Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 6-12, 2014. Since it's been two and a half days since the Packers played, you're probably itching more more Packer football already, even though we won't be getting any until this coming Sunday. So why not deal with the waiting by watching some good movies? There are some very vintage movies, some stuff that's more recent, and some "what were they thinking" stuff to be had. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Tyrone Power was Fox's biggest male star in the early 1940s, while Betty Grable was the big female star, although she mostly did musicals. So they only got paired once, in A Yank in the RAF, which comes up on FXM at 7:35 AM Monday. Here, he plays a character who's practially a mercernary. Having flown a Lend-Lease plane from New York to Canada, and then winds up working getting planes to the UK -- this is still before December 1941, so the US isn't legally at war yet, just selling armaments to the UK. Once in London, he meets Betty Grable, who is doing her part for the British troops by singing a few songs. The thing is, he knew her back in the States and is kind of in love with her. But he's so full of himself that you think the British RAF guy (John Sutton) would be right for Grable, except that he's not the lead. Can the desire to win Betty Grable's love make Tyrone Power do the right thing for the war effort?
Monday October 6 is also the birth anniverary of Carole Lombard, so it's unsurprising that TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with her. One of her movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Made For Each Other, which is on at 10:30 AM Monday. Lombard felt she was being typecast as a screwball comedienne and didn't want that, so she made this decidedly serious movie in which she plays a sort of bohemian character who in the first reel has met lawyer James Stewart, whom she's known for moybe 10 minutes before they get married. Maybe not that brief, but it was clearly an impulsive marriage, as everybody else feels Lombard is clearly not the right woman for Stewart. This causes consequences at the law firm, run by Charles Coburn, but Stewart and Lombard try to make it through on love as they face the problems any married couple would. It's certainly a change of pace from what Carole Lombard usually does, and she and Stewart are both good here.
Monday night on TCM brings a special called "Back to the Drawing Board", which is a look at some vintage animation. In fact, it's some very vintage animation, as some of goes back nearly 100 years. Unfortunately, the oldes stuff is a bunch of shorts that grouped by their creaters. First at 8:00 PM are the Winsor McCay shorts. The schedule lists these as running a total of 113 minutes, although the schedule also lists the next block as beginning at 9:45 PM, so there's obviously a mistake somewhere. The second block, from the Bray Studios, runs about an hour, as does the third block, from the Van Beuren studios. These will be followed by a couple of animated features, including the Fleischer Brothers' 1939 version of Gulliver's Travels, which is listed on the schedule for 1:30 AM Tuesday.
Tuesday night on TCM means a night of Peter Finch, the actor who won a posthumous Best Actor Oscar for Network, which will be on at 9:45 PM. But I'd like to mention a movie I don't think I've recommended recently: The Trials of Oscar Wilde, at 5:15 AM Wednesday. Finch plays the celebrated 19th century English writer, with the trials being the libel suit that Wilde foolishly brought against the Marquess of Queensberry (Lionel Jeffries). For those who don't know, Wilde had a relationship with the Marquess' son (John Fraser) that Dad didn't approve of, and when the son wouldn't stop seeing Oscar, who was about 25 years older and married, the Marquess accused Oscar of homosexuality. So Oscar sued and lost that case, which resulted in a criminal trial for perjury and indecency, and that trial resulted in a prison sentence and eventual exile in France. James Mason co-stars as the Marquess' lawyer.
You may recall Jack Webb from the terrible late-1960s version of Dragnet that's shown up on several of the digital subchannels that run old TV series. However, he also directed a couple of movies, using the same staccato deliver and "let's beat the message into your head" style that you can see on Dragnet. An example of this is The D.I., at 8:00 AM Wednesay. Webb plays the titular character, a marine corps drill instructor at Parris Island, SC (although Camp Pendleton was used as a stand in since it was a lot closer to Hollywood). Most of the recruits are as competent as you can expect, with the exception of Pvt. Owend (Don Dubbins), who looks like he's going to wash out. Why is he such a screw-up? Well, we get a scene with his mommy (Virginia Gregg) late the movie that reveals all. We also get a love interest for Webb who, needless to say, isn't that god at doing romantic scenes. The real-life Marines who reviewed this on IMDb all give it high marks.
