Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of September 19-25, 2016. Once the Packers beat the crap out of the Vikings at the stapler tonight, we're all going to be excited and need a way to come down off the high. Why not do that by watching some good movies? I've used my impeccable taste to pick out a bunch of movies I know you'll all like. There's more from Star of the Month Gene Hackman; more slapstick; and some other stuff as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with a short that's been programmed to fill out the time for Silent Sunday Nights: MGM's 1925 Studio Tour, at 1:30 AM Monday. In some ways, there's not much to say about this. As you can guess from the title, MGM took a camera around to each of their departments, including all the behind the scenes departments like wardrobe and accounting. But what makes it more worth seeing is that for some of the more famous names (sorry, cinematogaphers), intertitles do a good job of putting names to faces. There are also the people who would not yet be so famous (Howard Hawks is among the writers since he wasn't a director yet, and William Haines wasn't yet a leading man). And perhaps most fascinating is MGM's newest discovery, 18-year-old Lucille LeSueur. If you don't recognize the name, that's because she'd change it… to Joan Crawford.
A movie that I don't think I've recommended before is The Scarf, which you find at 8:00 AM Monday on TCM. John Ireland plays John Barrington, who at the beginning of the movie is escaping from an insane asylum. Apparently he was in the asylum because he strangled his girlfriend with a scarf, but he developed a perfect-for-the-movies case of amnesia and doesn't remember any of what he did. Or perhaps he may not have done it at all. He winds up at a turkey farm run by Ezra (James Barton), who is willing to hide John out. Meanwhile, he also meets would be nightclub singer Connie (Mercedes McCambridge), and they have an on again, off again relationship as she tries to figure out whether he's telling the truth. It doesn't help that she's wearing the same type of scarf that the murderer used. And then there's John's friend Dr. Dunbar, the psychiatrist (Emlyn Williams), who may or may not be trying to help John out. It a mess at times, but an interesting mess.
Over on StarzEncore Classics is a movie that's coming up three times on Monday: Mr. Mom, with the last of the three airings at 10:40 PM. Michael Keaton plays Jack, an engineer at an auto plant. At least, that's what he does until he gets laid off. His wife Caroline (Teri Garr) had been taking care of the kids, but since there's no money coming in, she has to go back into the labor force, taking a job at an ad agency working for Ron (Martin Mull). Jack then becomes a stay-at-home dad, which is the source of a lot of the movie's humor, since back in the 80s having a dad take care of the kids wasn't really a thing. There's also conflict when Caroline starts doing well in her job and has to go on business trips, keeping her away from the family. There's also tension in the fact that Ron starts falling for Caroline, which is of course a problem since she's married with children!
Next up is Joe Smith, American, at 6:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. Robert Young plays Joe Smith, who is a defense plant employee in the early days of World War II. He's just an ordinary man married to Mary (Marsha Hunt), but he's also working on some top-secret bomb sight plans, which makes him enough out of the ordinary that the enemy would like to kidnap him and figure out what he knows about those plans. So of course they do kidnap him and torture him to try to get the information out of him, but since this is a World War II-era movie, of course Joe is heroic enough not to give anything away. Not only that, but as the baddies are taking him away from the first hideout, Joe escapes by throwing himself out of a speeding car, at great danger to his own life! Of course he survives, and once he recovers he's able to help the authorities find the hideout, since he was able to remember all the sounds he heard along the way.
TCM's look at slapstick continues midweek. A movie I've recommended multiple times in the past, but is always worth another mention, is The Long, Long Trailer, at 10:00 PM Tuesday. Lucille Ball plays Tacy, who is getting married to Nicky (Desi Arnaz), a man who has a job that requires him to travel a lot. So Tacy gets the brilliant idea: rather than getting a traditional home, they'll get a trailer that will allow them to travel to work and live together, the way tour buses are set up nowadays. Of course, Tacy's dream isn't all that it's cracked up to be. First is that the trailer turns out to be quite a bit smaller than she thought, and then driving it around the country is more difficult than Nicky would have liked. It's all just the thing for the sort of physical comedy Lucy was doing with Desi on I Love Lucy at the time, only it's in Technicolor. Lucy also gets to confuse Desi with her use of English, as in the “turn right here” scene.
