Four years ago, a cache of movie reels containing footage from silent films previously considered lost was discovered in New Zealand. Back in the 1920s, it was common for the distribution chain involving movies in one place running a print for however long, and then handing it off to someplace further down the chain. New Zealand would have been one of the end of the line place, and it was common back then just to dispose of the prints since nitrate is such a fire risk. So it was a big thing for silent movie buffs when all this footage was discovered in 2009. Among the things in the find were three reels of The White Shadow, a movie on which Alfred Hitchcock was a screenwriter, as well as some silent films from John Ford. TCM is running a multipart series in Silent Sunday Nights starting tonight at midnight (ET; that would be tonight at 11:00 PM LFT) showing these finds. I'm not certain exactly what footage is in which part, or what all the other footage is.
This week is the 12th installment of The Story of Film, which has reached the 1980s.. The documentary episode airs at 2:15 AM Tuesday, and is followed by one of the only Georgian-language movies you'll ever see on American TV: Repentance, at 3:30 AM Tuesday. Made in the few years between the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras, the story is of a local Georgian mayor who dies, only for his body to be disinterred. He's reburied and exhumbed several times, and when they finally find the culprit, she proceeds to tell why, in a series of flashbacks, this man doesn't deserve to rest in peace. The movie is part black comedy, what with the dead guy constantly being dug up, and part devastating commentary on the Stalinist nature of local governance.
Tuesday sees the first of two airings this week of a movie over on the Fox Movie Channel: Wake Me When It's Over, first at 11:00 AM Tuesday on FMC and then at 7:30 AM Wednesday. Dick Shawn stars as a man who spends two years in a German POW camp in World War II and is wrongly declared dead; the only way to solve the bureaucratic snafu is to issue him a new serial number. However, another bureaucratic snafu means that they only have a record of the guy with the new serial number having served one day, so he's forced back into service, this time on a Japanese island under the Occupation where the Japanese have a shrine to a downed plane. There's no action going on, and a lot of surplus that's no longer needed, so Shawn gets the idea to start an island resort catering to the people who want to see the shrine! This eventually gets the attention of the brass higher up.... Ernie Kovacs plays Shawn's commanding officer, and was given a model who can't act (Margo Moore) as a love interest.
I'm sure you've seen Alfred Hitchcock's classic silent The Lodger, or the 1944 remake of the same title with Laird Cregar; both movies loosely tell the story of a man who may or may not be Jack the Ripper. Another movie with the same material is Man in the Attic, at 4:30 PM Tuesday on TCM. This time, the putative serial killer is played by a young Jack Palance, renting a garret apartment in a house owned by Andy Griffith's Aunt Bea (er, Frances Bavier) and British actor Rhys Williams. Palance's character is a loner doing experiments of some sort, and because he likes to keep his activities on the hush-hush, the folks around him begin to wonder if he has something to hide -- specifically if he could be that serial killer. Things look worse for Palance when he falls for his landlords' niece (Constance Smith), whose boyfriend is a Scotland Yard detective. This isn't quite as good as the 1944 version of The Lodger, but Palance does a good job with his role.
When you think of John Waters, you probably think of movies like Hairspray. For a completely different John Waters movie, you could try The Mighty McGurk, which is on at 6:00 AM Wednesday on TCM. It's completely different because this was directed by a totally unrelated director who just happens to be named John Waters. Wallace Beery, near the end of his career, plays McGurk, a former boxer who's drunk and reduced to working as a bouncer at a bar on the Bowery owned by Edward Arnold. Shades of The Champ here. In fact, we're about to get more shades of The Champ in the form of a British (!?) orphan played by future Quantum Leap cast member Dean Stockwell. There's also a relationship between Arnold's daughter and a Salvation Army man which Dad doesn't approve of since the guy wants to shut down all the bars. It's up to McGurk to make them all live happily ever after. And he might just get the chance too in the form of pawnbroker Aline MacMahon, who appeared with Beery a dozen years earlier in Ah, Wilderness!.
I think I've recommended all of the Burt Lancaster movies that are showing up this week as part of the TCM Star of the Month Salute, although some of them aren't as well known as others. I think this week might see the TCM premiere of Mister 880 at 8:00 PM Wednesday; that one has Lancaster as a Secret Service agent who investigates a sweet little Santa Claus-like man (Edmund Gwenn) who engages in a little private sector quantitative easing by printing counterfeit one-dollar bills.
That's followed at 9:45 PM by Judgment at Nuremburg, in which Lancaster plays one of the Nazis put on trial by the Allies in the Nuremburg War Trials. Spencer Tracy plays the American judge; Richard Widmark the American military prosecutor; Maximilian Schell in an Oscar-winning performance as the defense attorney; Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland as victims of the Nazis who testify; Marlene Dietrich as a widow of a Nazi general; and William Shatner as Tracy's adjutant.
French railyard manager Lancaster tries to stop Nazi Paul Scofield from looting art treasures on The Train at 3:45 AM Thursday; and
Lancaster reunites with Judy Garland as they work at a school for developmentally-challenged youth in A Child Is Waiting at 6:00 AM Thursday.
You've probably already seen a bunch of crap in the news about the 50th anniversary of the death of John Kennedy, since the Baby Boomers seem totally unable to move past the 1960s and they think the whole "Camelot" nonsense ought to be an icon for the rest of us too. Unfortunately, TCM is getting into the nonsense as well by spending Thursday night's prime time lineup. They are showing the hagiographic PT 109 at 2:15 AM Friday, but the rest of the lineup is documentaries, such as Four Days in November at midnight Friday (ie. 11:00 PM Thursday LFT), which has a ton of newsreel footage covering the reaction to the assassination. It was made in conjunction with United Press International, and offers a chance to see Abraham Zaprude, who shot a famous home video of the murder; Hollywood types who show up include Joan Crawford and Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford. Richard Basehart provides narration.
Another 6:00 AM movie this week is Aggie Appleby, Maker of Men, at 6:00 AM Friday on TCM. Wynne Gibson plays Aggie, a woman trying to make it in New York in the Depression while living with brawling boyfriend William Gargan. He gets sent to prison for slugging a cop; she gets evicted from their apartment and winds up crashing on the bed of out-of-town Charles Farrell, son of an upstate family who took an apartment in New York that's currently vacant. And then he shows up, and we see that he can't make it in New York because he's not tough enough. So Gibson decides to make him tough enough. It works, more or less, until Gargan gets out of prison and finds the two of them together. As for the costars, there's Zasu Pitts as the maid cleaning Farrell's apartment; and Betty Furness as Farrell's girlfriend from upstate. There's also a lot of sexual innuendo with some wonderfully fun lines, like one about men being like trees: if you tap them harder, you get more sap out of them.
Finally we have a western that's seen the silver screen several times: The Spoilers, at 4:30 AM Sunday on the Encore Westerns Channel. This is based on a popular novel from the first decade of the last century -- in fact, so popular it was filmed five times, with the best-known version being one from the early 1940s with John Wayne. However, this is the 1955 version, starring Jeff Chandler. The setting is Alaska in the days of the Klondike gold rush. Lots of people have come to Alaska looking to strike gold and get rich, including Chandler, but they're not all scrupulous, as people try to jump each other's claims. Those unscrupulous folks include the goy at the claims office, played by Rory Calhoun. Complicating matters are a couple of love triangles. Chandler is in love with saloon keeper Anne Baxter, and Calhoun is trying to get her too. However, Chandler also starts looking at another woman (1940s actress Barbara Britton in her final movie role). There's nothing earth-shattering here, but if you like those 1950s westerns, you'll probably enjoy The Spoilers.