Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of November 28-December 4, 2016. Wisconsin Badger fans are waiting with bated breath for the B1G Championship Game, and then getting screwed by the playoff committee because An Ohio State University is a bigger ratings draw. Since none of us can do anything about that, why not spend the time waiting by watching some good movies? I've used my good taste to select another batch of interesting movies and, with the first days of a new month, a new Star of the Month on TCM. Oh, it's the month with Christmas, so get ready for Christmas movies. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off this week with the Silent Sunday Nights movie, or in this case movies. This week, starting at midnight tonight, there are five two-reelers, all of which are dog-themed. Unfortunately, figuring out from the TCM schedule the order in which the shorts are airing is difficult. The monthly schedule says one thing, the weekly schedule says something else, and the set-top box guide is only showing one title in a two-hour slot! Anyhow, there are going to be two movies with the silent version of Hal Roach's Little Rascals (ie. the days before Alfalfa, Spanky, and the gang): Love My Dog and Dog Daze; two with Blair Kiel's favorite silent comic, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: Fatty's Plucky Pup and Fatty's Faithful Fido; and, one with Harold Lloyd, Number, Please? The Fatty Arbuckle shorts and the Harold Lloyd short are in the public domain and, unsurprisingly, have wound up on Youtube as a result.
If you don't like your movies doggie-style, you can switch over to StarzEncore Westerns and watch The War Wagon instead, at 1:25 AM Monday. John Wayne plays Taw Jackson, a man who used to own a ranch, but who was fleeced out of it by Pierce (Bruce Cabot) after gold was discovered on the spread. Pierce had Lomax (Kirk Douglas) shoot at Jackson, as well as having Jackson framed and sent to prison for years while Pierce got the whole spread – and the gold. Well, Jackson is out of prison now, and he's decided to find Lomax to try to get some revenge on Pierce. It turns out that Pierce is shipping the gold out in an armored wagon, and Jackson plans to rob that armored wagon. So this is really a combination western and heist movie. Also in the band of people Jackson hires are a dynamite expert (Robert Walker Jr.) and a Jewish Indian named Levi Walking Bear (Howard Keel).
In 1982, Werner Herzog released the movie Fitzcarraldo, about a man at the turn of the century who decides to build an opera house in Iquitos, Peru, in the middle of the Amazon rain forest. The film was an exceptionally difficult shoot. Documentarian Les Blank made his own movie about the difficult time Herzog his, and that movie, Burden of Dreams, will be on TCM at 3:15 AM Tuesday. Part of the movie's plot, for example, involved hauling a ship over the mountains, and you can figure out how that would be a problem. But there's so much more. The original two choices for male lead, Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, both had to pull out of the time-consuming production; Herzog had to hire head-case Klaus Kinski for the male lead; the indigenous peoples in the region didn't like Herzog's presence; and at one point there's war between Peru and Ecuador! It's a wonder Herzog was able to complete the movie at all.
You'll have to suspend disbelief to watch Too Young To Kiss, at 1:15 AM Wednesday on TCM. June Allyson plays Cynthia, a woman in her mid-20s who is a talented pianist, but can't seem to catch the attention of any of the bigwigs. Then she hears of impresario Eric (Van Johnson), who is planning an audition. The only thing is, it's an audition for children. So Cynthia gets the brilliant idea of dressing up like a 12-year-old girl for the audition, totally fooling Eric. That of course presents problems. Eventually the lie is going to come to light. But there's also the problem that Cynthia has a fiancé (when passing herself off as 12, that fiancé is passed off as her uncle). And of course Cynthia begins to fall for Eric, which of course sounds ultra creepy, especially coming from actors like Allyson and Johnson who never had that image.
You probably have all heard of the Broadway musical Hair. (Blair Kiel is jealous of it.) Hair was loosely adapted into a movie in the late 1970s, and that movie musical will be on at 3:25 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. John Savage plays Claude, a farm boy from Oklahoma who winds up in New York City having been drafted to serve in Vietnam. There, he runs into a group of hippies led by Berger, who take him on a series of adventures including meeting rich Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), with whom Claude falls in love although her love for him probably isn't anywhere near as strong. Along the way, they sing most of the songs that you might remember from the stage show, although without quite as much of the more out there stuff that the musical had, since for one you couldn't put that sort of nudity on screen. Watch for Nell Carter singing a couple of songs; Charlotte Rae from The Facts of Life; and director Nicholas Ray as The General.
