Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of November 25-December 1, 2013. It's hard to believe that we're going into the last month of the year, but sure enough, that's the case. Thanksgiving is also this week for our American readers, so if you have a family to enjoy it with, be thankful. There's another week of The Story of Film, and another Wednesday night of Burt Lancaster movies, among other fun stuff. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week sees the second half of movies recovered from New Zealand, as part of Silent Sunday Nights, airing tonight at midnight. I mentioned last week how the films ended up in New Zealand, and I see that the TCM site has a page mentioning which films will be showing up as part of the found films. I don't know if the movies are listed in the order that they're running, but this week sees a two-strip Technicolor short, an early Mabel Normand movie, scenes of rural Virginia from the 1920s, and the three surviving reels of The White Shadow, a movie written by Alfred Hitchcock before he became a director.
Monday night sees Part 13 of The Storyof Film on TCM. They're up to the late 1980s and early 1990s, so there are several films that I don't know very well. Perhaps more interesting for those of you who don't want to see foreign films is that in between the movies on Monday night, TCM is running a bunch of "making of" featurettes on various films of the 1980s. Perhaps the most interesting of these might be 2010: The Odyssey Continues, at about 11:28 PM. (Or, just after Where Is My Friend's House at 10:00 PM if you have to Tivo the whole program.) 2010, released in 1984, is of course a sequel to 2001, so it's a movie set in good part in the future in outer space. This 20-minute featurette looks at how the filmmakers created a vision for the future (they of course had no idea what the real 2010 was going to look like, and it's always fun to see how moviemakers get the future wrong), as well as how the zero-gravity effects were done. There's also The Making of the Blue Lagoon around 1:45 AM Tuesday, after the following feature, for our female posters who want to perv over Christopher Atkins. (Brooke Shields was about 15 when she made this, so get your minds out of the gutter, guys.)
Tuesday night brings another documentary to TCM. This time, it's part of TCM's infrequent series A Night at the Movies, looking at crime films. The documentary premieres at 8:00 PM Tuesday, and gets another airing at 11:00 PM for the benefit of those on the west coast. These airings are the jumping off point for a night of crime movies, starting at 9:00 PM with Bullitt, in which Steve McQueen tries to figure out who killed the witness he was supposed to be protecting, complete with a famous car chase.
I prefer The Naked City, which is airing at midnight Wednesday (or 11:00 PM Tuesday LFT). This one is a docudrama looking at how a big-city police department investigates a murder case and eventually finds the murder. It used extensive location shooting in New York City, which gives it a more realistic look and a more gripping story line.
What's left of the Fox Movie Channel is this week showing a movie they haven't run in quite a few years: Wild River, at 4:00 AM Wednesday.. Montgomery Clift stars as Glover, a man sent from Washington DC to help get the dams of the TVA build during the Depression. All those dams are going to flood a lot of people off of their land, and unsurprisingly some of them have no desire to leave. One of those is the matriarch Garth, played by Jo Van Fleet. She's been living on the family land long enough that it's the only thing she knows, and she isn't about to see her life destroyed. When meeting the matriarch, Glover also meets her granddaughter Carol (Lee Remick). He falls in love with her, which greatly complicates things. Further complicating matters is the fact that a lot of the southerners don't like these government men from the north trying to impose northern values on them. All involved put in excellent acting performances, and this is one of Elia Kazan's little-known masterpieces.
Wild River is also airing at 1:00 PM Wednesday, but I'd recommend getting the earlier airing because also on at 1:00 PM Wednesday, over on TCM, is Stakeout on Dope Street. A drug courier gets gunned down by the police, throwing his stash into the bushes. Before the other dealers can get it, the stash is discovered by a threesome of adolescents, who find it in amongst a bunch of cosmetics to hide its true origin. When they discover that the canister of non-cosmetics actually held two pounds of uncut heroin, they try to get the can, and then have the brilliant -- or unbelievably stupid -- idea of fencing the heroin themselves! But everybody in town wants the heroin: the police want to keep it off the streets; the dealers want to sell it; and the users want their fix! So the adolescents are in grave danger. It's told with a cast of mostly unknowns (you might recognize Abby Dalton as the girlfriend), but it tells its story in a very gripping manner. I don't know how realistic the heroin withdrawal scene is, but it is disturbing.
