Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of November 4-10, 2013. It's the first full week of November, so we get a new Star of the Month on TCM. We also get a centenary birthday salute, another birthday salute, Part 10 of The Story of Film, more screwball comedies on Friday night, and more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
You may remember the Ginger Rogers comedy The Major and the Minor, in which she masquerades as a 12-year-old girl in order to buy a half-price train ticket. Also masquerading as a young girl in a different film is June Allyson in Too Young to Kiss, at 3:45 PM Monday on TCM. Allyson plays Cynthia, a talented musician who is trying to get a meeting with impresario Mr. Wainwright (Van Johnson). The appointments keep falling through, so when she hears that he's getting together a tour of children's concerts, she decides to dress up as the girl Molly in order to get his attention! Of course, there's the problem that she's lying, as well as the fact that she's got a fiancÉ (Gig Young), whom she's passing off as her uncle -- which complicates things when Wainwright falls in love with the adult Cynthia. You'd think anybody would notice thirtysomething June Allyson wasn't at all a young girl, but then we wouldn't have a movie, would we?
Monday night brings Part 10 of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which brings us to the late 1970s in world cinema. Now that we've reached November, we're only getting The Story of Film on Monday nights the rest of the way. The night kicks off with two films from Australia, including Picnic at Hanging Rock, at 10:15 PM. The story (apparently not based on actual events despite what some sources say) is a simple enough one: a bunch of students at a girls' school in Australia circa 1900 go for an excursion to Hanging Rock one summer's day. But, three of the students go missing, along with one of the teachers, none of them ever to return. What happened to them? Well, the movie doesn't actually answer that question, instead looking in a roundabout way at ehat might have happened as well as the effect that the disappearances had on the other people in the excursion party. The flute music is played by pan flute master Gheorge Zamfir, whom you may recall hawking records in the 1980s, although he's a serious musician.
Up until now, Tuesday nights had been devoted to a second helping of movies mentioned in The Story of Film, but no longer. On this first Tuesday in November, TCM gives us a 24-hour centenary salute to Vivien Leigh. You probably remember her best as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wing, which is airing at 10:00 PM Tuesday. Leigh won a second Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire, which is on at 8:00 PM. Before that, however, are several other movies, including her 1948 British version of Anna Karenina. Leigh plays Karenina, the woman in a late 19th century upper class family married to a man (Ralph Richardson) with whom she's not quite in love. This becomes particulalry clear when she meets the dashing Count Vronsky (Kieron Moore) and starts a torrid (by 19th century standards) love affair with him, even presumably getting knocked up by him. (Vronsky and Karenin have the same given name, so when it comes to to give the baby a patronymic, it's the same either way.) You probably know from having read Tolstoy's oriiginal story what eventually happens to poor Anna.
If Vivien Leigh isn't your thing, you might want to switch over to the Fox Movie Channel, which is airing I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, at 9:00 AM Tuesday (and again at 8:00 AM Sunday). This is the thoroughly made-up story of real-life songwriter Joseph Howard, played here by Mark Stevens. Howard is best known for the song "Hello! Ma Baby", since it would later be used in the famous Looney Tunes short One Froggy Evening; in real life, he wrote the song with his wife Ida. In this movie, though, there's no Ida character! I told you it wasn't realistic. In the movie, Joe performs a song for Lulu (Martha Stewart the actress, not the domestic craftswoman), who steals the song and then invites him into her vaudeville troupe. Eventually joining them is Katie (June Haver), who was the niece of Joe's guardian, creating a love triangle. Joe and Katie have an on-again, off-again relationship for the rest of the film. The songs are nice, and the Technicolor is lovely, but the story is formulaic and not even based in reality -- after the film came out, another songwriter sued, claiming he had co-written the title song! And he won the case!
