Welcome to a bye-week edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of October 19-25, 2015. After the Packers beat the crap out of the Chargers this afternoon to go to 6-0, they'll have two weeks before their next game, which will give all of us a chance to stop and catch our breaths on this wonderful ride of a season. So why not enjoy the time off with some good movies? There's a lot interesting this week as ever, because I would never steer you wrong. Once again, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Since I know how much you all love early talkies, I'll make one of them this week's first selection: Montana Moon, at 6:00 AM Monday. Joan Crawford plays a flapper, except that she's also the daughter of a rancher. She's been back east with her father and would like to stay there because she met dashing Jeff (Ricardo Cortez). However, when she gets off the train to get on one going back east, she runs into equally dashing cowboy Larry (Johnny Mack Brown) and falls in love with him, not realizing that he works for her father. Still, they get married almost immediately, after which complications ensue because Jeff shows up again and Joan realizes she still likes him too. Because this was an early talkie, the studio tried to jam pack everything into it, including a couple of cowboy songs.
The third night of David Niven's turn as TCM Star of the Month comes up Monday night. It's been a while but they're showing My Man Godfrey again, at 11:15 PM. This is a remake of the William Powell/Carole Lombard classic, starring Niven in the Godfrey role, here playing an illegal immigrant since there was no depression on. He's spotted by Irene Bullock (June Allyson), and she takes him home to her family because Godfrey can be a butler and they need a new butler. Godfrey takes to this because he has ulterior motives in helping what is an eccentric family, and that's putting it mildly. However, he also has a past that he's hiding, and when somebody from that past shows up, he might just have to reveal what he's really doing. This version isn't bad, but the original is better.
Apart from the nights as Star of the Month, David Niven also shows up in The King's Thief, at 10:30 AM. Interestingly, he's neither the king nor the thief. The King, Charles II of England, is played by George Sanders. (Sanders also played Charles II in Forever Amber, which is showing on FXM Retro at 12:40 PM Friday and 3:30 AM Saturday.) Niven plays Charles' trusted associate the Duke of Brampton. Except that the Duke is violating that trust by falsely exposing people as traitors and having the King have them executed so that the Duke can inherit their fortunes. The Duke has all that info in a little book, and -- that book gets stolen! The thief, a highwayman named Dermott, is played by Edmund Purdom. How to use that info? Well, Dermott finds Lady Mary (Ann Blyth), whose father was one of the Duke's victims. Mary, together with Dermott's gang, join forces to take down the Duke. Watch for a young Roger Moore as one of the members of Dermott's gang.
There are two more nights of "Trailblazing Women" on TCM this week. Tuesday evening sees a bunch of women who were already relatively famous who turned to directing after becoming successful. This night's movies are relatively conventional, including things like A League of Their Own at 8:00 PM. Directed by Penny Marshall of Laverne and Shirley fame, this movie tells the story of a women's professional baseball league that was formed during World War II.
Thursday night's lineup is full of rather less conventional movies, with four of them being directed by black women. After the prime time lineup, there is one film in the overnight rounding out the night's lineup directed by a white woman: Best Men, at 3:15 AM Friday. This one has a bunch of "best men" going to pick up a friend who is getting released from prison and is on his way to get married to his fiancÉe (Drew Barrymore). On the way, one of the best men asks to stop by a bank to withdraw some money, but it turns out he was really planning to rob the bank. All sorts of chaos ensues. This is more drama than comedy, if you think the plot sounds comedic.
A couple of movies showing up on FXM Retro this week are ones I haven't mentioned before. First is Call Me Mister, at 7:15 AM Wednesday. Betty Grable stars in what was a familiar sort of role for her. This time, she's Kay Hudson, an actress who's going overseas to entertain the troops, except of course that the war is long since over. So she's in occupied Japan, where a bunch of American soldiers are waiting for their discharges so they can finally go home. Among those soldiers is one Sgt. Dooley (Dan Dailey), who happens to be Kay's ex-boyfriend. So when he sees her again he tries to win her back. But there's a reason Grable was the most popular pin-up girl of World War II, so Sgt. Dooley has a lot of rivals for Kay's affections. It doesn't help that his attempts to regain Kay's love wind up getting him wrongly accused of going AWOL, which is a serious problem. But by now you should be able to figure out where these Fox musicals are headed. Danny Thomas provides the comic relief.