Burt Lancaster shows up on Wednesday night for one final night of his movies as TCM's Star of the Month. I had forgotten that Lancaster is in Field of Dreams, which is on at 8:00 PM Wednesday. You know the basic story, that of an Iowa corn farmer (played by Kevin Costner) who hears a voice telling him "If you build it, he will come". (I always thought it was Darth Vader's voice, but according to IMDb both Costner and Ray Liotta claim it's them. James Earl Jones is in the movie, but as a modern-day writer.) So he builds a baseball diamond, and eventually members of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox show up, with the aforementioned Liotta playing Shoeless Joe Jackson. But that's not the real lesson to be learned. As for Lancaster, he plays the elder "Moonlight" Graham, a real person who played only one major league game before becoming a doctor, although the film gets all the details way wrong.
Thursday is Thanksgiving, a day for the family to gather together and be thankful for not being Viking fans. The Packers are going to be beating the everloving **** out of Detroit in the early game, but just before that, at about 12:05 PM Thursday on TCM, you can watch the Thanksgiving-themed short Let's Talk Turkey. This short is narrated by Pete Smith, who specialized in narrating comic shorts that generally looked at everyday topics. This time, the theme is how to carve your Thanksgiving turkey. We see, as on today's TV cooking shows, the way it's done right. And then we see the "average" newlywed husband trying to imitate the cooking show, only for things not to turn out anywhere close to the way they do when it's the TV chefs doing the carving. He's not helped by the fact that his wife's family doesn't like him. The Pete Smith shorts are generally moderately funny, although Smith's voice takes some getting used to, and the shorts are often just as funny without the narration (there's never any dialogue from the characters).
With Thanksgiving over, we can start getting to Christmas movies. Or at least movies that have "Christmas" in the title, such as Christmas in July, at 9:45 PM Friday on TCM. Dick Powell stars as an office worker who dreams of getting rich -- not in the old-fashioned way, but by winning a radio contest. The current contest involves writing the new slogan for a coffee company, and the jury to pick the winner can't decide on a winner. So some of Powell's co-workers decide to play a joke on him by sending him a fraudulent telegram stating that he's won the contest! He goes to the head of the coffee company, who writes him a check even though the jury is still deliberating! Powell and his girlfriend (Ellen Drew) then proceed to start spending that money on gifts for everybody in their apartment building, and it's only after spending a good deal of the money that everybody learns the telegram was a fraud. This is one of Preston Sturges' earlier efforts, but a very enjoyable one.
Yet another movie that I think hasn't shown up on TCM in years is the wonderful comedy Make Mine Mink, at 6:30 AM Saturday. Terry-Thomas stars as a British World War II veteran who's more or less retired and living in a rooming house iwth a bunch of women. One day, from a balcony above, a rich couple have an argument over spending, with them throwing a fur coat over the balcony. The roomers fish it in, since it's valuable, although they worry about it possibly being stealing. The fact that their maid's boyfriend is a policeman doesn't help. Anyhow, they get the idea to give it to a charity their landlord is involved in, which brings up the problem that the charity likes is increased revenue stream. So our gang of roomers becomes a gang of inept fur thieves, as they've all found a reason to live again, especially Terry-Thomas, who lives for planning these things with military precision. Make Mine Mink is one of the funnier movies you'll ever see.
Finally, we have the western Forty Guns, which is airing three times over the weekend, all on Encore Westerns: at 1:35 PM Saturday, 8:00 PM Saturday, and 2:40 AM Sunday. Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman who is the real law of na Arizona county with her "forty guns", which are more or less a private army. She needs them, since her kid brother (John Ericson) keeps getting in trouble. Into town comes Barry Sullivan and his brothers. Eircson shoots the old, worthless marshal; Sullivan takes the job of the new marshal, and actually tries to clean up the place. Complicating things is that he and Stanwyck are falling for each other, and the fact that Sullivan has a brother of his own who might mess things up. This movie was directed by maverick director Sam Fuller, so there are loads of unusual touches, from the opening shots of Stanwyck riding a white horse with her "forty guns", lots of sexual innuendo, and a scene at a public baths where the (male) owner sings a song called "Woman with a Whip" to the men bathing in barrels!
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