Sharing a birthday with Vivien Leigh is Joel McCrea, who was born November 5, 1905. Since TCM is spending 24 hours with Leigh, they can't spend Tuesday with McCrea, so they're honoring him on Wednesday instead. One of the McCrea films TCM is showing is Primrose Path, which iyou can see at 12:30 PM Wednesday. The star of this one is actually Ginger Rogers, playing Ellie, the elder daughter in what would probably be considered a "white trash" family: Mom (Marjorie Rambeau) was prostituted out by Grandma (Queenie Vassar), while Dad (Miles Mander) is at heart a good person but also a useless alcoholic who can't keep a job. Ellie wants to make an honest living, and when she meets Ed (Joel McCrea), she sees her chance. The two fall in love and get married, without her telling him about her past because she's so ashamed. When Ed finds out about it he stupidly dumps her, but you know they're supposed to end up together at the end of the movie.
Our new Star of the Month for November is Burt Lancaster, whom you might recall won an Oscar for playing Elmer Gantry. That's not on until next week, so this week you might want to watch him making love to Deborah Kerr with waves crashing around them in From Here to Eternity, which is on at 11:45 PM Wednesday. From this week's Lancaster movies, I don't think I've recommended the period piece The Flame and the Arrow before; that's airing Thursday morning at 8:00 PM. This one is a sort of Robin Hood story, except that it's set in medieval Italy. Lancaster, who had originally been an acrobat by training, plays the Robin Hood character, here named Dardo Bartoli, only this one has a wife who's left him for the bad guy! He and his Lombardians are fighting the unjust conquerors the Hessians, led by Frank Allenby and Robert Douglas as a man infiltrating Dardo's merry men. Playing the other love interest is Virginia Mayo, who looks lovely in color.
In between the Burt Lancaster movies, you can catch the interesting short Grandad of Races, at 9:49 PM Wednesday, or just after The Killers (which begins at 8:00 PM). The race here isn't the Kentucky Derby, or the Grand National steeplechase that you'll recall from National Velvet, but a short race in Siena, Italy. Each district of the city fields a horse and shows off its colors before the race in a procession of colorful flags (and thankfully the movie is in Technicolor), before the race, which is almost a no-holds-barred affair not for the faint of heart, is held over the cobbled expanse of the town square. It's interesting enough on its own, but also interesting as a historical document of a way of life that's disappeared over the last 60 years.
If you think of Pat O'Brien from Knute Rockne, All American, or Warner Bros.' 1930s gangster movies, you might want to have a look at Oil For the Lamps of China, airing at 10:00 AM Friday on TCM. O'Brien stars a Stephen Chase, a man working for a large American petroleum company in its China operations, where they drill the oil, distill it, and then sell some of the distillates back to the poor Chinese people. The company expects its employees to make sacrifices for them, and Stephen has already done so as his fiancÉe has left him. He gets a wife though in the form of Josephine Hutchinson, daughter of a professor of Asian studies who's died. She stays by him even though compnay wives are discouraged from doing so -- and in Jean Muir we see the consequences of that. Still, Stephen keeps working at his thankless job as the company doesn't care about him, and as the maelstrom of Chinese history in the first third of the 20th century churns around him.
There are more screwball comedies this Friday night, presented throughout the month by Matthew Broderick. This week's theme is couples who get divorced and then find out that they probably would have been better off not getting a divorce. I've blogged about these movies before, starting with
The Awful Truth at 8:00 PM, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as the divorcing couple and Ralph Bellamy as the third man;
Dunne and Grant returning for My Favorite Wife at 9:45 PM;
William Powell and Myrna Loy play the married couple in Love Crazy at 11:30 PM; and
Alfred Hitchcock directing a screwball comedy with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery as the never legally married Mr. and Mrs. Smith, at 1:15 AM Saturday.
If you want to see something truly, hilariously awful, this week's TCM Underground has it for you: Disco Godfather, at 2:00 AM Sunday. I mean, just with a title like that you know you're in for a treat! Rudy Ray Moore plays Tucker, a retired cop who now manages the local disco and is known as the "Disco Godfather" for gettin' down with the disco. One day, though, his nephew Bucky, a talented young basketball player, is lured into trying drugs, specifically angel dust. Bucky has a nasty hallucination that nearly kills him. When the Disco Godfather learns about what happens to Bucky, and the dangers of PCP, he vows to go after the evil drug dealers who are romaning the streets and exploiting our children. If you thought the portrayal of teens on marihuana in Reefer Madness was bad, just try adding disco to the mix. And the way Rudy Ray Moore delivers his dialog, you'll start to wonder if he's on something.
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