Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of October 13-19, 2014. The same October programming features that I've brought up the past two weeks will be coming up again on TCM this week, while there are some good movies on other channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday, October 13 is the birth anniversary of actress Laraine Day, so it's unsurprising that TCM will be spending the morning and afternoon with her, in films such as Unholy Partners, at 8:30 AM. Day is only in a supporting role here, as the secretary to Edward G. Robinson. He plays Corey, who served in World War I and, having been a reporter back home, started a newspaper of sorts for the boys "over there". When he returns, he wants to run the same sort of newspaper, but his old editor would still rather run a "serious" newspaper. So Corey is willing to go out on his own, except that he needs financial backing. He gets it from Lambert (Edward Arnold), who just happens to be the city's vice king and biggest gangster. Unsurprisingly, the two wind up clashing. Corey thinks he can print negative stories about Lambert and his gang, while Lambert thinks he should be able to use the paper for his own political ends. Marsha Hunt plays Robinson's girlfriend. Hunt, unless she dies, will be turning 97 on Friday.
Monday night brings us this month's Guest Programmre on TCM, that being comic author/director David Steinberg. He's selected four of his favorite films and will be introducing them with Robert Osborne:
The Marx Brothers and Kitty Carlisle in A Night at the Opera at 8:00 PM;
Fed Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance their way through Swing Time at 10:00 PM;
Cary Grant tries to get his dinosaur bone back from Katharine Hepburn's jaguar in Bringing Up Baby at midnight Tuesday (ie. 11:00 PM Monday LFT); and
Giulietta Masina plays an Italian prostitute in Nights of Cabiria at 2:00 AM Tuesday.
Following A Night at the Opera, a little after 9:45 PM, we get a short called Things You Never See on the Screen. This was Warner Bros. blooper reel for the year 1935, to be shown at the company Christmas party. The easiest thing to recognize is James Cagney in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but there are a lot of other famous actors flubing their lines, too. There's also a title card of some Italian-American crewman, who we're told "has gone home to cook one of his wop dinners". Seriously.
TCM is giving us a bunch of Richard Dix movies on Tuesday even though his birthday is in July. A movie I don't think I've ever recommended before is Shooting Stratight, at 10:00 AM Tuesday. Dix plays a professional gambler who sees one of his friends get shot by gangsters, so Dix goes off and kills the guy who did it. Of course, he has to flee town, so he takes the train out of town, where he meets a moral reformer type. Unfortunatley the train crashes, killing the reformer, and the two men's identities are mixed up. Dix is now convalescing in the middle of nowhere where the train crashed and falls in love with the local reverend's daughter (Mary Lawlor) who's been taking care of him after the crash. Of course, the gangsters running the gambling racket have set up shop here too, and one of the gangsters likes the reverend's daughter too. And her brother is in debt to them. What's a man who's wanted for murder and being mistaken for a reformer to do?
TCM will be running several Franchot Tone movies during the evening and overnight on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, this includes Mutiny on the Bounty, at 2:45 AM. Hoewver, what's more interesting is the short following Mutiny on the Bounty, at about 4:59 AM: Primitive Pitcairn. As part of making Mutiny on the Bounty, MGM also went to the actual Pitcairn Island and filmed this short of how the descendants of the Bounty crew and the Polynesian women they had taken with them were living 140 or so years on. Pitcairn is a very harsh environment, and the living conditions weren't all that good even by the 1930s when the place had become a British colony and was somewhat more accessible. I can only imagine what it was like those first years when the actual Bounty crew were around
For those of you who like musical biopics, you're in luck: FXM is running The I Don't Care Girl, at 9:50 AM Wednesday. Mitzi Gaynor stars as Eva Tanguay, who was a big-time vaudeville entertainer in the first two decades of the last century. Producer/impresario George Jessel, playing himself, frames the story as one of the various men in Tanguay's life telling the story of her life from their perspective. Oscar Levant plays a pianist who provides musical accompaniment for Tanguay. David Wayne plays a man who partnered with Tanguay on stage, and Bob Graham plays a singer who has the hots for Tanguay. Of course, the movie is only loosely based on Tanguay's actual life, and isn't helped by the way it was edited. Still, Mitzi Gaynor gets some nice musical numbers.
