Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, week of May 5-11, 2014

Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of May 5-11, 2014.  This week sees the Mothers' Day holiday on Sunday, as well as the Shiny Rookie Treasure Hunt, where NFL GMs search for shiny rookies, in New York.  If either of those isn't for you, there are a lot of good movies to be seen.  This being the first full week of a new month, we've also got a new Star of the Month on TCM.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

This week's first selection will once again be the Silent Sunday Nights movie on TCM.  It's one that I've recommended before, but is always worth another viewing, or a first viewing for the newbies here: Sparrows, at midnight Monday (or 11:00 PM tonight LFT).  Thirtysomething Mary Pickford is once again playing about 18, this time as "Mama" Molly, the eldest of the young people more or less being held captive in a "baby farm" in the swamps run by tyrannical Grimes (Gustav von Seyffertitz).  The kids are there because the people sending them there think its a sort of orphanage, but Grimes locks the kids up, makes them do all sorts of farm work, and doesn't give them enough to eat.  Grimes is in cahoot with some of the authorities, selling one of the kids and trying to take another away from Molly, the latter of which eventually dies.  Molly realizes escape is the only out, but that involves going through a swamp infested with crocodiles and quicksand....  It's a bit melodramatic at times, but the escape scenes are exciting and well-done.

We've got another movie returning to FXM/FMC after a long time in the Fox vaults: Jane Eyre, at 6:00 AM Monday.  Joan Fontaine plays the title role, but only as an adult; the movie starts off by showing us the harsh childhood she had as an orphan raised by her wicked aunt (Agnes Moorehead) at a girls' school run by an unforgiving man of the cloth.  When Jane grows up, Edward Rochester's (Orson Welles) housekeeper comes looking for a governess for his daughter (Margaret O'Brien), and selects Jane, who goes to his estate.  When she finally meets Rochester, she begins to fall in love with him, which is of course inappropriate.  Complicating matters  is that there's a part of the house Jane isn't supposed to enter, as if there's some deep dark secret going on in the house.  There's lovely cinematography, which makes you wonder how much influence Welles had on the director.

Monday over on TCM sees a bunch of movies with initials in the title.  I don't know whether I've recommended HM Pulham, Esq. before; it's airing at 9:30 AM Monday.  HM Pulham (Robert Young) is a member of one of those old Boston families that came from "polite" society, where one's station is life is almost planned out from the time one is born, which includes going to Harvard and marrying a nice woman (Ruth Hussey).  However, for his 20th reunion, Pulham remembers some of his past life when he didn't quite do what his parents (Charles Coburn and Fay Holden) wanted.  This included working at a New York ad agency, where he met the lovely and vivacious Marvin (Hedy Lamarr, yes with a man's name); the two proceeded to fall in love with each other even though we know they won't end up together.  And then back in the present, out of the blue, Marvin calls on Pulham again.  What will he do?

Another silly programming idea from TCM will be on Tuesday, when they play a bunch of movies with the word "scarlet" in the title.  There are worse places to start than The Scarlet Letter, at 6:00 AM Tuesday.  Hester Prynne (Lillian Gish) is a woman in a 17th century Puritan Massachusetts town who is married to a doctor (Henry Walthall) who has gone missing and is presumed dead.  Hester violates all the Puritan laws to the consternation of most of the townsfolk except the more forgiving Reverend Dimmesdale (Lars Hanson).  They fall in love even though that's something society would look down on, and sure enough, Hester gets knocked up, being exiled from town and being forced to wear a big scarlet A (for adultress) on her chest.  The townsfolk, meanwhile, try to get Dimmesdale to pressure Hester into revealing who is the baby's father.  And then Hester's husband returns....  As you can tell from the casting, this is a silent film, and pretty well done.

I'd like to recommend one more movie on FXM/FMC that I haven't mentioned in quite some time: O. Henry's Full House, at 6:00 AM Wednesday.  O. Henry was a writer of short stories from the turn of the previous century, and this movie is an anthology of five of his short stories by five of Fox's top directors.  The most famous of those stories is probably "The Gift of the Magi", and that shows up as the final story, with the husband and wife being played by Farley Grainger and Jeanne Crain.  They do well, but the other stories presented are almost as good in terms of the story, and in some cases have better acting.  Well, when you have Charles Laughton kicking things off as a homeless man trying to get himself arrested in the dead of winter so he can at least have a warm place to sleep, even if that is a jail cell.  Watch for Marilyn Monroe in this segment.  In the second story, Richard Widmark plays another of his laughing criminals.  That's followed by "The Last Leaf", involving a pair of sisters, one of whom (Anne Baxter) gets pneumonia, and a painter who plays an important part in their lives.  The fourth story is the hilarious "Ransom of Red Chief", about two conmen (Fred Allen and Oscar Levant) who get outwitted by a little boy.  The segments between the stories are hosted by John Steinbeck, which is another reason the movie is worth watching.

