Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of November 25-December 1, 2019. Thanksgiving is this week so we've got a number of family-friendly movies on the day. But before that there are more of the spotlights that TCM has been running throughout the month, all of which get one final day. There's also a movie that I don't think ran on FXM for a good 15 years before this month, and interesting stuff on a bunch of other movie channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with this week's Silent Sunday Nights selection on TCM: The Passion of Joan of Arc, at midnight Monday (or 11:00 PM tonight). You probably know the Joan of Arc story, about the teenage girl who claimed to have visions of archangels and saints which led her to head a force of men against the English during the Hundred Years War and win an important battle against the English. However, there were still French nobles allied with the English, and they captured her and put her on a show trial before burning her at the stake. This movie is about the trial and following events, not the battles. Joan (played by Maria Falconetti) absolutely refuses to recant, while her prosecutor Bishop Cauchon (Eugène Silvan) is perfectly willing to commit torture to get the evidence he wants. Since we know how history turns out, we know he didn't get the evidence but had to make it up, with the Catholic Church eventually exonerating Joan and canonizing her. The movie is notable for its extreme closeups and sparse photography at angles; cinematography was by Rudolph Maté, who left for Hollywood in the mid 1930s and photographed movies like Foreign Correspondent; after World War II he'd become a director on movies like D.O.A.
A western I don't think I've mentioned before is Cave of Outlaws, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 8:10 PM Monday and 11:24 AM Tuesday. Pete Carver (played as an adolescent by a very young Russ Tamblyn and as an adult by Macdonald Carey) served 15 years in prison for his part in a train robbery: the robbers took a bunch of bags of Wells Fargo gold, hid out in a cave, and in the resulting shootout, Pete was the only survivor. Somehow, nobody found the gold in all those years, and now that Pete is out of prison, he's made a beeline to the town nearest the caves. They all know the local legend, since they're willing to offer Pete credit on the theory that he's going to find that gold. He falls in love with Elizabeth (Alexis Smith), who's trying to get the town newspaper up and running again, but she already has a boyfriend in Garth (Hugh O'Brien) who isn't happy about this. Meanwhile, there's also a Wells Fargo agent Dobbs (Edgar Buchanan) who's been tailing Carver hoping Carver will lead him to the gold since it's rightly theirs.
Tuesday on TCM brings one final day of the movies of Star of the Month Bette Davis, looking at several of her later movies. Her final completed movie, The Whales of August, comes on at 4:15 AM Wednesday, and before that there's a bunch of stuff from the 50s through the 70s, such as All About Eve at 8:00 AM Tuesday and the classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? at 8:00 PM. The latter is known for the feud between Davis and Joan Crawford, a feud that produced such wonderful scenes as the following:
One of the movies that returned to FXM this month is Désirée. It's going to be on again at 10:50 AM Wednesday and 8:00 AM Thursday. Jean Simmons plays Désirée Clary, who works at the family millinery in Marseilles in 1794. If you know your history, that's during the French Revolution and who should walk into town but Napoleon Bonaparte (Marlon Brando!). He and Désirée fall in love, and his big dreams take him to Paris. Désirée follows after some time to look him up, only to find that he's getting married to Josephine (Merle Oberon) because it's politically convenient. Thankfully, Désirée is saved from a terrible fate by Count Bernadotte (Michael Rennie) who is also one of Napoleon's great generals; the two eventually get married. Napoleon eventually becomes emperor and still carries a flame for Désirée. With the difficult political situation in Europe, the Swedish parliament asks Bernadotte to take the Swedish throne, and Désirée follows. But she can't take Swedish royal protocol, and goes back to France in 1812, which means just in time for Napoleon to start the disastrous French campaign. Then when Napoleon escapes and has his Waterloo, Désirée is going to be the one to have to convince him to go to St. Helena.
We get one more day of the spotlight on cinematographers on Wednesday, with movies from the 1990s and 2000s. This gives me a chance to mention the physically lovely movie In the Mood for Love, which TCM is showing at 6:15 PM Wednesday. In 1962 Hong Kong, editor Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) is looking to rent a room for him and his wife who's always away on business, but the one he's asking about has just been rented out to Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), a secretary whose husband is also away on business a lot. Chow is able to get a room next door, and since the two principals' spouses are away (never actually seen in the movie) all the time, the two keep running into each other and start talking. Eventually they come to the conclusion that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other, and they start having a secret relationship themselves. But can their relationship last? The story is slim on the surface, but it's hiding a lot. The cinematography is excellent, both in depicting the characters' cramped lives and in depicting the style of 1960s Hong Kong (those vintage dresses all the women wear!)
