Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, week of October 21-27, 2013

Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of October 21-27, 2013.  This is the week that we finally get to Vincent Price's horror movies in his turn as TCM's Star of the Month.  But we have to wait until Thursday to do that; there's other interesting stuff along the way before that, including another week of foreign films in The Story of Film.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

Deborah Kerr was born at the end of September, but TCM is giving her some love on Monday morning and afternoon with several of her films.  One that I don't think I've mentioned before is Count Your Blessings, at 2:45 PM.  This one starts during the Blitz in World War II.  Kerr is an English lady Grace who meets French Captain Charles (Rossano Brazzi).  They have the sort of ultra-quick romance that people in movie set back then did, and get married almost immediately; a few days later he goes off to war.  The Captain stays in the military throughout the war and for years afterwards, only returning nine years later.  He finds out that in the very brief time he and Grace were together, he knocked her up, so she's got a kid too.  Further complicating things is that Charles apparently slept with a lot of other women during those nine years.  Maruice Chevalier shows up as Brazzi's uncle.  Deborah Kerr was always elegant on screen, but this isn't one of her best.

This week, The Story of Film looks at the "new waves" sweeping across the world of cinema throughout the 1960s, and TCM is bringing us a whole host of foreign films on both Monday and Tuesday nights.  These include such masterpieces as Andrei Rublev, at 2:45 AM Tuesday.  Rublev was a real man, a painter of Russian Orthodox religious icons and frescoes at the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th centuries.  The movie is nominally about him, although to be honest not much is known about Rublev's life.  In reality, it's about a man who tries to keep going while great upheaval is happening in his country, especially in the form of the invasions from the east in the form of the Tatars, told through several vignettes that show the importance of art, conscience, and faith..  Stay until the end and you'll get to see several of Rublev's actual works in color.

Along with the foreign-language movies in this week's episode of The Story of Film, there's an English-language film from Britain: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, at 8:00 PM Tuesday on TCM.  Albert Finney became a star thanks to this movie, playing Arthur Seaton, a worker in a northern England factory who has a dead-end job that pays him a salary he can use to chase the ladies and have a pint with the guys on the weekend.  At the start of the movie he's in a relationship with Brenda (Rachel Roberts), who's the wife of one of he co-workers.  Then he meets Doreen (Shirley Ann Field), and dumps Brenda for her.  Ah, but there's a catch: Arthur has gotten Brenda pregnant, and dammit, Brenda wants an abortion!  This is one of the "Kitchen Sink" films being produced in Britain in the years around 1960, looking at ordinary life in a more brutally honest way that the old cinema didn't, and was controversial upon release for broaching subjects like abortion.

Following Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a little after 9:30 PM, TCM is showing the short HMS Bounty Sails Again!, a promotional short made for the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, looking at the ship built to play the Bounty.  This is worth watching because, as you may recall, the Bounty was lost at sea off the coast of North Carolina last October in Tropical Storm Sandy, with the loss of two crew members.

In between the two nights of The Story of Film, TCM is honoring Margaret Lockwood all morning and afternoon Tuesday.  You probably know her best as the woman whose travelling companion Dame May Whitty goes missing in The Lady Vanishes, which concludes the Lockwood fest at 6:15 PM.  Starting if off is another of Lockwood's films from 1938, Bank Holiday, at 9:00 AM.  Bank Holiday is just a British term for any public holiday, with the one here being the summer holiday when folks back in the day would go to one of the British seaside resorts.  Lockwood plays Catherin, a nurse who has a boyfriend Geoffrey (Hugh Williams) who wants to bed her, although the hotel reservation has fallen through.  Catherine, meanwhile, had been attending at an operation where the woman died, and Catherine is worried about the dead woman's husband Stephen (John Lodge).  There's a subplot about a lower-class family, and another about a family trying to get their adult daughter to win the big prize at a beauty pageant.  A nice little British movie of the era.

