Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of May 4-10, 2015. Now that the NFL draft is over, we can turn to more important things, like the Champions League semifinals. That, and a new month on TCM, which brings a new Star of the Month, but we'll get to that later. There are good movies on channels besides TCM, too, and I've recommended a couple of those. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's Silent Sunday Nights doesn't have a feature, but instead a whole bunch of silents: ten of them, in fact, all of them 100 years old or more. They come on at midnight tonight (ie. the very wee hours of Monday morning). Unfortunately, whenever TCM runs a bunch of shorts like this, they always have some problems with the timing of them and whether the order they're listed in the schedule is actually the order in which they'll show up. So you'l want to record the whole two-hour block. The block includes famous silent era stars:
Fatty Arbuckle stars in and directed Leading Lizzie Astray, in which he tries to get his girl back from a sophisticated urban type;
Mack Sennett in The Curtain Pole, directed by DW Griffith, about trying to fix a curtain rod, with comedic results;
Charlie Chase lying to his wife so he can go drinking in Ambrose's First Falsehood; and
Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp in Recreation.
Three Violent People gets a pair of airings on Encore Westerns this week: at 2:45 AM Monday, and againat 11:30 PM Thursday. Charlton Heston stars as Colt Saunders, a Texan who left his ranch to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The South lost of course, but that's just the beginnings of Colt's problems. he returns to his ranch and meets lovely Missourian Lorna (Anne Baxter), whom he promptly marries. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, he meets his kid brother Beau (Tom Tryon), who lost an arm as a child and blames Colt for it. That, and his wife's past, become the least of his problems. Having lost the war, Texas has a provisional governor, as well as a lot of carpetbaggers coming down from the north. (Watch for Bruce Bennett, the first huband in Mildred Pierce, here.) And those carpetbaggers would just love to take over Colt's ranch. Rounding out the cast is Gilbert Roland as Colt's best friend. His sons are played by -- get this -- Robert Blake; Ross Bagdasarian (the guy behind Alvin and the Chipmunks), and Jamie Farr!
A couple of Americans lend their talents to the British movie Happy Go Lovely, Monday at 8:00 AM on TCM. Cesar Romero plays a producer trying out his new musical in Edinburgh, Scotland. The musical is floundering because, quite frankly, it sucks. Vera-Ellen plays a girl in the chorus. One day she has a bad morning, which is only saved when a kind man gives her a lift into work. That lift happens to be from the chauffeur for a millionaire, which leads everybody to believe that she's his sugar baby. So when the leading lady of the musical quits, our producer puts Vera-Ellen in, because you want to make her sugar daddy (David Niven) happy. Especially because he could provide secure financial backing for the show. Except, of course, that he's not her sugar daddy. That having been said, you can probably guess what's going to happen along the way. Vera-Ellen is lovely to look at, and David Niven is as charming and geltlemanly as ever.
TCM host Ben Mankiewicz's uncle, Don, died last week at the age of 93. By coincidence, the movie that earned him an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, just happened to be on the TCM schedule already: I Want to Live!, Monday at 8:00 PM. This movie tells the dramatized story of Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward). Graham was a real person who got involved with some small-time crooks who all eventually wound up implicated in the murder of a wealthy older lady. Graham went to the gas chamber for her part in the murder. The movie, however, has decided that it's going to tell two messages. One is that capital punishment is wrong; the other is a commentary on media coverage, which was just as lurid and scandalous as the 24-hour news channels are today (Nancy Grace, please f*** off and die). Hayward actually gives a fairly good performance, winning the Oscar for this. But the movie is overshadowed by its messages, with the gas chamber scene going on forever as it goes into great detail about the technical workings of the chamber. The movie also presents Grahame as far more innocent than she would have been in real life.
Tuesday night brings a night of "Bob's Picks" to TCM; I'm not certain if he's going to be back from his medical leave to present them. One of the movies that I don't think I've mentioned before is Agatha, at 11:30 PM. Agatha, of course, refers to Agatha Christie, played here by Vanessa Redgrave, and deals speculatively with a real incident from her life. At the time (the film is set in 1926), Agatha was married to Col. Archibald Christie (Timothy Dalton), but the marriage wasn't going so well because he wasn't faithful to her. Also, her mother had recently died. So Agatha got up and left. But where did she go to? No one seemed to know, as she just disappeared. There was a national outcry in England, and in the movie, an American reporter (Dustin Hoffman) eventually finds her at a spa hotel in Yorkshire, where she's plotting to gain revenge on her husband's mistress. Agatha's heirs didn't like this explanation and tried to prevent the film's release. And whatever happened, the marriage finally ended in 1928.
