Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of September 28-October 4, 2015. This is one of those odd weeks where there's no Star of the Month on TCM. But instead, we get two Spotlights. And there is a bunch of other interesting stuff out there as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Silent star Colleen Moore shows up in her final silent film, Why Be Good?, at 8:00 PM Monday on TCM. Moore plays the flapper Pert, who works in a department store by day and likes to go out dancing and basically enjoying herself at night. One night, Pert dances with Winthrop Peabody Jr. (Neil Hamilton, later the commissioner on TV's Batman), not realizing that he is the son of the man who owns the department store where she works. So when she shows up late for work the next morning, she's called in to management's office, which is where she runs into... Winthrop Jr.! Dad fires her, she thinks the son is the one who ordered the firing, and complications ensue. So the Peabodys try to test her by bringing her to a hotel and seeing if she really is a bad girl or if it was all just a misunderstanding. Supposedly Jean Harlow is in one of the party sequences if you can spot her.
Since I know how much you all love those moveis from the late 1920s and early 1930s, here's another: Consolation Marriage, airing at 6:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. Irene Dunne plays Mary, a working girl in love with Aubrey (Lester Vail), who decides he'd be happier marrying into love. Roughly the same happened to reporter Steve (Pat O'Brien), whose girlfriend Elaine (Myrna Loy) married another man. So when Mary and Steve meet, they decide that they'll have a marriage "of convience", that either one can leave at any time if it will make them happier. They even bring a baby into this open marriage! And then things get interesting when Aubrey and Elaine (not married to each other) both show up, and say that they would have been happier with their old loves. What will Mary and Steve do? And if they both go off with their old loves, who gets the baby? Granted, this was all before the Production Code, but it's still interesting that a movie like this would get made all the way back in 1931.
TCM has one final night of the September spotlight Five Came Back on Tuesday night. This Tuesday looks at director George Stevens. A film he made after returning from the war that fits in well with a look at directors who served is The Diary of Anne Frank, airing at 12:30 AM Wednesday. Of course, you know about Anne Frank, the young German Jewish girl who moved to Amsterdam with her family when the Nazis came to power, and then had to go into hiding in a small annex above a factory when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. It's not just her family in the annex; there's also the van Daans (mom Shelly Winters won an Oscar) and the dentist Albert (Ed Wynn). Together they lived in that annex for two years, while Anne wrote a diary. This movie isn't adapted directly from the diary, however; instead, it comes from a stage play adapted from the diary. Also, George Stevens wasn't too happy about having to film in Cinemascope (Fox ordered that), since he felt the wide screen couldn't give him the claustrophobic feel he wanted of eight people in that tiny annex.
A different director is being spotlighted on Wednesday morning and afternoon: Michael Powell, who was born on Spetember 30, 1905. One of his movies that I believe I haven't recommended before is Contraband, airing at 9:45 AM. Conrad Veidt, whom you'll best remember as the bad guy Strasser in Casablanca, plays Andersen, the captain of a Danish ship at the beginning of World War II, a time before the Nazi invasion when Denmark was still officially neutral. Andersen's ship is in port but everybody has to remain on board while a contraband check occurs. And then two of his passengers, Sorensen (Valerie Hobson) and Pidgeon (Esmond Knight) escape by stealing his landing pass. So Anderson surreptitiously disembarks so he can figure out what his passengers are doing. He gets more than he bargained for, as he finds that there's a Nazi spy ring afoot!
On Wednesday night, we finally get this month's Guest Programmer on TCM: actress Diahann Carroll. Carroll selects four of her favorites, and sits down with TCM host Robert Osborne to talk about them. Carroll is another of those programmers who has actually selected one of her own films, Claudine, which airs at 8:00 PM. In this one, she plays a single mother who meets garbage man James Earl Jones and begins an uneasy romantic relationship with him.
That will be followed at 10:00 PM by Now, Voyager, in which Bette Davis suffers a nervous breakdown and gets a cigarette from unhappily married Paul Henried.
In Gilda, at 12:15 AM, gambler Glenn Ford finds that his old girlfriend (Rita Hayworth) is now married to his new boss (George Macready), who has a shady background.
Finally, Glory, at 2:15 AM, tells the story of an all-black northern regiment in the Civil War.