As I said at the beginning, TCM Star of the Month Vincent Price finally shows up in horror movies this Thursday evening.  That begins at 8:00 PM with the 1953 version of House of Wax.  You probably know the story because it's a remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum, which I recommend often because it's such a fun film.  In the 1953 version, Price plays the sculptor who sees his museum burned because he doesn't want to do commercial stuff like his business partner wants.  Fast forward sveral years, and Price, presumed dead but really only disfigured, has started sculpting again, with his figures looking exceedingly lifelike.  Carolyn Jones, for example, looks a lot like Joan of Arc, with her friend Phyllis Kirk looking like Marie Antoinette.  Price is helped by his mute servant Igor, played by Charles Buchinsky at the beginning of his career before he changed his surname to Bronson.  This movie was originally produced in 3-D, and you can see a few sequences where it's very obvious that stuff was shot solely because of how it would look in 3-D.

TCM has an interesting line-up on Friday morning and afternoon: movies with titles you'll recognize instantly -- but they're not the movies you'd think of first.  A good example of this is the 1941 film Million Dollar Baby, at 4:45 PM.  There's no boxing here.  Instead, 83-year-old May Robson plays Connie, a wealthy lady who discovers that the only reason she's wealthy is because her father cheated his business partner.  She doesn't have any descendants, so she tries to find the business partner's descendants to give them their fair share of the money.  The one descendant she can find is the man's granddaughter Pam (Priscilla Lane), who works as a department store clerk.  The money would change her life, but there's the matter of her boyfriend Pete (Ronald Reagan), a struggling pianist/composer who thinks the rich are evil and doesn't want the money.  Meanwhile, Connie's lawyer Jim (Jeffrey Lynn) falls in love with Pam.  Of course, we know who's going to end up together at the end.

There are more horror movies on Friday night, including the movie that's Francis Ford Coppola's first directorial effort: Dementia 13, at 9:15 PM Friday on TCM.  The plot involves several siblings of an emotionally unstable mother living in an Irish castle, who lost their youngest sister as a child.  They meet every year on the anniversary of the girl's death, and this year, one of the brothers dies of a heart attack.  His wife, knowing she'll be cut out of the will, dumps his body in the pond and fakes his disappearance.  Unfortunately, it's the pond in which the little girl drowned, and the family has odd beliefs about that girl.  One of the siblings believes their sister-in-law isn't being quite truthful, but that's a leser problem when people start getting hacked to death by an axe murderer.  It's uneven, having been made on a shoestring budget, but it's still worth seeing.

For something truly awful, you could try Spaceflight IC-1, airing on the Fox Movie Channel at 10:45 AM Saturday.  Made in Britain with a bunch of no-name actors, the movie has a theoretically interesting premise: Earth is dying, so spaceships are being sent to colonize a new planet, Earth-2.  Since the voyage takes 25 years, there's only a skeleton crew with a bunch more in suspended animation.  The captain is a martinet, eventually leading the ship's doctor to mutiny.  The mutiny eventually fails, and the captain forces the doctor to re-animate the doctor who's suspended, so that the current doctor can be executed for mutiny!  Ah, but re-animation hasn't been fully worked out (you'd think they'd have done that back on Earth), and there are some consequences.  Unfortunately, the production values are terrbile; the direction is static; and the acting is wooden.

And for those of you who like more recent movies, Starz Comedy is running Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery three times over the weekend, at 1:25 PM and 11:25 PM Saturday, and at 8:45 AM Sunday.  Mike Myers has a dual role.  One is as Austin Powers, the superspy; the other Dr. Evil, the supervillian trying to take over the world.  Both of them get cryogenically frozen in the 1960s.  When Dr. Evil unfreezes himself, British intelligence have to unfreeze Austin Powers too, who still wants the world to be like the swinging 60s London he left behind.  The spy-movie plot is OK but silly, because the film is just as much about Austin Powers' attempts to adjust to the 1990s, when nobody is as swinging as he is -- and it doesn't help that his assistant (Elizabeth Hurley) is the daughter of his 1960s girlfriend.  There are a lot of jokes about the differences between the 60s and 90s, and even more sex humor.  But it's all so silly that the film is a hoot.