Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of November 9-15, 2015. I know a lot of you are ticked off by the Packers' horrible loss to Denver, so in the words of Aaron Rodgers, R-E-L-A-X, this time with some good movies. For those of you who claim that I only recommend old movies, I've got one from '14 this week. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off this week with My Dear Miss Aldrich, at 11:30 AM Monday on TCM. Maureen O'Sullivan stars in the title role, as a spinster from Nebraska who finds that an uncle she barely knew has died and, having no other close relatives, has bequeathed his New York City newspaper to her So she goes to New York with her aunt (Edna May Oliver) to take control of the newspaper. When she gets there, she finds that she's got an editor named Morley (Walter Pidgeon) who has some rather old-fashioned ideas about running a newspaper. In addition to making the mistake of not realising it's Miss Aldrich who has inherited the paper -- he thinks it's the old aunt -- he has the idea that women have no place as serious reporters. So Miss Aldrich sets out to prove him wrong by taking a reporter job at the paper and getting the big story before any of the male reporters can. You can probably guess what happens from here. There's a lot of familiar material here, but Edna May Oliver can make almost anything worth watching.
TCM is spending Tuesday morning and afternoon with William Powell and Myrna Loy, even though it's neither of their birthdays (Powell was born at the end of July; Loy in August). Of course, you can't really go wrong with William Powell and Myrna Loy. I've recommend most of the movies airing on Tuesday, but can't recall whether I've recommended Double Wedding (7:45 AM Tuesday) before. Loy plays Margit, big sister to Irene (Florence Rice), who is engaged to Waldo (John Beal). It seems more Margit's idea that Irene marry Waldo than it does Irene's. In fact, Margit seems to be planning every aspect of Irene and Waldo's lives, and would plan everybody else's if she could too. Into all of this comes playwrite Charlie (Powell). He's a bohemian, living out of a trailer, and when he presents a play to Irene and Waldo, Irene gets the idea that Charlie is the right man for her. Margit is horrified, of course, but to make matters worse, Charlie realizes that Margit is the right one for him. How can he mske Irene realize Waldo really is right for her, and make Margit see that he is right for her?
Norma Shearer returns for another night of movies on Tuesday night, this time featuring several of her early talkies. She won the Oscar for The DivorcÉe (12:45 AM Wednesday) and was nominated the next year for A Free Soul (9:30 PM Tuesday). But instead of those too, this week I'll recommend Their Own Desire, at 2:15 AM Wednesday. Shearer plays Lally Marlett, adult daughter in a well-to-do family. But then one day her dad (Lewis Stone) comes home and says he's divorcing Mom in order to marry Mrs. Cheever. Lally takes Mom's side, basically writing Dad out of her life. She goes on happily, meeting handsome Jack (Robert Montgomery), and falling in love with him. And then she finds out that Jack is Mrs. Cheever's son! Lally still loves Jack, but Mom doesn't seem to be able to handle the idea that her daughter will be in love with the son of the woman who took her husband away. Lally and Jack wind up meeting secretly, but their boat gets caught in a storm and they're presumed drowned. Can things end happily for anyone in this picture?
Wednesday is Veterans' Day. TCM isn't doing anything for the day, but FXM Retro is showing a bunch of their war movies, with one I haven't recommended in a while being the excellent Decision Before Dawn, at 11:00 AM with a second airing at 8:00 AM Thursday. It's getting toward the end of World War II, with the big invasion of Germany itself coming up soon. So the Americans need vital information on German capabilities. Col. Devlin (Gary Merrill) is tasked with the difficult job of finding some German POWs who can be trusted to go back into Germany where they'd be less likely to be suspected of spying since they're native speakers, and get that information. Of course, there's the big problem of whether any of the POWs can in fact be trusted. Oskar Werner plays Cpl. Maurer, who takes the Americans up on the order, while Richard Basehart plays Lt. Rennick, his American handler. This one was filmed largely in Europe using many bombed-out areas in the filming for a better sense of realism.
We all remember George Burns. Before he became the extremely elderly actor, he spent 38 years married to Gracie Allen and being the foil to her scatter-brained zaniness, a partnership which was very popular. When she didn't have her husband to play off of, the result is something like Mr. and Mrs. North, at 8:30 AM Thursday. The Norths (played here by Allen and William Post Jr.) were characters first from a series of novels and then a popular radio show who solved murders in the same vein as Nick and Nora Charles. In this movie, the Norths return home to find somebody they know in their liquor clost, really quite dead! Obviously, the guy has been murdered, and the suspicion falls on everybody they know. So Mrs. North sets out to figure out how nobody she knew could be a killer, which of course leads her into find out who really did do it. Of course, she does it with her crazy ramblings, exasperating her husband along the way.