Another minor musical shows up on TCM: Let's Be Happy, at 1:45 PM Thursday. This is part of a day of movies set in Scotland, and this one was actually made in the UK by a British company with Hollywood stars, unlike the statge-bound Brigadoon which follows at 3:30 PM. This one has a familiar plot. Vera-Ellen plays Jeannie, a young woman from Vermont who inherits some money from her Scottish-American grandfather. So she decides to visit the old country. Along the way, she meets Stan (Tony Martin), an American businessman who is well-to-do and likes our heroine. And in Scotland, she meets Lord MacNairn (Robert Flemyng), a nobleman who is down on his luck and has resorted to wooing tourists to get some needed revenue. He thinks Jeannie is actually a wealthy heiress and starts to pursue her because he could use the money she doesn't actually doesn't have. They all sing and dance because that was their talent after all.
In between all that is Wednesday night, on which we get this month's TCM Guest Programmer: Nathan Lane. Lane has selected four of his favorite movies, and is sitting down with Robert Osborne to discuss those movies:
First up, at 8:00 PM, is the original version of The Producers, which stars Gene Wilder as an assistant to Broadway producer Zero Mostel, who has the idea to make money by oversubscribing a surefire flop, only for that flop to become a huge success: Springtime for Hitler.
That's followed at 9:45 PM by All the President's Men, in which Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein respectively; they're the reporters who uncovered what was going on with the Watergate scandal that eventually led to President Nixon's resignation.
Another movie with political themes follows at 12:15 AM, Being There. In this one, Peter Sellers plays a sheltered, developmentally challenged servant who learned all he knows from watching TV and who charms a wealthy politically connected family with his nonsense platitudes after his previous boss dies.
Finally, at 2:30 AM, you can catch City Clights, which has Charlie Chaplin as a man trying to help a blind flower seller raise the money for the operation that will restore her eyesight.
The other FXM Retro movie I don't think I've recommended before is Anne of the Indies, which you can catch at 1:30 PM Sunday. This one is set a few decades after The King's Thief mentioned above. Anne is... a pirate, played by Jean Peters! On one of her voyages in the Caribbean, she waylays a ship carrying the former pirate captain LaRochelle (Louis Jourdan). What she doesn't know is that he's working for the British now, trying to regain his freedom by spying on other pirates, specifically Anne, who goes by her surname Providence so that the British don't know she's a she; and Blackbeard (Thomas Gomez). Anne accepts LaRochelle into her crew, and she begins to fall in love with him. She didn't know he was working for the British, but she also didn't know he's married to Molly (Debra Paget). When she learns what's really going on, she kidnaps Molly, setting up the final chase and swashbuckling scene....
If you want a better musical, you could do worse than to watch Tea For Two, at 12:30 PM Sunday. A movie version of the musical, No, No, Nanette, this one stars Doris Day as Nanette, a woman in the era just after the stock market crash of 1929 who would like to get into the theater because her boyfriend (Gordon MacRae) has written some songs she could really sing. However, they need the money and she has it only in the form of bonds controlled by her uncle (S.Z. Sakall). So she bets him that she can answer "no" to every question for the next two days and that she'll get the money for the musical as a result. What she doesn't know is that her uncle converted all those bonds into stock and is pretty much broke thanks to the crash. Meanwhile her answering "no" to every question causes all sorts of mix-ups. This movie, the third film version of the musical, got its title from the famous song which appeared in the musical and which I'm sure you all recognize. Some of the other songs, notably "I Only Have Eyes For You", were not in the original musical.
Finally, I'll mention a short that may appeal to some of you: Game Warden, at 8:36 AM Wednesday, or following The Adventures of Robin Hood at 6:45 AM Wednesday on TCM. This is one of the entries in the RKO-PathÉ Sportscope series of the 1950s. The final years of RKO saw a couple of series of shorts that tried to be more serious than what the other studios were putting out. The actual result is a bunch of shorts that are interesting time capsules even if the subject material doesn't get shown all that well on screen. This one looks at a game warden in the western half of the Catskill Mountains, so only 45 minutes or so from where I live, and how he has to deal with people who are destructive to wildlife and wildlife who are destructive to people.
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