Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of October 7-13, 2013. This is the week that that Egypt takes a big step towards knocking Ghana out of the 2014 World Cup and, we hope, Panama does the same to Mexico. But for those strange pepole who don't like soccer, we've got another week of Star of the Month Vincent Price not doing horror films, another Friday night of classic horror movies, and a bunch of other fine stuff. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's Silent Sunday Nights selection is one of the very earliest American feature-length films: Traffic in Souls. Made in 1913, the movie deals with two sisters in New York. One of them is kidnapped by the "white slave" trade -- think what is commonly called "sex slavery" today. The other sister tries to figure out what happened, looking for help from the "Purity League". They can't help her, largely because the guy running the League is actually working behind the scenes for the slavers! So it's up to our heroine, with some help from her cop boyfriend. This was made in New York, back in the days before many of the movie makers would go out to California for the better weather. One co-producer, Carl Laemmle, would go on to found Universal, while another, Jack Cohn, would co-found Columbia. The movie was shocking for 1913, banned in some places and a huge hit in others.
Over on what's left of the Fox Movie Channel, you can catch Something For the Boys, at 1:30 PM Monday. In a mild bit of strange casting, second-choice Fox player Vivian Blaine plays cousin to Phil Silvers. More bizarrely, both of them are also cousins with Carmen Miranda. The three cousins inherit a big house down in Georgia, except that it's in a parlous state. Luckily for them, however, there's an Army base nearby, what with this being World War II, and a sergeant there (Michael O'Shea) says that the men there would love to rent it out for their wives to use when visiting. They'll help out with the labor on fixing it up, but the cousins need some money, so what do they do? Why, put on a show! Oh, and along the way the Blaine and O'Shea characters fall in love. (I suppose the movie would be more interesting if O'Shea fell in love with either of the other cousins.)
This week brings Part 6 of the miniseries The Story of Film: An Odyssey to TCM, which has reached the 1950s, and specifically the non-American films of the 1950s. All of Monday night's lineup is dedicated to Asian films from the 1950s, beginning at 8:00 PM with Pather Panchali. This is the first film in the "Apu Trilogy" from Indian director Satyajit Ray, looking at Apu over 20-some years from his childhood. In this first film, Apu is the young son in a poor family in rural Bengal, living in poverty. Dad is a bit of a dreamer; Mom is the one who has to make ends meet; the family has an elderly aunt who can't support herself except by begging, but has nowhere to go; and a young sister who helps out the aunt by stealing fruit. As with the Italian neo-realist movies of the late 1940s, this one was made with mostly amateur actors, but still managed to produce a masterpiece.
The episode in the Story of Film miniseries airs at 10:15 PM Monday and again at 1:45 AM Wednesday. We saw early Luis Buñuel several weeks back; after the early Wednesday showing of the documentary we get later Buñuel with his Mexican film Los Olvidados, also known as The Young and the Damned, at 3:00 AM Wednesday. This one looks at the poor side of Mexico City, at a time when the country as a whole was becoming more prosperous and making lovely if unrealistic films in its Silver Age. Here, though, we get juvenile delinquents who roam the streets of the city. El Jaibo is the leader of the pack, and he's looked up to by Pedro, who still has a mother and doesn't realize just what a bad influence El Jaibo is going to be on him. Also in the group is a third kid, an orphan who also acts as the eyes for a blind man. Like Pather Panchali, this is another film with heavy influence from neo-realism.
Wednesday night this week brings a night of spoofs to TCM. First up, at 8:00 PM, is Love and Death, Woody Allen's comedy about trying to assassinate Napoleon;
That's followed at 9:30 PM by Murder by Death, Neil Simon's parody of the murder mystery genre;
In Support Your Local Sheriff! at 11:15 AM, James Garner plays a man passing through an old west town tho gets appointed sheriff; many comedic complications follow; and
This is Spinal Tap at 1:00 AM Thursday is the classic spoof of rock bands. Turn it up to 11 for Wednesday night's TCM lineup.
