Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of September 14-20, 2015. Football season is in full swing now, but we have to wait until we get the grudge match against the blankety-blanks from Seattle. So why not deal with the nervous anticipation of the upcoming big game by watching some good movies? As always, I've got a good selection of interesting movies for all of you to watch, since I know you all trust my discerning taste. All times are in Eastern, as usual, onless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with this week's Silent Sunday Nights feature: The Kid Brother, at 12:30 AM Monday on TCM. Harold Lloyd stars as Harold, the kid brother in a family with two older, burlier brothers, and a father who values masculinity. The medicine show comes to town, and all three brothers fall in love with Mary (Jobyna Ralston), a woman travelling with the show. But Dad, who is the local sheriff, is also guarding a bunch of money earmarked for building a new dam, and when some thugs from the medicine show steal it, Dad is accused. It's up to Harold to catch the people who really did it, and prove to his dad and brothers that he is the equal of them. As with all of Lloyd's movies, there are a lot of brilliant sight gags, but this one isn't quite as manic as, say, Safety Last or Speedy. Not that that diminishes the film; it just shows a different side of Harold Lloyd.
A couple of movies are returning to FXM Retro this week, both of them on Monday. First up is Forever Amber, at 3:30 AM and 12:40 PM. Linda Darnell plays Amber, who at the start of the movie is a teenager living with Puritan parents in the middle of nowhere England about 1660. This is just about the end of the English Civil War, which spelled doom for the Puritans as the monarchy was restored. So Amber leaves home, and with the help of adventurer Bruce Carlton (Cornel Wilde), with whom she falls in love and gets knocked up, although he doesn't realize it. Left with a child to support, Amber uses her sex appeal to try to rise through London society, eventually marrying an earl (Richard Hayden), becoming a courtier to King Charles II (George Sanders), and surviving the Great Fire of 1666. Still, Bruce was always the love of her life. And then he returns, although he's none too pleased to find out that Amber's beeng doing and that she bore his child without telling him. It's based on a racy, very popular novel of the 1940s, although the book was obviously toned down for the screen. It's also got lovely Technicolor photography.
The other movie back on FXM Retro is The Gay Deception, at 7:20 AM Monday. Frances Dee plays Mirabel, a small-town girl who wins a whopping $5,000 in a contest. (Well, this was the 30s, so that's probably like $100K today.) Mirabel decides she's going to go to the big city and act like a princess in order to attract a well-to-do man. Enter Sandro (Francis Lederer). He's a bellboy at the hotel where Mirabel is staying. Except that he really isn't a bellboy at all. In fact, he's a prince, but he's masquerading as a bellboy for reasons that only make sense in these 30s films, if they make sense anywhere. Mirabel and Sandro fall for each other and all sorts of complications ensue, especially when Sandro "pretends" to be a prince to take Mirabel to the ball. You can probably figure that there's going to be a happy ending, though. William Wyler, of all people, directed this light comedy.
Monday night on TCM brings a night of Sidney Lumet movies to TCM. One that I haven't recommended before is Running on Empty, at 10:15 PM. Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch play a married couple who were radicals back in the late 1960s, culminating in bombing a napalm factory. That of course is a serious crime, so they've been on the run all the years since, moving at the drop of a hat to stay one step ahead of the authorities. It's not much of a way to live a life for them, but making matters worse is that they've got two children. The elder son Danny (River Phoenix) is now a senior in high school, and he's become quite the piano prodigy. So much so that his music teacher suggests that Danny apply to the Juilliard School. The natural dilemma, of course, is that once Danny goes off to Juilliard and makes a name for himself, he'll never be able to see his family -- unless his parents give themselves up to the authorities.
TCM's Spetember spotlight, Five Came Back, continues on Tuesday night with a look at director John Ford. Perhaps the most interesting selection of the night is December 7th, at 11:45 PM Tuesday. That date, of course, is when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, dragging the US into World War II. Thankfully, this is the full 82-minute version, which was edited down after the government first commissioned it because there were some controversial things in it. The movie starts off with Uncle Sam (Walter Huston) talking about the greatness of America and its diversity, while "Mr. C" (Harry Davenport), basically Sam's conscience, warns Sam that the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii are going to cause trouble. That, and "real" American citizens in Hawaii are inadvertently spilling secrets to Japanese spies. Then we finally get the attack on Pearl Harbor, which is where the trouble came for Ford and co-director Gregg Toland. They mentioned mistakes the military made that hit too close to home and that the authorities probably didn't want being known to the general public anyway. So the movie was heavily edited for general release, and the edited version won an Oscar in the two-reel documentary category.
