Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of November 16-22, 2015. If the Packers should by some chance lose to the Lions this week, Packer fans are going to need a way to calm their white-hot anger over how badly the Packers are playing. Good movies like the ones I recommend every week are a good way of doing that. This week sees more Norma Shearer, as well as a salute to a recently deceased star of Hollywood's Golden Age. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I know that In the Land of the Head Hunters was a big hit here last week, so this week I'll mention a movie that was made even earlier: Traffic in Souls, airing at midnight Monday (ie. 11:00 PM LFT tonight) as part of TCM's weekly Silent Sunday Nights block. The theme of this 1913 film is the alleged "white slavery" trade, a moral panic over pretty young white women being kidnapped or otherwise tricked into winding up as prostitutes against their will. Mary (Jane Gail) is a young woman whose sister Lorna (Ethel Grandin) has gone missing. Mary tells her policeman fiancÉ (Matt Moore) about it, and an investigation starts, which ultimately involves the wealthy Trubus family who are running the "Purity League" that fights against white slavery. In fact, however, Mr. Trubus may know more about the white slavery racket than he's letting on, and Mary tries to get the goods on him. It's really quite amazing for a film made all the way back in 1913, and its salacious subject matter made it a huge hit at the box office.
If you think that Hollywood is unoriginal now with its glut of effects-driven comic book-themed movies, remember that old Hollywood was no more original. FXM is showing Love Is News at 6:00 AM Monday, followed immediately by the third version of the story, That Wonderful Urge, at 7:20 AM. (The second version, Sweet Rosie O'Grady, is not on the schedule. All three movies were made in the span of a dozen years.) In both of the versions on FXM, Tyrone Power stars as a reporter whose job it is to get celebrity gossip scoops. Here he's trying to get a story on an heiress (Loretta young in the original, Gene Tierney in the remake), and when she figures out what's going on, she decides to turn the tables by announcing to all the other reporters that she is in fact engaged to the reporter. Chaos ensues as Power tries to keep the other reporters at bay and convince them that he is in fact not engaged. But of course, he also finds himself falling in love....
Tuesday morning and afternoon brings a number of movies about resistance fighters against the Nazis to TCM. Yet again I'll mention one that I don't think I've mentioned in the past, Assignment in Brittany, at noon. Jean-Pierre Aumont, who actually fought with the Free French in real life, has a dual role. One is as Bertrand Corlay, a French official who has wound up in a London hospital; the other is as Captain Pierre Metard. Metard of course looks exactly like Corlay, so the Resistance gets the idea of sending Pierre back to France, where he will impersonate Corlay to get information about a Nazi naval base that is important because the Nazis are using it to harass Allied shipping. Of course, Matard finds that Corlay's life is much more complicated than anybody with the resistance knew, including Nazi collaboration and having a mistress on the side. This was made during the war, so it's even more one-sided than many of the post-war movies about the war.
Norma Shearer returns for a third night of her movies on Tuesday evening on TCM. One that I'm not certain I've recommended before is Smilin' Through, at 9:30 PM Tuesday. Shearer plays Kathleen, a woman who was raised by her uncle Sir John (Leslie Howard) after her parents were killed at sea. She's all grown up now, and the spitting image of the woman Sir John was going to marry except that she died on what was to be their wedding day. Into this comes Kenneth (Fredric March), in Britain because he's goign to fight for the UK in World War I. Kathleen falls for Kenneth, but Sir John is horrified by this because it was Kenneth's father who killed Sir John's bride because he was jealous he couldn't have her, not that Kenneth knows this. Sir John convinces Kenneth to wait until after the war to marry Kathleen, hoping Kathleen will meet somebody else during that time, but she doesn,t and then Kenneth returns from the war injured.... Shearer and March actually have dual roles, also playing the doomed bride and Kenneth's father respectively.
Wednesday night on TCM brings John Grisham sitting down with Robert Osborne to discuss more southern writers. This week includes the very southern Truman Capote with a movie that isn't about the South: In Cold Blood, at 10:00 PM. This is based on a true story out of Kansas in 1959: a family living on a farm in the middle of nowhere woke up in the middle of the night one night to find that they were subject to a home invasion, with two men looking for money in their safe and then ultimately killing the family in its entirety after getting less than $100. (The actual murder isn't shown until close to the end.) Robert Blake and Scott Wilson star as Perry and Dick respectively, the two criminals who commit the murder. Perry is looking for a quick buck, being in possession of what he claims is a map given him by his father that will lead him to a fortune in Mexico. So after the killing, the two head down to Mexico where, of course, nothing happens in finding that non-existent fortune, so they go back to the US and get caught and ultimately executed. Capote gave us an amazing docudrama with two vivid protagonists (even if they are killers) and a much more effective statement on capital punishment than I Want to Live!.