A bunch of nurses show up on Wednesday morning and afternoon on TCM, as in The Nurse's Secret, Wednesday at 12:45 PM. Lee Patrick plays nurse Ruth Adams here, and she's the boyfriend of police detective Tom Patten (Regis Toomey). There's been a death in the mansion of wealthy old lady Mitchell (Clara Blandick), and she suffered a nervous breakdown as a result. Tom is certain the the death is foul play of some sort, but he can't get anybody to talk to him about it. So he gets his nurse girlfriend to go and work for Mitchell so that she can get the evidence on what really went on at the house. Unsurprisingly, it seems as though everybody in the house could have been a murderer, if the death was indeed murder. This is one of a long line of breezy mysteries that Warner Bros. put out in the 30s and 40s, and the all blend together. The on in particular, since Warners had already made the story twice before.
Wednesday night brings May's Star of the Month to TCM: Sterling Hayden, who is probably best known for the tough guy roles he did, most notably in The Asphalt Jungle (9:45 PM Wednesday). Another of the tough guy roles kicks the month off: The Killing, at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Hayden plays Johnny Clay, a small-time crrok who's got a plan for an audacious robbery: he's going to steal the takings of a race-track, a place that handles a large amount of cash. Of course, such a big crime needs a bunch of people to pull it off, and Johnny has assembled a bunch of desperate types from what is a great cast of character actors. Notable is Elisha Cook Jr. (Wilmer the gunsel in The Maltese Falcon) is a wimpy husband/betting windo teller whose domineering wife (Marie Windsor of The Narrow Margin) is cheating on him (with future Ben Casey, Vince Edwards). That's where the scheme is ultimately going to go wrong. This is one of Stanley Kubrick's earliest films, and it's a great one.
Over on FXM Retro, we get another early John Ford film: Born Reckless, at 4:40 AM Thursday. Released in 1930, the film opens during World War I. Edmund Lowe plays Louis Beretti, a small-time crook who is robbing a jewelry store during a parade. Needless to say, he gets caught, but the DA gives him a sort of plea bargain: enlist to fight "over there" and we won't send you to jail. Persumably, sending this guy to the army will have the same effect sending 18-year-old delinquents to the military supposedly does, but that's not what really happens. Beretti returns home from the war, and becomes a criminal again thanks to Prohibition. This time, however, he becomes a classier sort of criminal since he's running the speakeasy for the society types. This was one of John Ford's first talkies, and he's only got a co-directing credit, which probably explains why the film is uneven and slow in parts.
Thursday night on TCM, as well as the next couple of Thursday nights, brings disaster movies. There are any number of those all-star disaster films, such as Airport this Thursday at 8:00 PM, but this week I'd like to mention a much earlier movie: Five Came Back, at 2:45 AM Friday. Several people board a plane coming from one of those hole-in-the-wall places in Latin America that Americans went to for no good reason, piloted by Chester Morris. However, the plane crashes in the jungle in the middle of nowhere! This being the 1930s, it's not as if there's any GPS to find the plane, so the pilot and copilot set out to repair the plane. Eventually they're able to get it to the point where it can take off again, but there's a catch. Even if they jettison all unnecessary cargo, they can only handle the weight of five people. They're going to have to leave a couple of people behind. Worse, this is an area where there are cannibals, so who stays and who gets left to die? Lucille Ball plays a showgirl; C. Aubrey Smith plays a professor travelling with his wife of many years.
While TCM is celebrating Mothers' Day on Sunday with a bunch of movies I've recommended several times in the past, some channels aren't. Take Encore Drama, for example, which is running Die Hard at 11:10 AM Sunday. (You can also see it at 3:45 PM Wednesday on Encore Classic.) Bruce Willis plays John, a New York cop invited out to Los Angeles for Christmas by his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). John goes to her business' Christmas party at the swanky Nakatomi Plaza office building, where none of them expect what happens next. Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) leads a group of terrorists who storm the building with the intention of robbing all the offices there. Even though John is off duty, he's not about to let that happen. John takes on an entire group of terrorists all by himself, and yet somehow saves the day. The movie has been often imitated (not least by the people who made it themselves, as they made a bunch of sequels), but never duplicated.
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