A new month means some movies coming back to FXM Retro, such as Four Jills in a Jeep, at 11:40 AM Thursday and 9:30 AM Friday. This one is actually based on a real story. Carole Landis did USO tours out to where the soldiers were in World War II, and wrote a book about it. In the movie, she's one of a group of four, along with Kay Francis, Martha Raye, and Mitzi Mayfair, who announce, sight unseen, that they're going to do their part for the war effort by going abroad on the USO tours. (All four had gone on a tour together in late 1942.) Kay is more or less put in charge of the group; Phil Silvers shows up to play the part of their driver; and Dick Haymes plays a GI who winds up as love interest to Carole. Along the way, the ladies go through some of the same hardships as the actual soldiers go through as well as entertaining them. Also, some Fox stars who remained stateside perform via radio for the GIs, although we get to see them: Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and Carmen Miranda, among others.
I mentioned Fitzcarraldo above; a different Fitz movie is on TCM this week: Fitzwilly, at 4:30 AM Friday on TCM. The title here refers the a butler, played by Dick Van Dyke. Fitzwilly heads the servants working for elderly Miss Woodworth (Dame Edith Evans), who unfortunately is no longer wealthy. She wants to make donations to charity, and the servants want to get paid, so Fitzwilly organizes a fraud in that he charges things at high-end department stores on wealthy people's accounts, with the goods being shipped to the servants' entrance at the Woodworth place. Woodworth is working on a vanity book project, and for that she needs a secretary, so she winds up getting Juliet (Barbara Feldon). Having a stranger in the house threatens to upend Fitzwilly's plans and reveal Woodworth's true bankruptcy. But Juliet and Fitzwilly fall in love, highly complicating things. This is, of course, all a comedy, so it's handled lightly and winds up being a lot of fun.
I know a lot of you like those vintage B movies, so one that I'll mention this week is Midnight Alibi, coming up on TCM at 9:15 AM Friday. Richard Barthelmess plays gambler Lance, returning to America from Europe. On the ship home he meets Joan (Ann Dvorak) and falls in love with her, but there's a problem in that her older brother is gangster Angie the Ox (Robert Barratt). In order to escape the gangsters, he winds up hiding out in the apartment of the elderly Abigail (Helen Lowell), who takes him in mostly because he looks like a dashing young man she love when she was a young beauty. (In a flashback sequence, Barthelmess gets to play the double role of the young lover.) And then Angie the Ox is murdered, and Lance stands accused of the murder. How's he going to get out of this one? Barthelmess had been a fairly big star during the silent era and the beginning of the sound era, but Warner Bros. let him go after this one, and his career never recovered.
We're into a new month, which means a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, that's Myrna Loy. Her movies are going to be every Friday in prime time, and there are a lot of them. The month is actually going to start off with a documentary on Loy, Myrna Loy: So Nice to Come Home To, at 7:00 PM Friday. This looks both at her movies – she started in the silent era as an exotic vamp (see the early talkie The Squall at 2:15 AM Saturday for an example, in which she plays a Gypsy woman) before becoming the “perfect wife and mother” in all those movies with William Powell – as well as her off-screen works. Loy took several years off from making movies during World War II to help sell war bonds, and then continued to do humanitarian works after the war. As for those “perfect wife” movies, you're going to have to wait until later weeks to see them.
Our last selection this week is the biblical epic David and Bathsheba, which I think may be a TCM premiere, at 8:00 PM Sunday. Gregory Peck plays David, the king of the Israelites famous for killing Goliath. Here he's got a wife and children, and successful military campaigns, but he doesn't have true love. That is, until he sees Bathsheba (Susan Hayward) taking a bath on the roof of her house, and falls in love with her. The feeling is mutual. But, there's a problem. Bathsheba is already married to Uriah (Kieron Moore), one of David's soldiers. David sends Uriah off to battle and his ultimate doom, while it turns out that Bathsheba has gotten pregnant, obviously by David and not Uriah. Oops, David has sinned! Sin should be something forgivable, but these are the old days, and people thing sin gets published seriously by God, and the punishment in this case is drought and crop failure for all Israel. How can David absolve himself (and Bathsheba, too, since she sinned) of his sins and save his people?