Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of September 5-11, 2016. Everybody is in a tizzy since Ted Thompson had the chutzpah to cut Josh Sitton. Since there's nothing we can do about it, why not try to calm down with some good movies? Once again, I've used my good taste to select a bunch of movies I know you'll all like. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I know how much you love early talkies, so I'll start the week with one: Devil-May-Care, at 6:00 AM Monday on TCM. Ramon Novarro plays Armand, a Napoleon-supporting Frenchman who is put before the firing squad after Bonaparte is deposed. Armand escapes, and hides out with Leonie (Dorothy Jordan). Except that she's a royalist, and when she learns the truth about Armand, she turns him in. He escapes again, and this time hides out with Louise (Marion Harris). The only problem is, he doesn't realize that Louise is the cousin of Leonie. The two women end up being rivals for Armand's attention. Surprisingly, this movie was conceived as a musical, and Novarro seems to do his own singing! He actually transitioned to talkies fairly well. And then to make things even more nuts, the folks at MGM decided that to make the movie more spectacular, they needed a two-strip Technicolor dance number.
Up against Devil-May-Care over on StarzEncore Westerns is The Gal Who Took the West, at 5:05 AM Monday. Yvonne de Carlo plays the gal, Lillian, a singer from New York who goes west to try to get success that way, posing as an opera singer. (She even gets to sing a couple of songs in an operatic style; apparently the movie was conceived with Deanna Durban in mind, who did have operatic chops.) Anyhow, when she gets out west, she finds herself smack dab in the middle of a feud. Two cousins, Grant (John Russell) and Lee (Scott Brady) are waiting for the head of the family (Charles Coburn) to die, each one hoping to inherit the land. It's gotten to the point where they're ready to go to war with each other. And Lillian has gotten herself into this. She's so lovely that the two cousins start becoming rivals for her too. But maybe that's a good thing, if she can bring about a compromise in the potential range war.
A movie returning to FXM Retro after an absence is A Letter to Three Wives, which you can catch at 1:15 PM Monday. Three women who are friends with each other in one of those post-war middle class towns are taking some children on a charity day trip. Just as they're about to leave, they get a letter from another friend Addie (voiced by the never-seen Celeste Holm). In that letter Addie says that she's sorry, but she's leaving town. And oh yeah, she's going off with the husband of one of those women, but not saying which one. So naturally, all three wives look back at their marriage and what might have gone wrong. There's Deborah (Jeanne Crain), married to rich veteran Brad (Jeffrey Lynn). Rita (Ann Sothern) is married to college professor George (Kirk Douglas), but she writes radio soap operas so makes more money than he does. And there's Lola (Linda Darnell), from the wrong side of the tracks (literally), who marries the not very handsome, but wealthy Porter (Paul Douglas). All of them have reasons to think hers is the husband who is running off with Addie.
This month's TCM Spotlight is on slapstick. Comedian Greg Proops will be presenting the history of slapstick every Tuesday and Wednesday in September. Since we're looking at the history of the genre, it's unsurprising that the look starts off with a bunch of silent movies this week. You can go all the way back to the start of the genre and pioneers like Fatty Arbuckle in Coney Island, at 2:30 AM Wednesday. This one has Fatty, his early movie co-star Al St. John, and an early Buster Keaton all going after the same girl at Coney Island, while Fatty has to try to jettison his wife.
As for Buster, he shows up more on Wednesday night, such as in the classic short One Week which you can see at 11:30 PM Wednesday. In this short, Buster plays a newlywed who, as a wedding gift, gets a prefab do-it-yourself house kit, as well as a lot to build it on. So he goes to build the house, and needless to say, things don't go as planned, as you can see from Keaton's imaginative sight gags. Stay all the way to the end for the finale.
