We'll start off this week with on of the TCM Imports: The Spirit of the Beehive, at 4:30 AM Monday on TCM. Set in Spain a few years after the end of the Civil War, the film deals mostly with two young sisters, with a lesser focus on their beekeper/teacher father, and their mother who still seems to pine for a lover from the past. One day, the local cinema gets the movie Frankenstein which the two sisters go to see, and the scene in which the monster accidentally kills the little girl really affects the younger sister. Meanwhile, the older sister tells her that the monster actually lives not too far from them, and takes her to an abandoned farmhouse which is where the monster supposedly lives. The younger sister keeps going back there and eventually finds a man on the run from the authorities. It's a movie that in some ways doesn't really have much of a plot in the traditional sense so it can be a bit frustrating on the first viewing, but the visuals are excellent.
A week and a half ago we had a day of early RKO talkies on TCM. This Monday, we get another, with such oddities as Conspiracy, at 10:30 AM. Bessie Love stars as Margaret, the sister of an assistant DA who has been going after the mob. The result is hat one of the mobsters has information on them and she stabs the mobster dead, being fully guilty of murder. So she runs off to a women's shelter, which is where she's discovered by crime reporter John (Hugh Trevor). John gets Margaret a job as secretary to the mystery writer Winthrop, who goes by the nickname "Little Nemo" (Ned Sparks, in a bizarre role; also, if you watched the Winsor McCay cartoons a couple of Mondays ago you'll recognize the name Little Nemo). The problem is, he's investigating the murder of that mobster that Margaret killed, and he's vowed to solve the case before the police do. Things get really complicated when the mobsters kidnap Margaret's brother, and she, Winthrop, and John have to solve that angle of the case.
On Tuesday night, TCM is putting a spotlihgt on ultra-low budget director Edgar G. Ulmber, who'm you'll probably best remember for the interesting film Detour, which is on the schedule at 2:45 AM Wednesday. However, the schedule might be slightly off due to mis-timing movies at the beginning of the evening. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with the breathlessly-titled Her Sister's Secret, at 8:00 PM Tuesday. This one has Nancy Coleman as a woman in World War II who has a brief fling with a GI about to go off to war and gets knocked up by him but he leaves before they can get married and she never hears from him again. So she gives up the child to her sister (Margaret Lindsay). Three years later, the soldier shows up. TCM has put the movie in a 75-minute slot, but the schedule lists the movie as running 82 minutes (IMDb lists 86 minutes). The next item on the schedule, at 9:15 PM, is a documentary about Ulmer which is listed at 77 minutes and put in a 90-minute slot. So the 10:45 PM feature, Carnegie Hall, my begin close to that time. That movie is listed at 136 minutes and in a 150-minute slot, so the 1:15 AM movie should begin at 1:15 AM.
Over on FXM Retro, you can watch the musical Do You Love Me?, at 6:00 AM Wednesday. Maureen O'Hara stars as Katherine, the dowdy conductor at a music school who's engaged to equally straitlaced Richard Gaines. She takes a train to the big city to meet a conductor friend of hers, but on the train she meets Barry (Harry James), who is the conductor of a swing combo. Horror of horrors! How could people who make real music like swing? So our lady conductor takes off her glasses, lets her hair down, and puts on a new gown, and suddenly both Barry and singer Jimmy (Dick Haymes) are in love with her. Oh dear, what's a lady to do? The plot doesn't have much going for it that you haven't seen in a dozen movies, but there's some good music both classical and swing, and Maureen O'Hara, who was about 27 at the time, looks great in Technicolor.
Wednesday, October 22 is the birth anniversary of actress Constance Bennett (1904-1966). So it's unsurprising that TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with her films. One of Bennett's films that I don't think I've recommended before is After Office Hours, which comes on at 12:15 PM Wednesday. Bennett plays Sharon, a society figure in New York who finds herself being chased by reporters when another society lady gets murdered. Among those reporters is Jim Branch (Clark Gable). As is the formula for comedies like this, the reporter falls in love with the ditzy society woman along the way. There's not much to the story, but darnit if it isn't so entertaining to watch these actors do their thing. Watch for William Demarest as the detective, Billie Burke as Bennett's mother, and Stuart Erwin as Gable's assistant.
