Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of October 27-November 2, 2014. After playing the Saints tonight, the Packers will have a bye, so the lack of a Packers game to prepare for is a perfect opportunity to catch up with some good movies. Halloween is this Friday, so there's a lot of horror movies. There's also the time change back to standard time overnight between Saturday and Sunday, so be careful with the TV schedules over the weekend. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with a movie on FXM Retro: Tail Spin, at 6:00 AM Monday. This is a movie that has a familiar plot, except that it's moved to an uncommon setting: the air, or more specifically the world of aviation. Alice Faye plays Trixie, who's competing in the air races back in the days when air races were actually a thing. It's her job, and she's serious about it, because she's a good pilot and needs to make ends meet. Into all this walks Gerry (Constance Bennett). She's a society girl, with a rich boyfriend, and has taken up flying in order to impress that boyfriend. However, her attitude and actions tick off all the other lady pilots, who have a sort of sisterhood. As you can guess with so much of the action taking place in the air, there are going to be crashes and at least one character meets her death. Alice Faye also gets to sing a song, since she was a musical actress at Fox.
If you want a well-made movie that has positive religious attitudes without being preachy, you could do far worse than to watch One Foot in Heaven, at midnight Tuesday (ie. 11:00 PM Monday LFT, just after the Monday Night Football game). Martha Scott plays a young woman in Canada whose boyfriend Wiliiam (Fredric March) is training to become a doctor. But one day, he suddenly gets the calling, and decides to become a Methodist minister. He proposes to her in spite of this and she accepts, not knowing what the future brings and what sort of hardships a Methodist minister's wife, who is supposed to be thrifty, will have to endure. Together, they have two kids and the movie tells the story of the family over several decades from small-town minister to big city; the difficulties the children have; and the sort of petty people a minister has to deal with on the various church committees. March is excellent as always, and even if like me you're not particularly religious, I think you'll still find the movie good.
There are going to be several horror movies on TCM on Sunday, but I'd like to recommend one of the shorts that's running between the movies: King of the Duplicators, at about 2:38 PM, following House of Dark Shadows (1:00 PM, 97 min). This one has a guy portraying a reporter talking to the head of the MGM makeup department, Frank Tuttle, at Frank's little corner of MGM. Frank shows the guy who the various faces for actors are conceived and then executed, using copious amounts of latex since they didn't know about latex allergies back then. Latex forms are made that Tuttle then works on, which allows precise copies of the makeup to be made without having the actors around. We get to see casts of various MGM actors' faces, and some more specific make-up work. The reporter speaks in a terribly dry style, but even this reporting can't bring down what is a really interesting short on vintage make-up work.
On Tuesday night, TCM brings us several horror anthologies. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with the excellent Dead of Night, which I've recommended several times before. So instead I'll mention the second film, Twice-Told Tales, at 10:00 PM. Vincent Price stars in a collection of three stories all based on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (in fact, Price does appear in all three). In "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", Price plays an old man pining for his fiancÉe who died close to 40 years earlier before they could get married; Dr. Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot) thinks he finds the fountain of youth that will allow the two lovers to get married. In "Rappaccini's Daughter", Price plays Rappaccini, whose wife hurt him many years ago. So he makes certain that his daughter (Joyce Taylor) will not be able to hurt the man (Brett Halsey) who loves her just has hur mother hurt her father. Finally, in "The House of the Seven Gables", Price plays a man visits the old family house that's been under a curse for 150 years. He's looking for the family vault, but there's that curse.... Beverly Garland plays Price's wife in this segment.
For more screams, tune in for Janet Leigh's final night as Star of the Month on Wednesday. She screams her little head off while getting stabbed in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, at 8:00 PM. Leigh plays Marion Crane, working at a real estate office in Phoenix, who's also the mistress of Sam (John Gavin), who is going through a difficult divorce. Marion steals $40,000 from her boss, and drives off, eventually decided to spend a night at the Bates Motel, run by Norman (Anthony Perkins), who takes care of his mother in an old house overlooking the motel and which looks like it could have come straight out of the "This Day in Packers History" thread the way everybody's talking about their crazy old grandparents and their davenports. Anyhow, we know Marion gets stabbed, but her boyfriend and sister Lila (Vera Miles) don't, so they start looking for her when she goes missing. Of course, all of you know this story already.
