Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of September 7-13, 2015. The Packers are going to open their 2015 campaign this coming Sunday, but I know some of you are mourning the fact that your boyfriend Jared Abbrederis won't be part of that campaign. So why not cheer yourself up by watching some good movies! As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday being Labor Day, it's time for the annual TCM salute to the Telluride Film Festival. All through the morning and afternoon they'll be running movies that got important showings at Telluride, or prominently involve Telluride honorees. One of the latter is the French clown/actor Pierre Étaix, who made a handful of films in the 1960s, including Yoyo, on at 9:15 AM. Yoyo, played as an adult by Étaix, is the son of a female circus performer and millionaire who knocked her up several years earlier. The circu comes back, and Dad finds out he's got a son. Fast forward to the 1930s. With the Depression, Dad loses his fortune and and run off with Mom and the kid to be itinerant performers. Eventually, Yoyo grows up, finds the now decaying mansion where Dad lived, and vows to buy it. The movie starts a bit slowly, since the 1920s sequence is done as a silent, but once the sound kicks in, it becomes a lot of fun.
I should also mention a couple of documentaries that will be airing Monday on TCM. First up, for Telluride honoree Billy Wilder, there's Billy Wilder Speaks, at 11:00 AM. German director Volker SchlÖndorff planned to do a more traditional documentary on Wilder in the late 1980s and interviewed him several times over a two-week period to that effect. I don't think that documentary ever got made, but instead we got the interviews edited into this documentary. Wilder talks -- sometimes in English and sometimes in German -- about working with people like Marilyn Monroe, James Cagney (whom he sent into retirement), Jack Lemmon, and more. If you're an avid movie buff like me, you'll probably know a lot of the stories already, but it's still fun to hear Wilder tell them.
The other interesting documentary if you can call it that is Fragments, at 10:00 PM. This one looks at how many movies, mostly silents, have been lost, with the exception of a scene or two. In some cases, such as first Best Actor Oscar winner Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh, it's tragic to know that we'll probably never have the rest of the performance, while in other cases there's some background of historical interest. Apparently, back in the early days of filmmaking, you could copyright individual still photos of what made up the movie, and this was cheaper than copyrighting the entire movie. So moviemakers would take a scene of a minute or two, submit the photos developed from the film, and copyrighted those. As with the old flipbooks, those photo sequences have been reconstructed into silent movie fragments.
A couple of movies are returning to FXM Retro this week. The first of them is From the Terrace, at 3:00 AM and 12:30 PM Tuesday. Paul Newman stars as David, a young man from Philadelphia who, having served in World War II, wants to do better than his father did, which was pretty well financially although not personally. Dad (Leon Ames) is a mean SOB, while Mom (Myrna Loy) is a hard-drinker and unfaithful. So David goes off to New York City with his Navy buddy, where he gets a good job on Wall Street and then meets Mary (Joanne Woodward). Mary comes from an even better family. David and Mary get married, but David soon discovers that this life isn't all it's cracked up to be, as the marriage is loveless and the business world isn't as rewarding as he thought it would be. Mary has her old college flame, and then David meets a woman too.
A movie that a lot of people love that left me a bit cold is Being There, which shows up on TCM at 3:15 PM Tuesday. Peter Sellers plays Chauncey Gardner, a mentally-challenged man who's spent all of his life gardening for a wealthy man in Washington DC, and in his spare time watches a lot of TV. Unfortunately, the old man dies in the opening scene, and Chauncey is forced to leave the only home he's ever known. (You'd think the old bastard would have considered Chauncey in his will.) So he winds up wandering around Washington until he's hit by a limousine. To avoid any controversy, they take Chauncey back to their mansion and give him medical treatement there, which is easy since they've got round-the-clock care for the patriarch Ben (Melvyn Douglas) who's got some terminal blood condition. Chauncey, having spent that life watching TV and gardening, answers all of everybody's questions in platitudes, but everybody thinks these platitudes are the deepest things out there, including the President, who is one of Ben's friends. But who is Chauncey really?
Tuesday night brings a second night of the TCM Spotlight for September, "Five Came Back", looking at five directors who served in World War II. This week, it's John Huston. The feature film that's been selected is Across the Pacific at 8:00 PM, with Humphrey Bogart trying to save the Panama Canal from being bombed. Perhaps more interesting, however, is the movie that follows, Report from the Aleutians at 9:45 PM. This one looks at the men who were stationed in the Aleutian Islands, a lonely outpost in an inhospitable region off the Alaskan mainland that was close enough to Japan that a couple of the islands were actually captured by the Japanese during the war. A young Charlton Heston served in World War II and was stationed in the Aleutians. He was convinced that if it weren't for the atomic bomb, he and the other people stationed there would have been sent as part of the force to invade the Japanese "Home Islands". Also on TCM Tuesday night are a couple more Private Snafu shorts.