Some of you may be surprised to know that Vincent Price made a western. Actually, he made more than one, if you count The Jackals, which is a remake of Yellow Sky, but set in South Africa. (That one is coming up at 10:00 AM Tuesday on FMC, with a repeat at 1:20 PM Sunday, but I just recommended it a few months ago.) Another Vincent Price partial western I haven't recommended before is The Baron of Arizona, which is being shown at 8:00 PM Thursday as part fo Vincent Price's turn as the TCM Star of the Month. This one is actually based on a true story, that of James Addison Reavis (played by Price). Apparently, when the US made the Gadsden Purchase of what is now southern Arizona, it was required to honor the previous Mexican (and before that Spanish) land claims. So Reavis, who was real estate agent, forged over a period of years a series of documents claiming that the noble Peralta family actually owned much of what is modern Arizona. He even got himself a Mexican wife (played by Ellen Drew) to pass herself off as the descendants of the Peraltas.
Director Stanley Kramer was born in September 1913, but TCM is putting him in the spotlight on Friday morning and afternoon with several of the movies that he directed. One of his earliest is The Pride and the Passion, at 9:30 AM. When Cary Grand made The Howards of Virginia back in 1940, he vowed never to do another period piece. But he got roped into doing this one to get away from the mess that was his personal life at the time. Here, Grant plays a British naval captain during the Napoleonic wars whose job it is to recover an abandoned Spanish cannon before the French can get to it. However, when he gets to the part of Spain where the cannon is, he finds that the local peasants want to rise up against the French, led by Frank Sinatra. They're trying to restore the gun and get it to Avila, which the French are besieging. Each side has something the other needs, so they're going to have to work together. Complicating matters, however, is Sinatra's girlfriend, played by Sophia Loren; Cary Grant's character winds up falling in love with her. (Who wouldn't?)
There's another night of horror films on TCM on Friday night. This week brings one of the classics from the UK: Dead of Night, at 11:00 PM. It's an anthology, but with an interesting framing story: an architect (Mervyn Johns) has a meeting with a client at an English country manor. When he gets there, he has this strange feeling that he's met everybody before. Each of the people at the house as a horror tale of their own to tell, such as one with a car driver who winds up in hospital and keeps seeing a hearse driver go past, saying "Room for one more"; a mirror that seems to be a portal into another dimension; and Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist who seems to have a demented dummy with a mind of its own. Each of the stories within the movie is pretty good, but unlike most other anthology movies, the story around it is just as good, with a surprising ending.
A lot of you probably think of Ricardo MontalbÁn as Khaaaaaaaan! Either that, or Mr. Rourke from Fantasy Island. But he was actually quite a capable actor, as he shows in the severely underrated Mystery Street, which shows up at 8:30 AM Saturday on TCM. MontalbÁn plays Moralas, the Portuguese-American police chief in one of those small towns along the Cape Cod coast. Moralas gets involved when skeletal remains are discovered in his town. It turns out those remains are of a woman who has been missing for months, and was pregnant when she died. Suspicion first falls on a young husband Mr. Shanway (Marshall Thompson) because his car was found near the body. But there's more to the case. The dead woman (Jan Sterling) was a nightclub girl involved with a prominent businessman (Edmon Ryan). Meanwhile, the victim's landlady (Elsa Lanchester) finds a clue before the police, and starts trying to solve the mystery herself.
Last up is the 1954 version of Magnificent Obsession, at 4:00 PM Sunday. Rock Hudson plays Bob, a playboy who at the beginning of the movie is racing his speedboat, and getting it into a crash. To heal him, the doctors need the defibrillator, but the only one around belongs to a prominent doctor. Sure enough, while it's being used on Bob, the doctor suffers a heart attack and dies. It turns out that this doctor was the single most virtuous person on the entire planet, and Bob is the most evil, selfish man around. Everybody hates Bob, and when he tries to make it up to the doctor's widow Helen (Jane Wyman), he gets her into a car crash that blinds her! This gets Bob to try to atone for all his sins by becoming a doctor himself, so that he can cure Helen of her blindness. Oh, Bob falls in love with Helen along the way. I'd say it's terrible, but this was directed by Douglas Sirk, who was a master of taking terrible material like this and making it laughably interesting.
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