Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of September 1-7, 2014. This is the first week of a new month, so we're going to get a couple of new spotlights on TCM, a new Star of the Month, and some films on FXM that haven't shown up in quite some time. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is Labor Day, which on TCM means the annual salute to the Telluride Film Festival, showing films that either screened there or feature people who were honored by the festival. This year's salute begins with a movie I recommended last year as part of the Story of Film series, but which deserves another viewing: Russian Ark, at 6:00 AM. There's not that much of a plot to this in the traditional sense; an unseen man meets a mysterious visitor from the past who proceeds to take the man on a tour of Sankt Peterburg's Hermitage museum, interspersed with brief lessons on Russian history, complete with thousands of extras in period costumes. The art is beautfiul as is the building, but the amazing thing about the movie is that it's done in one long take. When we're looking at the artworks, it's awkward because those would be natural places for cuts, but the scenes with the extras, notably a ball at the end are so precisely timed that you wonder how they did it in one take..
Over on FXM Retro, we're getting a mini-marthon of Shirley Temple movies on Labor Day. Three, in fact, including one that I've never mentioned before.
First up is Wee Willie Winkie at 10:15 AM, featuring Temple in British India at the end of the 19th century;
Then it's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at noon, with Shirley playing a girl whom a radio producer wants to sing on his show, if only he can find her; and
The Little Princess at 1:25 PM, with Shirley playing a girl whose father goes off to fight the Boer War.
The Little Princess was filmed in color; the other two in black and white but were both colorized when studios thought doing that was a good idea. The last time I saw Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on FXM it was the colorized version; I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true of Wee Willie Winkie.
One of the movies that's back on FXM after a long hiatus is Bobbikins, at 7:45 AM Tuesday. Shirley Jones plays an American in the UK married to an Englishman (Max Bygraves) with a toddler son. Things change for the family when the boy starts to talk to Dad: the boy talks like an adult, and what the boy is saying is the names of companies that Dad should invest in in the stock market! This is obviously a sign, and Dad gets the bright idea to invest, which brings in quite a bit of money for the family. But of course they find that having money doesn't necessarily bring happiness, or at least it brings problems in adition to the things money can do. There's a reason Bygraves wasn't particularly successful on this side of the Atlantic, and watching Bobbikins should make it clear why. Shirley Jones is talented and tries hard, but has substandard material to work with.
Over on TCM, they're spending Tuesday morning and afternoon celebrating the actor William Holden, even though his birthday is in April. One of his movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Force of Arms, which comes on at 9:30 AM. Holden plays Sgt. "Pete" Peterson, an American GI in Italy during the American offensive through the country in World War II. During a leave in Naples, he meets Lt. Eleanor (Nancy Olson), who's a lieutenant because she's a WAC. You can probably guess that a man and a woman alone together in a war movie are going to fall in love, and sure enough that happens here. But then the war comes for them again, and you wonder whether both of them are going to survive the war so that they can live happily ever after. Especially when he deliberately gives up a desk job to start fighting again.
Tuesday nights in September bring one of this month's spotlights: {i]The Projected Image in Film[/i], a more or less annual series that has looked at various minority (from an American perspective) groups and how they've been shown on the big screen. This year, the group in the spotlight is Jews. Despite the fact that several of the movie moguls who founded the studios were Jewish, there was always a focus in the movies on being American. Robert Osborne sits down with an expert on the subject who will be presenting the movies on Tuesdays; this first Tuesday in September brings the Jewish immigrant experience. There's no better way to start off than with The Jazz Singer, and in fact the series starts with the first two versoins of The Jazz Singer. The 1927 partial talkie, in which Al Jolson plays the cantor's son who wants to sing jazz, is on at 8:00 PM, followed at 9:45 PM by the 1950s version with Danny Thomas taking over the main role, updated to make him a Korean war veteran.