TCM is spending Wednesday morning and afternoon looking at college life, especially college football. A very early sound movie on the topic is So This is College, kicking off the morning at 6:30 AM. Robert Montgomery at the beginning of his career plays Biff, a senior at USC, a star on the football team (not that he looks anything like Clay Matthews or even former USC OL turned actor Marion Morrison) and best friend of Eddie (Elliot Nugent). They vow to make football be the thing this season, but unsurprisingly, a woman named Babs (Sally Starr) comes into the picture, and both guys think she might be going after them, which puts a strain on their friendship. There's other stuff typical from college films of the first decade or so of the sound era like the glee club or the even bigger importance college football was portrayed as having even compared to now. Polly Moran provides some comic relief as the fraternity's cook, while a very young Joel McCrea is listed on IMDb in an uncredited role as "Bruce".
Another movie that returns to FXM Retro after a long absence is Gang War, at 10:35 AM Wednesday. Charles Bronson, early in his career, stars as a high school teacher in Los Angeles with a pregnant wife. One evening he goes out to pick up a prescription for her, and he happens to witness two guys knifing a third to death. Being the good citizen that he calls the cops, not knowing that what he witnessed was a mob killing. Also unfortunate for him is that he leaves his wife's prescription in the phone booth, which enables to police to track him down and ultimately for the mob to learn about him. The head mobster (John Doucette) sends one of his thugs to rough up the wife, but the thug accidentally kills the wife. This leads our previously mild-mannered teacher to lose it and decide that he doesn't care about the consequences, as long as he can kill the mobsters responsible for his wife's death. An interesting movie with an interesting performance from Bronson and some great location shooting in LA.
Thursday night brings another night of Susan Hayward's films to TCM. This time sees more of her Fox output and some starring roles, as in David and Bathsheba at 9:45 PM. Gregory Peck stars as David, the biblical king of Israel who has all the power and possible sex (or at least wives) a man could want. However, one day when he looks out from his terrace, he sees the lovely Bathsheba (Hayward) at her place. This wouldn't be much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that she's already married to Uriah (Kieron Moore). Still, David summons Bathsheba and discovers that she finds him dreamy, too. Uriah just happens to be an officer in David's army, so David arranges for a battle in which Uriah will get killed. God isn't very happy about this, and starts visiting all sorts of disasters upon Israel, which you think they'd be able to handle after the 40 years in the desert thing. David has to try to repent of his sins in order that Bathsheba not be killed and Israel be saved. Yeah, it's a biblical movie, but well-made and photographed quite well.
I'm happy to see another airing of Went the Day Well on TCM, even if it is at 2:00 AM Saturday. The scene is the village of Bramley, somewhere in the idyllic part of England. Well, it would be idyllic if there weren't a war on and all that separated the UK from the Nazis was a few miles of English Channel. Into this village come a couple of British soldiers. But the locals begin to notice that these soldiers act a bit strangely. It turns out that they're not British at all, but Nazi agents, preparing for a German invasion. The Nazi soldiers basically take the entire village hostage, but the villagers don't intend to take things so supinely. They have numbers, but is that enough against the cunning and better-armed Germans? This one was made in the UK during World War II, and it must have been quite the fright for contemporary audiences. Today it's more of a curiosity, but an interesting one.
On Saturday at 3:30 PM on TCM, you'll have the opportunity to catch another World War II film: Triple Cross. This one loosely tells the story of Eddie Chapman. Chapman, played by Christopher Plummer in the movie, is a safecracker who winds up in prison in Jersey, which is part of the Channel Islands. This is the only part of the UK that the Nazis were able to take over, and Chapman makes a deal with the Nazis that in exchange for letting him out of prison, he'll spy on the British for them. They eventually agree, and of course Chapman repays that kindness by becoming a double agent. Of course, things weren't quite that simple. Chapman was also a ladies' man and winds up with a girlfriend who's working for the French Resistance and one (Romy Schneider) who's a theoretically neutral Swede working for the Nazis. The cast includes Gert FrÖbe (Goldfinger) as a policeman who vets Chapman's worthiness; Yul Brynner as Chapman's Nazi handler; and Trevor Howard as Chapman's British handler.
Original Post