If you like the Warner Bros. B movies, and they made some of the most interesting ones back in the 30s, then you'll definitely like Bureau of Missing Persons, airing at 10:15 AM Thursday on TCM. Pat O'Brien plays Detective Saunders, who has recently been reassigned to the missing persons bureau because he's been too violent for other police work. At his new assignment he meets all types looking for people, but the biggest case happens to involve Norma (Bette Davis), who is looking for her husband. Saunders falls in love with her, although it turns out that her husband has been murdered, and she's the chief suspect! Or is she? There's a lot going on here what with all the other cases, and Warner Bros. brought out a bunch of their great character actors. Lewis Stone plays Saunders' boss; Allen Jenkins plays Saunders' cop partner; Glenda Farrell, Hugh Herbert and others also show up.
For those of you who like more recent movies, I suppose I could mention The Buddy Holly Story, airing several times this week, including 7:00 AM Thursday on Encore, repeated three hours later if you've got the west coast feed. As you can guess from the title, this is a biopic about Buddy Holly, the early rock-and-roll singer who was tragically killed in a plane crash in 1959 along with Richie Valens (subject of La Bamba) and the Big Bopper (I don't think he's been the subject of a biopic yet). Holly, played by Gary Busey before the motorcycle crash messed him up in the head, played the music that the youth of the day loved but which absolutely horrified the parents. He wound up with the Crickets for a back-up band (named because a cricket wound up in the studio during a recording session) and became a big success before that fatal flight. Busey actually performs the music here; he's not lip-synching to the singing of Holly. If you like movies that look back at the 1950s as opposed to movies actually made during the period, this isn't a bad place to start.
Maureen O'Hara died last month, but with all of the programming specials TCM was having, it wasn't until this week that they were able to schedule the appropriate 24-hour tribute to her. Starting at 6:00 AM Friday, TCM will be showing 12 of O'Hara's movies, in a variety of genres. She started her career back in England with the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Jamaica Inn, which will kick the day off at 6:00 AM. The led to her getting the part of Esmerelda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (8:00 PM). There are westerns like Big Jake (3:45 PM); swashbucklers like The Spanish Main (4:00 AM Saturday), and even a straight-up drama like The Battle of the Villa Fiorita at 1:45 PM, which has her as a mother who has run off to Italy to get away from her estranged husband, taking up with a lover (Rossano Brazzi), only to have her kids (including Olivia Hussey a few years before she would do Romeo and Juliet) show up to try to bring her home.
TCM is showing the odd movie Seven Seas to Calais at 8:30 AM Saturday. Rod Taylor stars as Sir Francis Drake in this Italian production set in the time of the Spanish Armada, which Drake had a big hand in defeating. Drake also went on a round-the-world voyage, in which he plundered Spanish loot for the glory of Britain. Meanwhile, back at home, there's a plot going on to try to depose Elizabeth I (Irene Worth) and replace her with Catholic Mary Stuart, played by one of the many Italians getting the smaller roles. Drake gets involved by having his right-hand man Malcolm (Keith Mitchell) have a relationship with one of the ladies-in-waiting, who is also beeing wooed by one of the people in the plot to put Mary on the throne. Of course, we know how that plot as well as the Spanish Armada ended. If you want something different from the way Hollywood approached this material, here you are.
With the cold weather coming, what better actress to watch than Sonja Henie? Well, I suppose you could watch somebody who could act, but then couldn't do the elaborate ice-skating musical numbers that Henie could. FXM Retro is running one of Henie's movies that I don't think I've recommended before: My Lucky Star, at 7:35 AM Sunday. In this one, Henie plays a department store clerk who is seen skating by the owner's son (Cesar Romero), who takes a liking to her even though he's going through a divorce. His wife (Louise Hovick, later known as Gypsy Rose Lee) catches the two of them together, so he sends the girl off to college under the pretense that she weare the store's newest clothing lines since that will bring in the customers. Needless to say, she continues skating there, which wows everybody, and falls in love with an upperclassman (Richard Greene), all of which causes controversy. A young Buddy Ebsen appears as the boyfriend of Henie's college roommate (Joan Davis).
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