If you like recent movies, I can recommend Working Girl, which is coming up at 9:20 AM and 8:00 PM Wednesday on Starz Comedy. Melanie Griffith plays Tess, a woman who is still a secretary as she's pushing 30. But she's got ideas, and is glad to get a job with the high-flying Katherine (Sigourney Weaver) in the Wall Street world. That is, until she discovers that Katherine is stealing her ideas and taking credit for them. But Tess is in luck. Katherine breaks her leg on a skiing trip, and Tess comes up with the audacious plan of doing Katherine's job just as she would, practically down to stealing Katherine's identity. She's even got a plan to keep a company from being taken over, just needing the help of investment banker Jack (Harrison Ford). She even falls in love with him, not realizing that he's Katherine's boyfriend. And of course Katherine is bound to recover from that broken leg.
I know a lot of you like Lee Tracy, he of the ultracynical, wisecracking characters in 1930s movies. You've got a good chance to see him this week, in Behind the Headlines at 9:15 AM Thursday on TCM. Tracy plays Eddie, a former newspaper reporter in a relationship with current newspaper reporter Mary (Diana Gibson). Eddie has gone over to radio, reporting news live from the scene, and since he can report live he can get the news out before the newspapers do. The two reporters are in a sort of friendly rivalry trying to scoop each other, and Mary thinks she has an idea when she cottons on to a plot about stealing gold destined for Fort Knox. (Back then they couldn't just irradiate the gold.) But while trying to uncover the plot, Mary gets kidnapped, and it's up to Eddie to help rescue Mary. This is the sort of B movie studios churned out by the dozen, and again shows that B movie doesn't have to mean bad movie.
It's hard to believe that Witness is over 30 years old, but it is. You can catch it on StarzEncore Classics, at 1:15 PM Thursday. Harrison Ford plays John Book, a police officer who gets involved in a unique murder case. One guy killed another in the men's room at the Philadelphia train station. The thing is, there's a witness in little Samuel (Lukas Haas). But he's Amish, and the Amish don't particularly want to get involved with the police. Book has to get the witness to testify, but there's the problem that the killers want to get rid of both the boy and Book. So he has to take the kid back to Amish country and hide out there, protecting the kid. Samuel's mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis) is a widow who was taking the kid to see his aunt, but now with Book around trying to protect Samuel, Samuel begins to look to him as a father figure, and Rachel has her own inappropriate feelings for him. Further, the killers are sure to find Book and the kid he's protecting eventually….
Thursday night on TCM brings another night of Treasures from the Disney Vault. This time there are more cartoons; the first Disney live-action feature Treasure Island at 8:30 PM; and a visit to Disneyland from just before Walt died and was frozen under Pirates of the Caribbean comes on at 11:45 PM. To be honest, though, other than Treasure Island, I don't recognize any of this installment's “treasures”.
Yolanda and the Thief is an MGM musical that doesn't show up as often as the better-known ones. You've got an opportunity to see it this Friday at 12:15 PM on TCM. Yolanda is played by Lucille Bremer. She's an heiress in the fictitious Latin American country of Patria. Her family basically owns the whole place, and now that she's finished her schooling, she's ready to take over the family business. Enter Johnny (Fred Astaire). He's on the run, being a conman and the titular thief. He's made it to Patria with partner in crime Victor (Frank Morgan). It's there that he overhears Yolanda praying to her guardian angel. So of course Johnny comes up with an idea: pretend to be that guardian angel, and use that con to bilk Yolanda out of millions! It's a good idea if you're a thief, but of course there's a snag. Well, two snags. One will be getting out of the country, but the bigger one is that Johnny falls in love with Yolanda!
For a different sort of Technicolor from that era, you can see An Ideal Husband, at 8:15 AM Sunday on TCM. Made in Britain and based on an Oscar Wilde play, the movie stars Paulette Goddard as Mrs. Cheveley, who has invested in a scheme that unfortunately is a fraud. MP Sir Robert Chiltern (Hugh Williams) knows it's a fraud and is about to expose it in the House of Commons, but Cheveley approaches him to blackmail him. If you expose the fraud, I'll expose a secret from your past, she tells him. Sir Robert approaches his playboy friend Viscount Arthur (Michael Wilding) for advice, and things get complicated as everybody delivers Oscar Wilde's one-liners. Glynis Johns plays Sir Robert's sister, while veteran character actor C. Aubrey Smith plays Viscount Arthur's father. The production values are excellent, but I have to admit I'm not the biggest fan of Oscar Wilde's work.
