Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of September 11-17, 2017. I hope all of you made it through Hurricane Irma safely. If you've got power but no particular place to go, why not spend the time watching some good movies? There's more from Star of the Month Jennifer Jones on Tuesday, and some other programming blocks and interesting stuff on other channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is running a bunch of Jimmy Durante movies on Monday, and one might put some fear into a bunch of you: What! No Beer? at 10:00 AM. Jimmy Potts (Durante) has an idea for making a boatload of money. Prohibition is about to end, so open up a brewery and make a killing on now-legal beer. So he goes into business with friend Elmer (Buster Keaton), who is in it because he wants to make enough money to marry the woman he loves, Hortense (Phyllis Barry). There are, of course, problems. First off is that Prohibition isn't ended quite as soon as the two would hope, so their product is still technically illegal. Although it turns out their “beer” is watered-down enough that it might not even really be beer, which draws the interests of gangster Spike (Edward Brophy). But it also draws the interest of competing gangsters like Butch (John Miljan). Further complicating matters is that Butch loves Hortense too. Buster Keaton lost creative control after signing with MGM, and the result was sub-par movies like this. He and Durante not having compatible comic styles doesn't help either.
Monday night brings another quarterly installment in Treasures from the Disney Vault to TCM. This time, Leonard Maltin brings several live-action movies to TCM, with no Disneyland episode and only one animated short. The animated short, Lonesome Ghost at 12:15 AM Tuesday, has Mickey Mouse as a ghost hunter. As for the live-action movies, the night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Swiss Family Robinson, about the family that gets shipwrecked on a tropical island, only for them to turn the place into something even more lavish than Gilligan's Island. And later in the night, at 2:30 AM Tuesday, there's Freaky Friday, which has Jodie Foster finding herself switched into her mother's (Barbara Harris) body, and vice versa.
A movie with a related theme to Freaky Friday is Big, which StarzEncore Classics will be airing at 7:42 AM Thursday. Josh, a 13-year-old boy, is at a carnival where he meets a girl he knows and winds up crushed to find that he's not “at least this tall” to ride a certain ride. So he finds a wish machine, and makes a wish that he could be bigger. Surprisingly, he wakes up the next morning to find that his wish has been granted, as he's now got the body of Tom Hanks. Naturally, this causes all sorts of problems with his friends, so he goes out into the adult world to try to get a job even though he's still got the mind of a 13-year-old. He's able to get a job working for a toy manufacturer since he's got that uncanny ability to understand just what 13-year-old boys want (for obvious reasons). But he also meets Susan (Elizabeth Perkins), who strikes up a relationship with him. Can Josh go back to being a 13-year old? Does he even want to any more?
There's another round of Jennifer Jones movies on TCM on Tuesday night. I could mention Portrait of Jennie (8:00 PM) again, but this week I'll recommend We Were Strangers, which follows at 9:45 PM. The setting is early 190s Cuba, when one in the long line of brutal dictatorships that continues to this day is in power, this one led by Machado. Tony Fenner (John Garfield) is a man who fled with his family when Machado came to power, but he's come back with financing from other exiles in the States in the hopes of dealing a blow to the dictatorship. It's there that he meets bank employee China Valdés (Jennifer Jones), who has turned against the regime because secret police officer Ariete (Pedro Armendáriz) has been showering unwanted advances on her while he was also responsible for her kid brother's death. They, along with a few others, come up with the idea of tunneling under the main cemetery in Havana and blowing up a bomb when all of the bigwigs are there for a funeral of one of the higher-ups. It's a daft idea, and you'd think the secret police would figure out what's going on. Of course, Tony and China fall in love along the way.
I movie that's back on FXM Retro is As Young As You Feel, which you can catch at 8:40 AM Tuesday and 7:20 AM Wednesday. Monty Woolley plays John Hodges, who works as a printer in a local factory, doing work he loves and living with his family (son Allyn Joslyn, daughter-in-law Thelma Ritter, and granddaughter Jean Peters). The granddaughter is even in love with one of John's young co-workers (David Wayne). But the company has a policy of mandatory retirement at 65, which John finds is likely to be murder on him since he's still so vital and full of life. The company has been bought out by a distant holding corporation, so John gets the bright idea of impersonating Cleveland (Minor Watson), the head of the holding company, and visiting the factory where he worked. Everybody is impressed with the fake Cleveland's ideas, including Cleveland himself, since it brings good PR. But all sorts of other problems happen because of this, not least with John's old boss (Albert Dekker). The boss' life decides she likes the fake Cleveland even more than her husband, for example! Watch for a young Marilyn Monroe in a brief role as a secretary.