A couple of movies are coming up on FXM Retro this week that I don't think I've mentioned before. First is Bloodhounds of Broadway, airing at 11:50AM Thursday and 7:30 AM Friday. Scott Brady plays Numbers, a gangster who has been spending time in Florida to escape the commission investigating him up in New York. When the commission winds down, he heads back to New York, meeting Emily (Mitzi Gaynor) along the way when her bloodhounds wind up asleep in his car. He takes this rural girl back to New York with him, and another gangster's moll Mitzi Green) takes Emily under her wing and turns her from a gingham-clad yokel into an overly made up dancer and singer who winds up taking Broadway by storm. Numbers begins to fall for Emily, but there's a problem in that he's already got a girlfriend (Marguerite Chapman) who has the evidence that could send Numbers up the river for a long time. Can Emily get him to accept a lighter sentence?
Thursday night brings the October Spotlight to TCM: Women directors. Actually, there are so many directors on whom the spotlight will shine that the spotlight will be running on Thursdays and Tuesdays; it's just that this Tuesday is still in September. I've mentioned Alice Guy-BlachÉ several times before, since she was one of the first female directors, but you can catch a bunch of her films this week. So instead of her work, I'll mention the movie The Love Light, which is airing at midnight Friday (or 11:00 PM LFT Thursday, shortly after Thursday Night Football). Mary Pickford stars as Angela, a young woman living along the coast of Italy whose brothers are called off to fight in World War I. Unfortunately, her brothers are casualties, so Angela becomes the local lighthouse keeper. This is how she meets Joseph, an American who is washed ashore. Then the melodrama hits. They have a child, but a madwoman who lost her son takes the baby. And then it comes to light that Joseph is probably not an American, but a German spy (remember, Germany and Italy were on opposite sides in World War I). The direction was handled by Frances Marion, who is better known as one of the great screenwriters in early Hollywood. Joseph was played by Marion's real-life husband, Fred Thomson, who would become a big star until his untimely death from a tetanus infection.
Bob Hope's birthday is in late May, but TCM will be showing a bunch of his films on Friday morning and afternoon. Hope plays a late 19th century insurance salesman who unknowingly sells a life insurance policy to Jesse James (Wendell Corey). Unfortunately, his bosses don't like the idea, since James is sure to get killed committing one or another bank robbery. So they send him out west to fine James and cancel the policy. Jesse, for his part, figures he can fake his own death and collect the insurance money. And when the insurance salesman comes out west, what better person to take the fall than him? Complicating matters is that our hero falls in love with Jesse's girl Cora, played here by Rhonda Fleming. (In real life Jesse was married, reasonably happily as far as I know.) Perhaps the highlight of the movie is the climax, in which a whole bunch of stars of popular TV westerns of the day (this was released in 1959) have cameos playing off their TV characters. See how many you can recognize.
The other Fox movie is Black Sheep, which you can catch on FXM Retro at 7:30 AM Saturday. Edmund Lowe plays John, a professional gambler who plies his trade fleecing unsuspecting marks on cruise ships. On this particular cruise, he meets actress Jeanette (Claire Trevor) returning home from England and tells her he'll sneak her into first class. Therey, they see a young man Fred (Tom Brown) who is about to kill himself! Apparently he's been taken by some widow who is in fact a thief, and who is now trying to blackmail him into taking part in her crimes! John takes pity on Fred, but the big surprise comes when John goes to Fred's cabin. Fred has pictures of his mother and grandmother, and John realizes that Fred's mother was, well, his wife, which would make Fred his long-lost son! Can John save Fred? Will Jeanette figure out whether John is honest or a con artist?
Our last selection this week is a sprawling western: The Big Country, at 8:00 PM Sunday. Jean Simmons plays Julie, a teacher in a western town who has inherited a plot of land from her grandfather. This land is important because it's got a river on it, and that provides water for the local ranchers, the two biggest being Major Terrill (Charles Bickford) and Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives, who won an Oscar). These two don't like each other, and they've more or less passed that on to their children. Into all of this, Julie brings James McKay (Gregory Peck). He's a ship's captain from back east who's inally decided to give up that life and get married, which is why Julie is bringing him west. He of course gets involved in the coming water war, and the people in the younger generation get involved in a whole bunch of romantic complications: one of the Hennessey kids (Chuck Connors) wants Julie, while the Major's daughter (Diane Baker) likes McKay.
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