Back on TCM, we're getting a bunch of 1930s love-triangle movies on Wednesday, such as Man Wanted, at 2:30 PM. Kay Francis plays Lois, who is the editor of a high-society magazine who is married to playboy Fred (Kenneth Thomson). Lois' secretary has just quit, so she's looking for a new one, and takes on an unlikely candidate: Tommy the exercise equipment salesman (David Manners). As his does his eecutive assistant job well and gets closer to Lois, Tommy begins to fall in love with her, which is a problem for both. While Lois already has a husband, Tommy is engaged to Ruth (Una Merkel). Rounding out the cast is Andy Devine as Andy, Tommy's roommate. Of course, you can probably figure out who's going to end up with whom in the final reel, but watching Kay Francis' ridiculous wardrobe and seeing Andy Devine outside of westerns is always worth it.
Wednesday night means more Janet Leigh, and once again her movies continue into Thursday morning. If you liked Jack Webb in The D.I. last week, you'll probably like him in Pete Kelly's Blues, which is on at 9:00 AM Thursday. Webb stars as Pete Kelly, the leader of a 1920s dixieland jazz band who plays cornet in the combo. This being the Prohibition era, Kelly's band is playing in speakeases, and the gangster McCarg who runs the speakeasies (Edmond O'Brien) wants more of a cut then they're already getting. This really riles up the band's drummer, played by a young Martin Milner before Route 66 and Adam-12, who rebels to the point that he gets himself knocked off by McCarg's hired goons. Janet Leigh plays Pete Kelly's girl and doesn't have much to do; Peggy Lee plays the girl that McCarg wants to promote; Lee Marvin plays the band's clarinetist, and Andy Devine plays a cop much more seriously than most of his roles.
Since nobody wants to watch the Patrious put a beatdown on the Jets on Thursday night (why nut just put Bill Belichick and Rex Ryan in a cage match?), watch the ghost movies on TCM instead. This week's set includes the odd comic fantasy The Ghost Goes West, at 12:45 AM Friday. Eugene Pallette plays Joe Martin, a grocery store magnate who decides to show off his family's wealth by purchasing a British castle. Not only that, but as with London Bridge 35 years later, they dismantle the whole thing and ship it brick by brick to Florida, where the castle is going to be rebuilt. The only problem is that there's a ghost haunting the place, and that ghost (Robert Donat) can't be freed until the family does something to avenge his honor. The ghost causes a spectacle once he's in America, and this gives the ghost's descendant (also played by Donat) the chance to avenge that honor. Jean Parker plays Pallette's daughter, and unsurprisngly her character and Donat's wind up falling in love along the way.
For those of you who like more recent movies, I'll recommend something from the 1980s: F/X, at 5:40 AM Thursday on Cinemax and at 8:00 PM Friday on Action Max if you've got the hi-def package. Bryan Brown plays a special effects artist who is approached by the FBI with a request to make it look like a gangster (Jerry Orbach) has been murdered. The reason is that he's an informant in a big case about to go into the Witness Protection Program, and making it look like he's been killed will make it easier for them to get their guy on the witness stand. But the FBI double-cross him, leading him to think that he's actually killed the gangster and try to prove his innocence. Meanwhile, tough NYC homicide detective Brian Dennehy is on the case, but he suspects that there's something odd going on when his attempts to get help from the FBI are rebuffed.
Friday on TCM brings a bunch of Montgomery Clift movies, as it's the anniversary of his birth in 1920. The last of the movies that TCM is showing also happens to be Clift's final film: The Defector, at 5:45 PM. Clift plays Bower, an American physicist who is visiting West Germany when he's given an ultimatum by a CIA agent (Roddy McDowall): help the CIA get an East Bloc physicist out to the west, since the guy claims he'll only talk to Bower. So what's a guy who's basically being blackmailed by the government to do? It turns out that all of this is a ruse to get not the scientist out, but some microfilm. The bad news is that, being only a few months away from dying, Monty Clift looks terrible here. On the bright side, the movie was filmed relatively on location in West Germany (obviously they couldn't film in East Germany back then.)
Finally, for those of you who can't stand the Sunday morning gabfests of retired NFL stars who are no better at analysis than you or I, you could switch to Action Max if you've got the Cinemax high-definition package and watch a day of James Bond movies. They've got Sean Connery, starting with his first film Dr. No at 7:10 AM; George Lazenby in On Her Majesty's Secret Service at 11:10 AM; Roger Moore fighting the late Richard Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me at 5:50 PM; and Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies at 8:00 PM, among others.
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