Thursday night on TCM sees several movies that are more or less documentaries. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with In the Land of the Head Hunters. Released in 1914, this was done by Edward Curtis, a professional still photographer who had the idea of going to a remote part of British Columbia's Vancouver Island, filming the Kwakiutl tribe and then taking the footage he got and fashioning a story line around it. (That's also basically how Nanook of the North was done minus the director being a still photographer by trade.) The fact that there is this footage and that it's survived for over a century is amazing, but of course there's that story, about tribes going to war over a native chieftain's daughter. Needless to say, it's not particularly realistic. There were no head hunters, and while a lot of the footage may be reasonably authentic (eg. the native dances), the way it's presented isn't.
Encore Westerns is running The Horse Soldiers several times, including 11:55 AM Friday and 1:15 AM Saturday. Based loosely on a real campaign in the Civil War, the movie stars John Wayne as Colonel Marlowe, given the task of going several hundred miles into Confederate territory, destroying a vital railroad junction also serving as a supply depot, and then get his soldiers to the safety of Union-held Baton Rouge. Of course there are complications. One is the regimental doctor, Major Kendall, played by William Holden. Medicine wasn't as advanced in those days and Col. Marlowe lost his wife at the hands of doctors, so he has an obvious antipathy toward them. There's another colonel who is clearly only serving because he thinks it will advance his later political career. And then there's Miss Hannah (Constance Towers), a southern woman who overhears some of the details of the mission. In order to keep her from going to the Confederate soldiers and spilling the beans, Marlowe has to have her kidnapped and brought along with the Union soldiers.
I can't recall if I've recommended Devil in a Blue Dress before, but you've got a couple of chances to catch it this week, such as Friday at 9:45 AM and 10:00 PM on Encore Action. A throwback to the classic noirs, this one stars Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, a struggling private detective in post-World War II Los Angeles. One day, De Witt Albright (Tom Sizemore) comes into Rawlins' office, looking for Rawlins' help in finding Daphne (Jennifer Beals). She's the fiancÉe of white mayoral candidate Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), but is known to spend a lot of time in the black part of town and has supposedly been seen in a blacks-only club. He takes the case, but then a key person in the case winds up murdered with the evidence pointing to Easy, which puts the police on his trail. Easy has to find the real killer before the police can pin it on him, since who's going to have sympathy for a black guy accused of killing a white?
A wonderful, little-seen British comedy airing this week on TCM is Make Mine Mink, at 3:00 AM Saturday. Terry-Thomas plays a retired army major living in a rooming house owned by Dame Beatrice (Athene Seyler) and with two other female lodgers. The Dame is disappointed that she can't do much for her favorite charities, but that changes when a couple in the apartment above them has an argument and the woman throws a fur coat over the balcony, landing on their balcony. This ultimately leads them to come up with the daft idea of stealing fur coats, fencing them, and giving the proceeds to charity! The major, having served in the war, comes up with elaborate clockwork schemes for the robbers, which somehow go off despite being carried out by him and some batty old women. But there's a problem. Not only are they stealing; their housekeeper (Billie Whitelaw) is an ex-con now married to a policeman, and the cops begin to suspect her, which our well-meaning fur thieves didn't intend to have happen.
And now for the shorts. In addition to the Traveltalks shorts that show up regularly, I'll mention a couple of other things. First at 12:50 PM Monday, or following the already-mentioned My Dear Miss Aldrich (so your DVR should catch both of them) is Romance of Digestion. Not a very romantic topic, but then this is a Robet Benchley short, so you can probably figure out already what the short is about. Benchley tries to give a lecture on the subject of digestion, in his own inimitable way. If you like Benchley you'll probably like this short; if not you can try the next one.
The Great American Pie Company at 12:12 PM Tuesday, following The Great Ziegfeld. Chic Sale, generally known as a "hick" comedian, plays a hen-pecked husband selling his wife's pies. The only thing is, there's another pie-seller in town, so the two men meet ostensibly to discuss a merger to create the titular pie company. Meanwhile, Chic is trying to eat his competitor's pies without paying for them.
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