Also airing overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday is Neighbors, at 12:05 AM Wednesday on Encore Classic. (It'll also be on various HBO channels several times over the course of the week.) John Belushi, in his final film before his untimely death, plays Earl, a suburban man happily married to Enid (Kathryn Walker). One day, the house next door is moved into by new neighbors Vic and Ramona (Dan Aykroyd and Cathy Moriarty respectively). Earl and Enid's lives begin to change, and not for the better. Vic and Ramona are completely different from pretty much anybody else Earl and Enid have ever met, and Ramona seems to be trying to seduce Earl! It's just one of the ways in which Vic and Ramona seem to be picking on poor Earl. This one is very much an acquired taste. There are some reviewers who think it's one of the great movies ever made, while others consider it terrible. I first saw it back in the mid-80s on a VCR, and definitely put myself in the latter camp.
If you think Neighbors is strange, wait until you see Alphaville, airing at 2:15 AM Thursday on TCM as part of a night of movies directed by Jean-Luc Godard. This movie might make more sense if you think of it as a spoof, both of the 60s secret agent movies and of the low-budget science fiction movies of the era. Eddy Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a detective in the classic detective movie mold who gets tasked with going to the city of Alphaville to find spy Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff). Alphaville, however, looks amazingly like the banlieues outside Paris with their mindless concrete apartment blocks. Alphaville is run by an evil dictator with the help of a supercomputer, but while this is all supposed to be sometime in the future, everything looks like it came straight out of the mid-60s, which is because the movie was made in 1965. Together with the help of the daughter of the man behind the supercomputer, Lenny saves the day, or so it seems.
Thursday morning and afternoon on TCM bring a day of Anne Bancroft. One of her movies that I haven't recommended before is Garbo Talks, at 6:00 PM. The movie isn't exactly about Greta Garbo, and the thought of Anne Bancroft playing her is nuts. Instead, Bancroft plays Estelle, a woman who learns that she's dying of a brain tumor. She's had a great unfulfilled wish in her life, which is to meet Greta Garbo, who famously left the public eye in 1942 and was thought of as a recluse, although that wasn't exactly true. So, it's up to her son Gilbert (Ron Silver) to try to find Greta and get Mom the chance to meet her, which he tries even though it puts a strain on his own marriage to Lisa (Carrie Fisher). Garbo does eventually show up, although of course it's not Greta herself (Greta was still alive when the movie was made), but Betty Comden, who is probably best remembered as half of the team (with Adolph Green) who wrote the music to On the Town and the screenplay for Singin' in the Rain.
We get another night of Susan Hayward on Thursday night, including a movie that I think hasn't aired on TCM in years: The Conqueror, at 10:00 PM. The titular conqueror is Temujin, who would later become Genghis Khan, and is played by... John Wayne! As you can probably guess from that casting, this movie has a reputation as being a serious misfire. Hayward plays Bortai, a Tatar woman who is the love interest for Genghis. As for the rest of the cast, you get to see, in oriental makeup, William Conrad and Agnes Moorehead among others. The dialog is awful, although there's some lovely Technicolor scenery. And that brings us to the other interesting thing about the movie. The movie was filmed in Snow Canyon, Utah, just downwind of Yucca Flats, Nevada, where the military had done nuclear testing. As a result, the filming location was contaminated, and a shockingly high number of cast and crew developed terminal cancer, including Wayne, Hayward, Pedro Armendariz (who shot himself before the cancer could run its course) and director Dick Powell.
Finally, I'll mention one more biopic that would go well with The Conqueror: Alexander the Great, at 2:15 PM Sunday on TCM. Alexander, played here by Richard Burton, is the son of Philip of Macedon (Fredric March) and was tutored by Aristotle (Barry Jones). Alexander would inherit the throne after Philip died and conquer much of the world east of Greece that was known to the Greeks at the time, before dying at the young age of 33. The first half of the film deals with family intrigue, as Philip worries about his son's growing power, especially because Alexander's mom Olympias (Danielle Darrieux) seems to be spurring on Alexander against his father. And then Philip dies, leaving Alexander to unite the Greek city-states and lead them in a series of battles first against Persia and then against points further east. Like The Conqueror, both of which came out in 1956, it's a mess, but one that's worth one viewing at least.
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