Elsewhere on Wednesday, you have the chance to watch Reds, which will be on Epix at 6:40 AM Wednesday. If you've been to Moscow and done the Lenin's mausoleum tour, you'll know that there are quite a few people buried along the Kremlin wall behind Lenin's tomb. Among those is an American journalist, John Reed. Reds is his story, with Reed being played by Warren Beatty. Reed was a leftist, writing articles denouncing World War I when in 1915 he met Louise (Diane Keaton), who would become his on again, off again lover. 1917 rolled around and the February and October Revolutions in Russia, spurring Reed to go back to Russia and bring Louise with him. Reed would return to the US briefly to start the US Communist Party and Louise would have an affair with Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson). But the American public at large had the good sense to reject the idea of Communism, while Reed himself became disillusioned, thinking Lenin wasn't practicing “real” communism (where have we heard that nonsense before). Reed would finally go back to Russia for good, dying young having been in poor health most of his life.
Thursday is Thanksgiving, so TCM is running a bunch of family-themed movies. It's another chance to mention Yours, Mine, and Ours, which will be on at 9:45 PM. Lucille Ball plays Helen North, a Navy widow with eight children working on the base in Alameda CA. Also on the base is officer Frank Beardsley (Henry Fonda). He's a widower, and he's got 10 children. Even if you haven't seen the movie you can probably guess what's going to happen. Various friends, including Frank's friend Daniel (Van Johnson) are trying to get the two to date, and everybody realizes that what would be the most logical solution would be for Frank and Helen to wind up together, since both know how to deal with large families. (There's a joke where a young lady says she's very thankful for birth control.) Eighteen kids, of course, would be insanely large. But sure enough, the two start a relationship and ultimately get married, even if trying to blend the two families isn't always going to be easy. Surprisingly, this is based on a true story.
Also on Thanksgiving is a different sort of family movie, The 'Burbs, at 12:40 PM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Tom Hanks plays Ray Peterson, who lives on a peaceful suburban street with his wife Carol (Carrie Fisher) and their kid. He's taking what he had hoped would be a peaceful staycation, but he hears odd noises co ing from the basement of the house owned by new neighbors the Klopeks. And, as it turns out, he's not the only one, as neighbors Art (Rick Ducommon) and military veteran Mark (Bruce Dern) have also witnessed strange goings-on. Despite the fact that Ray just wants a stress-free week, Mark eventually convinces him to join in the investigation of the Klopeks. They all begin to wonder whether the Klopeks are some sort of satanic murder cult, especially after another elderly neighbor of theirs goes missing. But certainly there aren't satanic killings in the suburbs, are there? And how could you possibly get away with them if there were? A very dark comedy.
We get one more night of Dennis Miller and his friends on TCM on Friday night. Among the movies in the lineup is Sullivan's Travels, at 8:00 PM Friday. Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a successful movie director of fluff like “Ants in Your Pants of 1938” who wants to make meaningful message pictures. To do this, he feels he has to find out what it's like to live in poverty, something the studio doesn't want, since they want him making more movies. However, he goes off, meeting a struggling actress (Veronica Lake) along the way, and the project seems like it's going to be a success. Until just before the end of it, a hobo steals Sullivan's shoes which had his ID in the soles, and then said hobo gets run over by a train in a rail yard. So everybody thinks Sullivan is dead, while the real Sullivan has no way of proving his identity, which results in him getting picked up by the police on an assault charge and being put on a chain gang. How is he going to get the outside world to understand who he really is?
William Powell and Myrna Loy made several movies together outside of the six Thin Man movies. One of those is Double Wedding, which will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Sunday. Myrna Loy plays Margit, the older sister in a family where her younger sister Irene (Florence Rice) is engaged to Waldo (John Beal). However, it's Marget who's running the show, down to controlling how the wedding is going to go off. Into their lives walks starving artist Charlie (William Powell), who convinces Irene to become an actress. When Charlie tries to teach her and Waldo how to do a love scene, Irene starts to fall in love with Charlie, which of course appalls Margit. She approaches Charlie, who agrees to leave Irene on the condition that Margit allow him to paint her portrait. Of course, this is going to take some time for Margit to sit for the portrait, and as you can probably guess, Margit finds herself falling in love with Charlie, whose free-spirited personality is in many ways the exact opposite of Margit's. It's material that's been done in a bunch of different ways, but it still works here.
Sunday is December 1, which means that we're finally in the same month as Christmas and it's OK to start seeing Christmas stuff show up. TCM is showing good Christmas stuff, much better than what you'd get on places like the Hallmark Channel. Each of the four Sundays before Christmas, TCM is running a Christmas movie double feature in prime time before Silent Sunday Nights comes on. This first Sunday in December sees two classics, the 1951 version of Scrooge (also known as A Christmas Carol) at 8:00 PM (this is the one with Alistair Sim), followed at 10:00 PM by The Bishop's Wife, with David Niven as the bishop and Loretta Young as the wife who learn how to love each other again from angel Cary Grant.