Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of November 20-26, 2017. Thanksgiving is this week, which means that many people only have a three-day workweek, making it a good opportunity to catch up on some old movies. (You don't want to know how many I've got on my DVR that I haven't watched yet.) There's more from Star of the Month James Stewart, and stuff suitable for Thanksgiving. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I don't think I've recommended the silent The Single Standard before. It's this week's Silent Sunday Nights selection, at midnight Monday (ie. 11:00 PM tonight LFT) on TCM. Greta Garbo plays Arden Stuart, a wealthy socialite who's being pursued by the equally wealthy Tommy (Johnny Mack Brown). However, she resents the double standard that married men can still party while their wives are expected to stay home and socialize with the other housewives, so she goes off with the chauffeur for a one-night stand! That doesn't work, but she makes the acquaintance of artist Packy (Nils Asther). He invites her aboard his yacht, and she could see herself marrying him. But he lives for his art and so he dumps her to head for China. Back home Arden decides the least bad thing to do is to marry Tommy, and she settles down with him and even bears him a child. But of course a few years later Packy returns from Asia, raising the question of whether Arden will stay with Tommy or run off with Packy. Shades of The Divorcee here.
Arsenic and Old Lace is back on this week, at 2:00 PM Monday on TCM. Cary Grant plays Mortimer, a critic who has finally decided to get married, to Elaine (Priscilla Lane). He goes to tell his beloved spinster aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair), but when he's at their house, he learns that they have a disturbing secret. He finds a dead body, and when he confronts the two women, they tell him that this isn't the first dead body. In fact, they feel they've been performing a service by finding lonely old men who have no living family, and offering the men “companionship” that really means poisoning them with elderberry wine. Further, they've been using Mortimer's cousin, who's mentally ill himself and thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, to bury the bodies; “Teddy” thinks he's digging the Panama Canal. If that's not enough, into all of this walks another cousin Jonathan (Raymond Massey) who is a fugitive from justice and who has gotten plastic surgery from Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) only to wind up looking like Boris Karloff.
I've mentioned Maury Dexter several times. He was a director of ultra-low-budget movies that Fox distributed in the early 60s when the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra was hemorrhaging money and they needed cheap content. Dexter's stuff ranges from interesting to hilariously terrible. In 1963 he proofered his take on the teen movie with The Young Swingers, which will be on FXM Retro at 4:45 AM Monday. In this one, Mel Hudson (Rod Lauren) plays a young man who runs the local music club and teen hangout spot, the Vanguard. However, the grown-up developers have a plan for the area, and that plan most definitely does not include the building that houses the Vanguard. So they try to put the Vanguard out of business in order to aid their development. The building's owner Roberta Crawford (Jo Helton) wants to evict them, but Mel fights back. Of course the movie is on the young people's side. Along the way Mel falls in love with Roberta's niece Vicki (Molly Bee).
TCM is showing several Ralph Meeker movies on Tuesday. One that I don't think I've recommended before is Teresa, at 8:00 AM. Meeker isn't the star here; the male lead is John Ericson playing Philip Cass, a thoroughly unlikeable man. Philip served in World War II (under Meeker's sergeant character) without any positive distinction, and at the end of the war married the titular Teresa (Pier Angeli). Philip brought Teresa back to New York, where he's got a nasty overbearing mother (Patricia Collinge) who has obviously rubbed off on her son because he's just as much a whiny jerk. If Teresa were American by birth, she'd probably leave her husband despite the fact that by this time she's carrying his child. John finally decides to go to the VA to get some psychiatric help (from Rod Steiger in one of his first movies), and maybe he can get his life together. If he can get out from under the clutches of his mother, that is.
Wednesday is yet another day of James Stewart movies. One that doesn't get shown very much is Thunder Bay, which will be on at 9:15 AM. Stewart plays Steve Martin, who is not a wild and crazy guy at all, but a naval engineer fresh off of service in World War II. He's wound up in Louisiana because he's got the idea of drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, setting up a safe oil platform in order to do so. To get out to where the oil is, he hires the boat of the Rigaud family, and he falls for one of the Rigaud daughters (Joanne Dru) while his business partner (Dan Duryea) falls for the other. There's a problem, though, in that their exploration for oil disturbs the shrimp beds that have been the livelihood for the Rigauds and everybody else in the Rigauds' small coastal town, so of course the locals turn on Steve and his partner. Gilbert Roland, fresh off The Bad and the Beautiful, plays one of the leaders of the shrimpers who fight the oil men.