In between these two, you get a murder, but not quite so many screams, in Journal of a Crime, at 8:00 AM Wednesday. Ruth Chatterton plays a woman married to playwright Adolphe Menjou. However, it's not such a happy marriage, since the husband is carrying on an affair with the star of the latest play he's written (Claire Dodd). Wife tries to get husband to break off the affair, but he refuses. So she takes matters into her own hands by shooting the mistress dead! Fortunately for her, there was also a bank robbery going on at the nearby bank, and the robber decided to hide out at the theater where Chatterton was murdering Dodd. The police, with their typical competence, naturally blame the robber both for the murder of a teller at the bank, and for the murder of Dodd, and send him to the electric chair. The husband, however, figures out who really killed his mistress; needless to say, his relationship with his wife goes even more sour.
Some movies have lurid titles that make you want to watch. A good example is I Was a Communist For the FBI, which TCM is showing at 3:45 PM Thursday. This is based on a real story, that of Matt Cvetic, played by Frank Lovejoy. Cvetic, a Slovenian-American living in Pittsburgh, was approached by the FBI to help infiltrate the Communist Party, and would later tell his story, likely highly exaggerated, in a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post. Those stories were the basis for this movie, which has the Communists trying to take over the steelworkers' union and the teachers' union. Eventually, one of the violent strikes goes too far for one of the teachers, Eve (Dorothy Hart), who decides to join Matt in his heroic fight against the evil Commies. Yes, the movie is blatantly obvious, but it's nowhere near as bad as many reviews would have you believe.
Friday is Halloween, so TCM will be giving us 24 hours of horror movies. Well, not quite, in that they're including a documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, at 1:45 PM. This is about William Castle, the producer-director who came up with such gimmicks as wiring some of the seats to shock viewers of The Tingler, or having a skeleton fly out over the audience in another. The funny thing is that even without the gimmicks, Castle's movies were generally quite enjoyable.
If you want an actual horror movie, stay up for the last one, Eyes Without a Face, at 5:15 AM Saturday. Pierre Brasseur plays Dr .Genessier, a man living in an estate outside Paris whose daughter died in a car crash he feels responsible for, much to the sorrow of her boyfriend. Only, it turns out that his daughter didn't die; she only had her face totally disfigured. Since Genessier is a plastic surgeon, he's been researching the possibility of doing a face transplant, and worse, experimenting by kidnapping young women and trying to transplant their faces onto his daughter! And then the boyfriend gets the distinct feeling that he's heard from the daughter. It's a really creepy movie that despite the subject material, doesn't have very much gore in it. Alida Valli (the girlfriend in The Third Man) plays Dr. Genessier's assistant.
Moving forward to Saturday night, if you have Encore Westerns you'll have a chance to see John Wayne's last movie, The Shootist, at 8:00 PM. (Supposedly it will be repeated overnight, but it's around the time of the time change so you'll have to check your box guide listings.) Wayne plays JB Books, the titular shootist, a gunman who's killed a bunch of men in his time. But he's old now, and he's been diagnosed with terminal cancer in an era when there was no real treatment for the disease. So he's looking for a peaceful place to die without too much fuss, which has led him to the boarding house run by Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall) and her son Gillom (Ron Howard). Gillom recognizes Brooks, and wants Brooks to teach him how to handle a gun so well, but Bond isn't so certain she wants a gunman around, since there are bound to be people who would like the honor of being the person to kill Brooks.
The Packers may not be playing this coming Sunday, but there is a football-themed movie on: Good News, at 10:00 AM Sunday on TCM. A remake of a 1927 stage musical that had already been turned into a movie once before; the movie tells the story of Connie, a girl working her way through college (June Allyson), who meets Tommy, the star football player (Peter Lawford who doens't look like a star football player at all but that's another story) and falls in love with him. The only thing is, Tommy is also being pursued by the more glamorous Pat (Patricia Marshall) whose presence threatens to derail the whole relationship. And when I say whole, I mean Tommy relationship with football too, since if he can't keep his grades up he can't play on the team. (He should have gone ot UNC where they'd enroll him in bogus courses.) Of course, this is the sort of film you know is going to have a happy ending so you watch it for the musical numbers if you like such things. Oh, and you can also watch it for the singing of the "Velvet Fog", Mel TormÉ, although he can't act that well.
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