Janet Leigh returns for her second night as TCM's Star of the Month on Wednesday night. Her movies continue into Thursday morning, with things such as Confidentially Connie, at 5:45 AM Thursday. This comedy, for some values of comedy, stars Leigh as Connie, the wife of college professor Joe (Van Johnson), who is teaching at a college in New England despite being the son of a Texas cattleman (Louis Calhern). Being a college professor doesn't bring in all that much money, which is a problem, because Connie has just found out she's pregnant, and needs to eat a lot of meat (which is damn expensive!) so she can have a strong, healthy child. Worse is that the dean is looking to promote a professor, and he's meeting for dinner with all of the candidates, who are more or less expected to provide good meat at the dinner parties. So Connie, along with Joe's dad, cook up a plan, which results in a price war among the butcher shops in town and the attendant chaos. Bizarre stuff, with the sheen of MGM's perfect America moralizing on top of it all.
TCM is running several creaky early musicals on Friday morning and afternoon. A good example of the genre is the 1929 film Tanned Legs, at 1:00 PM. Arthur Lake, who would go on to play Dagwood Bumstead a deacde later in all those Blondie movies, plays Bill, a young man engaged to Peggy (June Clyde). But she runs off to Florida with the rest of her family, so he follows her down there, where it turns out there's a problem. Peggy's sister Janet (Loretta Young's sister Sally Blane) wrote some letters that some guy is now using as blackmail, and his blackmail would ruin Bill and Peggy's wedding. In among this trifling story are several songs of 1920s vintage, and some musical numbers where the early sound of the day didn't allow for using the camera the way Busby Berkeley would. So although we do get some tanned legs, we don't get as much of them as we would in something like Gold Diggers of 1933 just a few years later.
For those of you who think I don't recommend recent enough movies, how about something from the 80s (and yes, I mean the 1980s, not the 1880s): Angel Heart, at 12:05 AM Sunday on Encore Drama. Set in the 1950s, it stars Mickey Rourke as private detective Harry Angel. He's approached by an intermediary of the wealthy Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro). Cyphre wants Angel to find a singer named Johnny Favorite, as the singer owed him a bunch of money. So Harry begins to investigate, but it seems that everybody he talks to to try to get information has the disturbing habit of winding up brutally murdered. Eventually, the evidence suggests that Favorite was into black magic, which sends Angel to New Orleans, where he meets the mysterious Zorra (Charlotte Rampling) and Epiphany (Lisa Bonet).
If you're in the mood for a horror movie, this week's TCM Underground has one of the more fun entries: Blacula, at 2:15 AM Sunday. William Marshall, before he becomes Blacula, plays the 18th century African prince Manuwalde, who is distressed that the white people are taking his people and enslaving them on other continents. So Manuwalde goes looking for help in Transylvania, which is where he meets Count Dracula, who rather cruelly bites our prince and puts him to sleep in a coffin. Fast forward 200 years or so, and a couple of antique hunters find this coffin and think it would be neato to bring it to Los Angeles. And then they open it, only for Blacula to come out, with a need to bite people's necks. Blacula also finds Tina (Vonetta McGee), who looks amazingly like his old wife. Watch for veteran character actor Elisha Cook as an undertaker, and listen for the music by the Hues Corporation before they hit it big with the song "Rock the Boat". Blacula will be followed at 4:00 AM Sunday by the sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream.
If you want another movie from late 19th century English history, you cuold try Man in the Attic, at 11:00 AM Sunday on FXM (or just before the Packers beat the crap out of Miami). If this movie looks familiar, it should: it's a remake of The Lodger, which had been done by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927 and then by Fox in 1944. Jack Palance plays the titular lodger, who rents the garret apartment in the attic from Andy Griffith's aunt Bea (er, Frances Bavier) in 1880s London. He falls in love with the landlady's niece Lily (Constance Smith), who's also a music hall dancer. Then comes the Jack the Ripper murders, and our lodger comes under suspicion of being the murderer. The police inspector who investigates (Byron Palmer) also begins to fall in love with Lily. For people who remember Palance from City Slickers, it's easy to forget that he played the heavy quite a bit in his younger days, and was quite good at doing so.
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