Wednesday, May 7, is the birth anniversary of Gary Cooper, so TCM is showing him in a bunch of movies during the morning and afternoon, such as One Sunday Afternoon at 7:45 AM.  Gary Cooper plays a dentist who, one Sunday afternoon, gets a call from old friend Neil Hamilton (yes, the future police commissioner on the Batman TV series) to pull a tooth.  This leads the Cooper looking back on life....  Back in the day, he and Hamilton were friends who met a pair of nice girls (Fay Wray and Frances Fuller), although both were more interested in the Fay Wray character.  Hamilton more or less cheats Cooper out of Wray, which is just the first in a series of events in which Hamilton pulls a fast one on Cooper, with the last of them leading to Cooper's going to jail for a crime committed by Hamilton.  If this story sounds familiar, it's because the movie was remade in 1941 as The Strawberry Blonde, lighter in tone and with James Cagney playing the Gary Cooper role.

At last we get to this month's TCM Star of the Month: June Allyson.  Her movies are going to be on TCM every Wednesday in prime time this month.  The first one to show up is The Glenn Miller Story, at 8:00 PM Wednesday.  Obviously, Allyson isn't the title character here; that honor goes to James Stewart.  Glenn Miller was a trombonist and arranger who had his own ideas and, when the leaders of the travelling bands he was in didn't quite like his ideas, Glenn decided that the only thing to do was start his own band.  The rest, of course, is history, as the Glenn Miller Orchestra became one of the most successful of the late 1930s and early 1940s, until World War II came along, at which point he joined the war effort as a military bandleader.  Of course, this would lead to tragedy as his plane went missing somewhere over the English Channel on Christmas Eve 1944.  June Allyson plays Glenn's wife, who makes sacrifices of her own to see that her husband succeeds, and gets the finale.

Another movie with a story you probably know is Our Town, at 10:15 AM Friday on TCM.  Based on the play by Thornton Wilder that's commonly performed in high schools, the story is of live in small town Grover's Corners, NH, at the turn of the last century.  George (William Holden) and Emily (Martha Scott) are classmates at high school in the beginning, and eventually fall in love and get married, all against the backdrop of bucolic small-town life as we'd like to think it was like.  The acting is uniformly excellent, with character actors Fay Bainter and Thomas Mitchell as George's parents, and Beulah Bondi and Guy Kibbee as Emily's parents.  There's more to look at on screen than in Wilder's original play, of course, and some of the events in the play were changed in the movie thanks to the Production Code, but apparently all with Thornton Wilder's approval.

If you have all of the Cinemax channels including the high-definition channels, you can catch the James Bond movie Moonraker, at 1:30 PM Sunday on 5StarMax.  Made in the cheesy Roger Moore Bond era, this one tells the story of a space shuttle that's hijacked and goes missing.  Bond investigates the company that made it, led by the mysterious Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), has to deal with Jaws (Richard Kiel) again, and has a love interest named Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles).  Ultimately, Bond discovers that Drax absconded with the space shuttle as part of a plot to gas the population of Earth from space, leaving Drax and his army of superhumans left to rule Earth!  Bond has to go out to space and get on that space shuttle to foil the plot, in a climactic laser battle.  I told you it was cheesy.

Sunday is also Mothers' Day, so TCM is unsurpsiringly giving us a bunch of movies about mothers.  I think I've recommended all of them before, but one that hasn't shown up on TCM in quite some time is the delightlful comedy The Mating Season, at 10:30 PM.  John Lund plays an engineer from a very modest background -- his parents ran a hamburger stand -- who meets and falls in love with Gene Tierney, who is of a very high-class background.  Lund's mom (Thelma Ritter) doesn't make it to the wedding, but when the hamburger stand goes bankrupt, she goes out to see her new daughter-in-law, but thanks to a comedy of errors winds up working as a maid at a party she's giving, and then winds up as their maid in general, without the daughter-in-law knowing her true identity.  Things get even more complicated when the other mother-in-law (Miriam Hopkins) moves in, and turns out to be a piece of work.  Ritter is great, delivering all sorts of wonderful lines.  Watch for a scene where she teaches her son's boss about check-kiting.