Wednesday nights in September bring this month's Star of the Month to TCM: Melvyn Douglas. Melvyn Douglas had a long career starting as an often romantic lead in the 1930s, continuing all the way through to the 1970s; indeed, Douglas didn't win the first of his two Oscars until Hud in 1963. The second of those Oscar wins, for Being There, is the movie that kicks off the salute at 8:00 PM. But instead I'm going to mention a movie I don't think I've talked about before, Three Hearts for Julia, at 7:30 AM Thursday. Douglas plays a war correspondent who's gone off to report on World War II, leaving his wife (Ann Sothern) at home, playing violin in an all-women orchestra conducted by Felix Bressart. She thinks he's abandonded her, and wants a more high-class husband, so she's willing to divorce. But she still thinks of him as a friend, so he's willing to help her pick between her two music world suitors (Lee Bowman and Richard Ainley). The conductor knows better, however, and we in the audience know that Douglas and Sothern should be together.
Our Green Bay Packers are going to be beating the crap out of the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday night. TCM is counterprogramming with this month's Guest Programmer, director Richard Linklater, who made movies like Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise. Linklater has selected three movies that put the spotlight on great directors:
Some Came Running, in which war veteran Frank Sinatra returns to his small hometown, directed by Vincente Minnelli, at 8:00 PM;
The Asphalt Jungle, one of the first great heist movies, directed by John Huston, at 10:30 PM; and
Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman's look at early 20th century Sweden through the eyes of a child, at 12:45 AM Friday.
Following those is one more great director, RenÉ ClÉment, with the outstanding Forbidden Games, at 4:00 AM Friday. The scene is France in June 1940, just as the Nazis are conquering the place. There's a big exodus of refugees from Paris to the countryside, including a couple with a young daughter Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) and her dog. Nazi strafing eventually kills both parents and the dog, although Paulette refuses to believe the dog is dead. She then meets a young farm boy Michel (Georges Poujouly) who helps her bury the dog and takes her home to his family. Paulette wonders why all the dead animals can't have graves, so Michel starts helping her build a cemetery for dead animals, which is all fine and good until he starts stealing crosses to mark the graves, which unsurprisingly causes a lot of consternation among the adults of the little farming community. A beautiful, if tragically sad movie.
This being the opening week of the NFL season, it might be a good time to run Black Sunday, which is on Encore Action or whatever they're calling it three times this week: at 3:40 AM Wednesday, 1:30 AM Thursday, and 12:20 PM Sunday. Bruce Dern plays Lander, a disgruntled Vietnam vet, which makes him a prime target for Dahlia (Marthe Keller), who leads the Palestinan terrorist group Black September. Dahlia gets Lander to take part in a plot to use the Goodyear blimp that flies over the Super Bowl to kill the tens of thousands of people watching the game. Robert Shaw plays Kabakov, a Mossad agent who knows Black September is going to do something, but not what; besides, he's going to need the help of the American authorities to stop any plot taking place in the US, so it's up to him and FBI agent Corley (Fritz Weaver) to stop the plot. Somewhat surprisingly, the movie uses footage from an actual Super Bowl, with the consent of the NFL -- can you imagine Roger Goodell allowing this?
This week's Essential brings the return to TCM of a movie they haven't shown in quite a few years: Coal Miner's Daughter, at 8:00 PM Satrurday. Sissy Spacek stars as Loretta Webb, who at the start of the movie is about 14 and living in the hills of Kentucky as the daughter of a coal miner (Levon Helm of The Band), when recently demobbed WWII veteran Doolittle Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones) shows up. He falls in love with the teenaged Loretta and marries her at a ridiculous age, taking her across the country to Washington where he's got work as a logger. But he hears her sing, and gets her to sing in public, and the rest, as they say, is history. Loretta would go on to become an extremely successful country singer, although the rise to the top was by no means easy. Among the country legends playing themselves are Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, and Minnie Pearl. Beverly d'Angelo plays Patsy Cline, who for obvious reasons could not play herself.
Finally, if you don't want to watch Sunday Night Football for whatever reason, TCM has a premiere for the channel: the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. Yes, this is the version with Charlton Heston as the lead of the space crew going to a distant earth-like planet, where they discover that apes run the place, and imprison the humans. Two of the apes: Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) take a sympathetic liking to Heston, and he escapes to find the shocking truth about the planet. But you knew the rest of the story already, thanks to the effects-driven remakes over the past 15 years. Watch the original. The movie is based on a novel by French writer Pierre Boulle, who also wrote the book on which the movie Bridge on the River Kwai is based.
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