Star of the Month Janet Leigh returns on Wednesday night with more movies, this week including several that had then husband Tony Curtis in the cast too. The first of these is The Perfect Furlough, at 8:00 PM Wednesday on TCM Curtis plays Paul, an Army corporal stationed at an Arctic base where there are very few women. This is of course a problem since Paul is a skirt-chaser par excellence. So needless to say something is going to happen to give him a chance to chase a skirt, which is getting a furlough to Paris to meet an Argentine bombshell actress (Linda Cristal). Of course, the Army doesn't want anything untoward to happen, so they send along an Army psychologist/lieutenant (that's Janet Leigh) to make certain that Paul doesn't get into too much trouble. You can probably guess that complications of the love triangle nature ensue.
Thursday night on TCM means more ghost movies, including things such as The Woman in White, at midnight Friday (or 11:00 PM Thursday LFT). Gig Young plays Walter, a painter who having fallen on hard times, has become an art instructor. One of his students, Laura (Eleanor Parker), lives in an estate out in the middle of nowhere, and Walter is invited there to give Laura her lessons. What he finds is strangs. There's a woman in white who looks exactly like Laura; a Count (Sydney Greenstreet) who's trying to marry Laura off to Percival (John Emery) his wife the Countess (Agnes Moorehead) who has secrets of her own, and Laura's distant cousin Marion (Alexis Smith), to whom Watler finds himself attracted. But what's up with the Count, and why is he seemingly trying to manipulate everybody? The explanation is a bit convoluted, making the movie a bit of a mess.
A movie with a lot less pretension is Circle of Deception, over on FXM Retro at 9:15 AM Friday and again at 6:00 AM Saturday. Bradford Dillman plays Captain Paul Raine, a member of the Canadian Army during World War II. There's a difficult mission to be performed, and his superiors are thinking of picking him to lead it. What he doesn't know is why they're planning him to lead the mission. It turns out that they expect the Captain to be captured by the Nazis, and that he's mentally weak enough to break under torture. So they're going to give him information that's false, without his knowledge, in the hopes that he does break and he'll feed the Nazis the false information. Suzy Parker, who would eventually become Dillman's real-life wife, plays an intelligence officer whose job it is to determine whether or not Raine really is the right man for the mission. Things get complicated, though, when she finds herself falling for him....
Those of you of a certain age will enjoy the 1980s action film Highlander. It's airing several times this week on Encore Action, including twice on Friday, at 2:40 PM and 10:00 PM. Christopher Lambert stars as a man living in 1980s New York who in the opening scene finds another man drawing a sword on him. What does our hero do but draw a sword of his own and get in a sword fight with the other guy, resulting in the other guy being decapitated. It turns out that the winner was born Connor MacLeod in 16th century Scotland, and is an "immortal": normal wounds won't kill him, and the only way to kill an immortal is to decapitate him. There are a couple immortals remaining, and they've all made their way to New York, where the last one standing will receive immense power and knowledge. Sean Connery plays a man who teaches Connor swordsmanship.
Finally, let's see if there are any interesting shorts on TCM this week. Obviously if there weren't I wouldn't be talking about the shorts, so the short in question that I'd like to mention is Glimpses of Florida, at about 5:45 PM Tuesday, or immediately following Flipper (4:15 PM, 90 min). This is one of those vintage Traveltalks shorts which, as you can guess, takes the viewer to Florida as it was back in 1941, a time when the population of the state was about 3 million instead of the roughly 20 million it is now. Marvel at some of the rural places that probably no longer exist, as well as some of the tacky tourist traps, including people wrestling with alligators -- real alligators, not the Florida Gators football players who will shoot you if you look at them the wrong way. Sorry, Blair Kiel, but I don't think there's any mention of Jacksonville in this one, although Jacksonville is just South South Georgia.