A movie returning to FXM Retro after an absence is Hard Contract, at 4:05 AM Wednesday. James Coburn plays hit man John Cunningham, who gets one final job from his boss Williams (Burgess Meredith), to go over to Europe and bump off three people. The only thing is, one of the three happens to be Cunningham's predecessor in the job, Carlson (Sterling Hayden). Cunningham has always isolated himself from the world, but when he gets to Europe he meets part-time hooker Sheila (Lee Remick) and her circle of friends, including Adrianne (Lili Palmer). The two women unwittingly break down Cunningham's hard, cold exterior, to the point where he's not certain whether he wants to commit the last killing, of Carlson. It doesn't help that the two women introduce Cunningham to their social circle which just happens to include Carlson, or that Carlson recognizes why Cunningham is there. A generally interesting movie, but it's quite talky at times. There's also some nice location shooting.
Western fans can catch Fort Defiance on StarzEncore Westerns at 6:30 AM Thursday. Ben Shelby (Ben Johnson) survives the Civil War and shows up at a ranch in Arizona run by blind Ned Tallon (Peter Graves) and Ned's uncle Charlie (George Cleveland). Ben is looking for Ned's brother John, but doesn't tell Ned that John supposedly deserted resulting in a bunch of people getting killed, including Ben's brothers. So Ben is waiting for John to return from the war so Ben can kill him. Meanwhile, the rancher Dave Parker (Craig Woods) also had brothers served in the Civil War and died. Since Dave has had a running feud with the Tallons anyhow, he's more than willing to kill off the lot of them. John finally shows up, and it turns out that the bad reputation he's gotten may not be so accurate. Further complicating matters is the fact that they're all in Arizona and have to deal with Indians. If the color looks a bit odd, that's because the movie was filmed in Cinecolor, a two-strip competitor to three-strip Technicolor.
If you like a B drama like Joe Smith, American, I think you'll also like a B comedy like Public Wedding, at 4:45 PM Friday. A couple of carnival con-men are hard up for money, and they decide to make some by staging a wedding inside the mouth of a giant whale, with the whole thing being sponsored. However, the intended bridegroom cons them out of all the money and leaves, while the intended bride, Flip Lane (Jane Wyman) winds up at the “altar” with artist Tony Burke (William Hopper). So Flip winds up actually married to Tony, never having met him before. She decides to try to make a go of the marriage, to the point of trying to manage her husband's career, which unsurprisingly causes him all sorts of aggravation. It's the sort of zany stuff that Warner Bros. always seemed to pull off well, in this case wrapping everything up in just under an hour.
Gene Hackman returns to TCM for another evening of his films on Friday night. He's one of the title characters in Zandy's Bride, at 1:45 AM Saturday. Sorry if you thought he was the bride; he's Zandy Allen. Zandy is a farmer in northern California in the mid-19th century. It's a difficult and isolated life, and all he knows of family is his Ma (Eileen Heckart) and Pa (Frank Cady). Still, he sends away for a mail-order bride, because he needs to start a family to have someone to help work the farm and take it over when he gets older. He gets Swede Hannah Lund (Liv Ullmann). At first he doesn't know what to do with a wife, so he treats her like a servant and someone he can control as he wishes. But Hannah is strong willed and will have nothing of that. Together, the two learn to understand and even love one another. Susan Tyrell plays a woman with whom Zandy apparently had a relationship in the past, and whose presence threatens to come between Zandy and Hannah.
Stormy Weather is on TCM at 8:00 PM Sunday. I don't think I mentioned this one when it was last on, so now is a good time to mention it. After the success of Cabin in the Sky, Fox decided to make its own all-black musical. They got Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to star alongside Lena Horne, and the story is loosely based on Robinson's own life. Robinson plays Bill Williamson, who at the beginning of the movie is seen on the cover of a magazine, so he tells a bunch of children the story of his career. Just after returning home from World War I, he meets singer Selina (Horne), and promises to come back to her when he makes it big. Of course, they both eventually make it, but the struggle to make it keeps them apart. The story isn't so much the point here as is the music. Fox got a lot of the famous black entertainers of the day to perform, including Dooley Wilson (who was supposed to do Cabin in the Sky as he had on Broadway but got stuck in a little thing called Casablanca instead), Cab Calloway and his orchestra, and pianist Fats Waller.