which comes on at 6:00 AM Saturday. Walter Huston stars as the captain of an American submarine in World War I. Robert Montgomery plays his second-in-command. If you've seen any submarine movies, you'll recognize a lot of the clichés, such as the two officers constantly being at odds with one another: Montgomery is more or less the "good cop", with Huston as the new commander being the stickler for the rules. There's a bigger problem though. Montgomery meets a woman and falls in love with her, not realizing she's the captain's daughter. And then he also finds out she's married! There's a good scene involving the death of one of the unimportant crewmen, along with Eugene Pallette and Jimmy Durante providing comic relief.
Sunday morning and afternoon brings a bunch of war movies starring John Wayne, most of which I've already recommended before. I think the only one I haven't is The Sea Chase, at 8:45 AM Sunday on TCM. This one has interesting casting in that John Wayne plays... a German ship's captain who's not particularly fond of the Nazis, at the beginning of World War II! At the start of the movie his ship is in Sydney Australia, so obviously he has to skedaddle once the war starts, heading for Valparaiso in neutral Chile. But before that happens the German Consul asks him to take on a passenger, who is played by the gorgeous Lana Turner and happens to be a spy, too. Meanwhile, the Germans are being chased by a British ship, captained by Davud Farrar. But even more fun in this turkey is the rest of the cast of the German ship. Tab Hunter. Skipper from Gilligan's Island. Marshall Dillon from Gunsmoke. Southerner Claude Akins. Yikes. Yeah, it's a mess, but there are a lot of fun messes worth a viewing.
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