Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of October 14-20, 2013. We've got another week of great films, with the latest installment of The Story of Film, this time with classic European cinema; another night of Vincent Price; more Friday night horror; and some movies that went gloriously wrong and became unintentionally hilarious. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday, October 14, marks the anniversary of the birth of Lillian Gish, so it's only natural that TCM is going to spend the morning and afternoon with her. Gish, having been born in the 1890s, made a whole bunch of silent films, and TCM is showing a couple of those, such as a version of La BohÈme (10:15 AM) or a version of The Silent Letter (12:00 PM). However, I'd like to mention one of her talkies: The Cobweb, which is on at 3:00 PM Monday. The story is simple: staff and patients at a mental institution spend two hours arguing over new curtains for the library. Really, that's what the film is ostensibly about. Really, though, it's about the people who work at the hospital and their problems, as well as the patients. Richard Widmark plays the new director-in-waiting, who has the idea of letting the patients design the curtains, since that will be good therapy. Gloria Grahame is his long-suffering wife, who has a rich friend back east who sends material for curtains -- Grahame thinks she's trying to help. Charles Boyer is the doctor about to lose his job as director; John Kerr is a patient who develops an attachment for Grahame; Lauren Bacall is the young widow doctor who develops feelings for Widmark. Gish plays the treasurer whose job it is to see that things don't go over budget, and boy does she want to pinch pennies on the curtain project. It's all a mess, but an incredibly fun mess.
Part 7 of The Story of Film: An Odyssey is titled, "Shock of the New, Modern Filmmaking in Western Europe", and deals with the late 50s and early 1960s, when French directors such as FranÇois Truffaut started what would be called La Nouvelle Vague, which is French for "The New Vague", or something like that. The documentary airs at 10:00 PM Monday and 1:45 AM Wednesday. Actually, of course, the movenment is the "New Wave", and Truffaut's The 400 Blows will be one of the movies spotlighted, at 3:45 AM Tuesday. However, I'd like to make mention of a couple of films from Sweden. The first of these if Winter Light, at 11:15 PM Monday. Directed by Ingmar Bergman, the movie stars Gunnar BjÖrnstrand as the pastor of a church in a rural Swedish town who doesn't have much of a congregation. The good pastor is a widow, and with having lost his wife and not having a big flock has begun not to believe in God. This causes problems when one member of that congregation, a fisherman played by Max von Sydow, comes to the pastor with his problems, for which the pastor doesn't seem to care. Meanwhile, the teacher Marta (Ingrid Thulin) professes her love for the pastor, but he doesn't express feelings for her in the same way.
The other Swedish movie was much more controversial: I Am Curious (Yellow). It's showing at 3:00 AM Wednesday on TCM. The movie was extremely controversial because it showed full frontal nudity and sex, getting it banned for a while in the US; in fact, almost 50 years on and the movie is, if certainly not for children, also not pornographic. Lena Nyman plays Lena, a young woman who wants to know all there is about the world (including sex), so she archives all her experiences, interviewing people about 1960s-era Swedish social democracy along the way. Parallel to all this, the director and crew intersperse their thoughts as though they're implying this is a mockumentary about Lena. There's footage from an interview done with Martin Luther King Jr., and a poetry reading by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This is one of those movies you see once, just to cross it off your list of famous movies to see.
A mess that's lovely to look at, even if it doesn't deliver plot-wise, is Secret World, which you can catch at 6:00 AM Wednesday on the Fox Movie Channel. The movie was made in France with mostly unknown (to Americans) actors I'd never heard of. Don't worry, the dialogue is in English FranÇois is a small boy whose parents have died in a car crash, so he's living with Uncle Philippe and Aunt Florence, living at their big house out in the country. FranÇois has a rich imagination, playing at the abandoned open-pit mining operation nearby; he's also a kleptomaniac. Philippe fought in World War II with the Free French, and his English comrade has a daughter Wendy (Jacqueline Bisset) who's come for a visit. Actually, she's his mistress. Philippe's son Olivier comes home and tries to woo Wendy, while Wendy takes a motherly liking to FranÇois. Unfortunately, the plot never really goes anywhere, which is a shame, because the movie was made on location and the locations are all beauriful. Oh, and they dyed Bisset's hair blonde, which is also a disaster.