It's been a while since TCM has run Butterflies Are Free, but they're showing it again at 9:45 PM Thursday. Goldie Hawn plays Jill, living in a San Francisco apartment in the opening scene and cavorting around it in just her undies. She notices the man in the next apartment over out on the balcony so she of course thinks he's perving on her. She goes over to talk to the man, and discovers the man, named Don (Edward Albert Jr.) is actually blind so he never would have seen her undressed! This is Don's first apartment, since he has an overprotective mother who thinks that Don can't live on his own and dammit, he's going to show her. Don and Jill strike up a relationship that progesses as far as sleeping together. And then the next morning Don's mother (Eileen Heckart, who won an Oscar for this role) shows up unannounced and is unsurprisingly not thrilled to see Jill prancing around underdressed. Mom is of course here to bring Don “home”, even if that's not what he wants. And Mom just knows that Jill will stop loving Don when the going gets rough.
It's nice to see a night of Carole Lombard on TCM on Friday. I'm not certain if I've recommended Hands Across the Table before, but it's going to be on at 8:00 PM Friday. Lombard plays Regi, a manicurist who works on idle rich male playboy types. One of her current clients is Allen (Ralph Bellamy), a former pilot confined to a wheelchair after a plane crash. She wants to marry him for his money. But then she meets Theodore (Fred MacMurray), who passes himself off as a rich playboy. But when he misses his yacht and has to spend a night on her sofa, he tells her that his family has lost his fortune and that he's trying to wed a rich woman Vivian (Astrid Allwyn) because he needs the money! Although both of them are planning to marry for money instead of love, the two find out that they're falling in love with each other even though neither has money. The logical choice would be for both of them to marry money and then get a sizable divorce settlement, after which they can marry each other, but that's a bit cynical isn't it? Watch for William Demarest who gets one scene trying to woo Regi. He and MacMurray would of course go on to play together in My Three Sons.
A search of the site claims that I haven't blogged about Bandolero! in quite some time. It's on StarzEncore Westerns again at 10:38 PM Friday among other times. James Stewart plays Mace, who is heading to a small town in Texas to hang a man. The only thing is, it turns out that he's not actually a hangman, and that one of the men the original hangman was going to hang is Dee (Dean Martin), who is Mace's brother. And they were on the gallows for a botched bank hold-up that killed a man. Mace is there to make certain the hanging doesn't go off as planned, and that the gang gets to escape. But on the way out of town, they do two things. First is that Mace actually robs the bank his brother had failed to rob; the other is that they kidnap Mrs. Stoner (Raquel Welch), the widow of the man Dee and his gang killed in the botched holdup. They then head for Mexico with Sheriff Johnson (George Kennedy) chasing not far behind, even though he has no jurisdiction in Mexico. And then once in Mexico, the gringos all find out there are bandits in arid northern Mexico who might just kill all of them.
For those of you who like David Wayne, you get anther chance to see him this week, in The Naked Hills at noon Saturday on TCM. Wayne plays Tracy Powell, a man in late 1840s Indiana who gets gold fever when he hears about the gold strike in California. So he drops everything and runs off to California. Eventually he gets double-crossed and goes back to Indiana to get himself a wife (Marcia Henderson). Except that poor Tracy gets the gold bug again, so he just abandons his wife and young kid to try to find gold and become wealthy. And he gets that gold bug again and again. You'd think the wife would finally realize she needs a different man and file for divorce or something, but by the end of the movie Tracy is willing to go back to the family that he's barely spent time with over the last 20 years and settle down admitting defeat. And they seem to be grudgingly accepting of this. They couldn't have gone west with him and made a fortune serving the arrivals even newer than them?
It's been a while since I've recommended anything in TCM Underground, so I'll mention this week's selection, The Awakening, at 2:30 AM Sunday. Charlton Heston plays Matthew, an archaeologist who is searching for the tomb of a mythical ancient Egyptian queen Kara. He finds a tomb and, wouldn't you know it, at the same exact time he finds that tomb his wife is giving birth to their daughter. Fast forward 18 years, and the daughter is all grown up Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist). But she's acting rather strangely. Dad eventually reaches the conclusion that when Margaret was being born, at the very moment he was finding that tomb, Kara's soul escaped from one of those jars in the tomb and inhabited Margaret's body, so he's really dealing not with his daughter Margaret, but with Queen Kara! Unfortunately Kara is malevolent, and Matthew realizes that the only way to defeat her is to do some sort of ancient ritual that will probably kill the body carrying Kara's soul. Oops, there goes his daughter.