Thursday is Thanksgiving, a time at which a lot of people try to get home to be with family. One of the great movies with that theme is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which will be on StarzEncore Classics in a Thanksgiving marathon: the first airing will be at 10:00 PM Wednesday, and there will be 14 more airings roughly 96 minutes apart until 10:00 PM Thursday. Steve Martin plays Neal Page, a wealthy executive living in Chicago in a big house with a wife and three kids. But he's on business in New York just before Thanksgiving and all he wants to do is get home. He loses his taxi to Del (John Candy), but that's just the beginning of his problems. When he gets to the airport, he's been bumped from first class and seated next to Del, an obnoxious salesman of shower curtain rings. And then the flight gets cancelled, and Neal and Del get put in the same hotel room! Finally, Del decides that he's going the same way as Neal, and the two try to make it to Chicago together, not that Neal is very happy about that.
Meanwhile, over on TCM, they're showing a bunch of family movies for Thanksgiving, such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at 3:30 PM Thursday. The Nolans are an Irish-American family struggling to get by in the Brooklyn of the first decade of the last century. Dad Johnny (James Dunn) is a singing waiter, at least when he can find work. Unfortunately, he drinks too much, which means that he doesn't get as much work as he should, and this, combined with his generosity, leaves the family constantly short of money. Mom Katie (Dorothy McGuire) is tough as nails, in part because she has to be to raise the family with a drunk for a husband. Daughter Francie (Peggy Ann Garner) is precocious and wants to grow up to be a writer, but how much can the family afford to sacrifice to help her succeed in her ambitions? There's a kid brother Neeley (Ted Donaldson) and Aunt Sissy (Joan Blondell) who has a series of men in her life. And since this is focusing on Irish-Americans, what would the movie be without the stereotypical Irish cop, Officer McShane (Lloyd Nolan)?
For something entirely different on Thanksgiving, switch over to StarzEncore Westerns, where you'll find Robbers' Roost on at 8:10 AM. Bruce Bennett plays Herrick, a rancher who is now confined to a wheelchair and running the place with help from his sister Helen (Sylvia Findlay). He's worried about cattle rustlers screwing up with the big cattle drive, so he comes up with the audacious idea of hiring the outlaws to run the cattle drive with him! The thinking is that he's going to be hiring two rival gangs, headed by Hank (Richard Boone) and Heesman (Peter Graves), and with the rival gangs watching each other, nobody will want to try to steal cattle for fear of retribution from the other gang. Into all of this walks Tex (George Montgomery). It turns out that somebody murdered his wife and stole his horses, and he's been looking for the man who did so. It's likely that with all the outlaws here on the cattle drive, one of them will be the guilty party. And of course, lots of guys fall for Helen.
After Thanksgiving is over with, on Friday we get to this month's Guest Programmer on TCM: actor Matthew Modine. Modine sits down with TCM host Ben Mankiewicz to present four of his favorite movies. Three he watched courtesy of his father who ran a drive-in; the fourth he saw when he was a budding actor in New York:
The Dirty Dozen at 8:00 PM, in which Lee Marvin leads a bunch of reprobates on an impossible mission against the Nazis;
Cool Hand Luke at 10:45 PM, in which Paul Newman eats 50 hard-boiled eggs;
Network at 1:15 AM Saturday, a behind the scenes look at a TV network and its news department that creates as much fake news as [insert favorite bogeyman channel here]; and
Grand Illusion at 3:30 AM, with a bunch of French flyboys in World War I becoming prisoners of war in Germany.
Finally, I'll mention the movie Rafter Romance at 6:00 AM Sunday. Ginger Rogers plays Mary, a woman who can't make rent, so her landlord comes up with a unique solution: He's got a loft apartment that she can use half the time, while Jack (Norman Foster) uses it the other half of the time since she works days and he works nights. (What do they do on the weekends?) Mary and Jack each hate their roommate whom they never see, except of course that they meet on the outside, neither of them knowing that they're seeing their real-life roommate. And on the outside, they fall in love. It's a hoary, nonsensical plot, but the movie is a hoot. And watch for Robert Benchley as Mary's boss at a vintage telemarketing firm. In fact, RKO, remade the movie a few years later as Living on Love, and that remake is on TCM this week, at 6:00 AM Saturday.