Back on TCM, on Wednesday they'll be celebrating the 88th birthday of actress Angela Lansbury. One of her films that I don't think I've recommended before is Kind Lady, which will be on at 1:00 PM Wednesday. Lansbury isn't the kind lady here; that would be Ethel Barrymore. She plays Mrs.Herries, a wealthy old woman who has spent her life collecting fine works of art. One day, into her life comes Mr. Elcott, a painter who would like to do a painting for her. Only, that's just a ruse. In fact, he wants those artworks since they're worth so much. He gets his partners in crime -- Lansbury, Keenan Wynn, and Betsy Blair -- into the house as new servants for the old lady, and together they start selling off the stuff, claiming that the old lady is going mentally ill. By the time she figures out what's going on, will it be too late?
Last week, it was Vincent Price in a western, more or less, despite his not normally doing westerns. This week, that honor goes to Tyrone Power. TCM is doing an entire night of his movies on Wednesday night, kicking off at 8:00 PM with Rawhide. Power plays the son of a stage coach line owner, who in preparation to take over the business, is visitng stations learing about the business. A stage coach arrives carrying passenger Susan Hayward. However, the cavalry has learned about four convicts who have escaped from prison and are planning to rob a coach, so Hayward stays at the station to be safe. Yeah, right. Of course, the convicts, led by Hugh Marlowe, come to the station instead, and hold the folks at the station hostage. Complicating things are the fact that the criminals think Power and Hayward are married, and that she lost his gun along the way. The other criminals are played by western stalwart Jack Elam; George Tobias; and Dean Jagger.
The Vincent Price movies continue on Thursday night, and we're still not up to his horror films. However, we do get a hilariously horrible mess this week: The Story of Mankind, at 9:45 PM. Price plays The Devil, who goes up against The Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman). The thing is, now that mankind has invented weapons with which he can destroy himself, the celestial gods decide that mankind may no longer be fit to exist. It's up to the Devil to prove that case for the prosecution, and The Spirit of Man to make the case for the defense. Both sides do so by showing various famous incidents from man's history, making much of the film a series of all-star vignettes, with some incredibly bad casting. In chronological order, blonde bombshell Virginia Mayo plays Cleopatra; Peter Lorre is Nero; Hedy Lamarr is Joan of Arc; Chico Marx as a monk in the Christopher Columbus episode; Groucho Marx as a comic Peter Minuit fleecing the Indians to buy Manhattan; Harpo Marx discovering gravity as Isaac Newton, and a manic Dennis Hopper as Napoleon. And that's just for starters. Sit back and laugh for this one.
You may remember director George Stevens from his later classics like Shane and A Place in the Sun. TCM is spending Friday morning showing some of Stevens' earlier work, such as The Nitwits, at 10:00 AM Friday. This 1935 film stars Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey (he's the one with the glasses and cigar), who were an immensely popular comic duo at RKO until Woolsey's death in 1938. In this movie, they play a pair of men who run the cigar stand in the lobby of a building where a music publisher (Hale Hamilton) works. Wheeler has a thing for Hamilton's secretary (Betty Grable, before she became the big musical star at Fox). Hamilton gets an extortion letter, refuses to pay, and gets killed for his refusal. Suspicion falls on the secretary, and so Wheeler and Woolsey have to work to find the real killer so that they can save Bert's girlfriend. Note that this is a comedy, not so much a mystery.
Friday night brings more horror, this time including one from the great producer of horror in the 1940s, Val Lewton: The Seventh Victim, at 11:15 PM. A young Kim Hunter plays Mary, a girl at a boarding school whose bills have been paid up to now by her sister Jaqueline (Jean Brooks). However, the checks have stopped coming, so Kim has to go off to the big city and find out what's happened. At first, it seems as though Jaqueline has disappeared, and when Mary then discovers that her sister has secretly become married to Ward Cleaver (er, Hugh Beaumont), taken an apartment with nothing but a noose in it(!), and joined what seems to be a satanic cult. And the may or may not be killing people Mary is trying to get to help her investigate what's happened to Jacqueline. Oh, but Jacqueline herself may be the next victim! Val Lewton never got much of a budget, but it's amazing what a disturbing film he was able to make on such limited budgets.
For even more horror, you can tune to TCM on Saturday night, when they're putting the spotlight on director Tod Browning, who worked at MGM in the 1920s and 1930s. The best-known of these movies would be Freaks at 8:00 PM, in which one of the sideshow midgets falls for a "normal", the lady trapeze artist, who eventually decides she doesn't like him after all and tries to knock him off, only for the other sideshow members to come to the rescue.
There's also The Devil Doll at 10:30 PM, in which Lionel Barrymore gets to go in drag as he plays an escaped convict who's learned the secret of miniaturizing people and turning them into mind-controlled slaves, whom he intends to use for his evil schemes.
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