Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, week of September 9-15, 2013

Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of September 9-15, 2013.  This is of course being posted before what had better be a glorious Packer victory over the San Francisco team ,after which you'll be so excited you'll want to use something like some good movies to wind down and relax.  If for some terrible reason the Packers fail to iwn, then it's better to watch some good flicks than break your TV.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

The Alfred Hitchcock films continue on Sundays, with each Sunday night concluding with one of Hitchcock's silents airing in Silent Sunday Nights.  This week, that brings The Ring, at 12:45 AM Monday.  Carl Brisson (who boxed in real life) plays Jack, a boxer in a travelling circus who makes his living by taking on all comers from the audience.  One of those challengers is Bob, played by Ian Hunter (who would go on to play King Richard in the Errol Flynn version of The Adventures of Robin Hood).  Bob is actually a boxer, and when he bests Jack in the ring, he decides to hire Jack as a sparring partner.  Jack has a girlfriend (Lillian Hall-Davis), and you just know that Bob is going to fall in love with the girl too.  Bob and the girl eventually run off together, forcing Jack to train for a chance at another fight with Bob, hoping he can win the fight and the girl.

Monday, September 9 marks the birth anniversary of Arthur Freed.  Freed started his career as a lyricist, and along with composer Nacio Herb Brown, wrote he songs for The Broadway Melody of 1929 as well as the song "Singin' in the Rain".  In the late 1930s, Freed became a producer at MGM, where he produced some of the great musicals of the next 20 years.  Singin' in the Rain the movie (airing at 12:45 PM) used his songs as well.  The whole morning and afternoon is movies produced by the "Freed Unit", up until 6:30 PM which brings the documentary Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM.  This is actually an episode of the PBS series Great Performances using archival footage with Freed, as well as interviews with a whole lot of people who worked with Freed: actors, like Mickey Rooney; directors, like Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain); and songwriters like Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who wrote the story for Singin' in the Rain and songs for On the Town).

Monday brings the second nistallment of the documentary The Story of Film to TCM.  It covers roughly the second half of the silent era, and airs at 10:00 PM Monday, with a repeat at 3:45 AM Wednesday.  Several of the great silent comedians are going to be covered in the accompanying movies, including Buster Keaton, who kicks things off at 8:00 PM with the short One Week.  Keaton plays the Man, in this case a newlywed who has been given the present of a house by his unseen uncle.  The only catch is, it's one of those pre-fab houses that comes in a kit, or the 1920 equivalent.  Never mind that the boxes don't look like nearly enough for a house; Keaton tries to build the thing, with a lot of comic difficulties along the way.  There is a full house when he finishies, but like those TV cooking shows, the self-made thing doesn't look like what the directions say you're going to get.  And there's one more complication....

Tuesday night brings dramatic silent films as part of the story of film.  I think I've recommended all of them before, but the one I'd like to mention again is The Crowd, which you can see at 2:00 AM Wednesday.  James Murray plays John, an Everyman whose father believed in the American dream and told him he'd do big things someday.  So, adult John goes off to New York, gets a job in an office building, and meets average woman Mary (Eleanor Boardman); the two fall in love and get married, even though her family thinks John won't amount to anything more than that office worker.  Still John continues to struggle even though he isn't getting anywhere in his life.  And then tragedy strikes him and his wife....  The Crowd is one of the most beautfiully shot American silent movies you'll ever see.

Over on the Fox Movie Channel, you could watch On the Avenue, which is airing at 6:00 AM Monday, and again at 7:05 AM Sunday.  Dick Powell plays a Broadway actor turned writer who has written a new show parodying the "richest girl in town", starring Alice Faye in the title role.  At the play's premiere, the actual richest girl in town (Madeline Carroll) and her family show up, and are understandably aghast.  Carroll goes to Powell to give him a piece of her mind, with the result that the two fall for each other and Powell softens the show, this enrages Faye, who has her eye on Powell too.  She decides to get some revenge by rewriting the show to make Carroll look even worse, with the result that Carroll blames Powell for it.  Everything gets resolved by the last number, and you can probably guess who winds up with whom.  The songs here were provided by Irving Berlin, and the movie has a bunch of 1930s character actors, which unfortunately includes the Ritz Brothers.

This month's TCM Guest Programmer is Madeleine Stowe, an actress who has made such prestige films as the Daniel Day-Lewis version of The Last of the Mohicans, and is now appearing in the TV series Revenge.  She sat down with Robert Osborne to talk about four of her favorite movies, and those movies are airing this Wednesday night:
The More the Merrier at 8:00 PM, in which businessman Charles Coburn rents half of Jean Arthur's Washington apartment during a housing crunch in World War II, and then turns around and rents half of his half to Joel McCrea;
Splendor in the Grass at 10:00 PM, which sees Natalie Wood playing a girl in 1920s Kansas who falls in love with Warren Beatty, but won't put out, which leads to disastrous consequences;
The Italian neo-realist film The Bicycle Thief at 12:15 AM Thursday, about a father whose job depends upon his bicycle, which gets stolen; and
Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess at 2:00 AM, in which Montgomery Clift is a priest accused of murder who knows the truth -- only because the guilty party spilled the beans in the confessional.

Thursday night brings the second week of Kim Novak movies in her turn as TCM's Star of the Month.  I believe I've recommended three of this week's four movies before, with the one I haven't recommended being Pal Joey, at 10:00 PM Thursday.  Frank Sinatra plays Joey, who at the beginning of the movie is thrown out of one city for trying to seduce the mayor's daughter.  He ends up broke in San Francisco where he eventually gets a job singing at a club.  He falls in love with one of the chorus girls (Kim Novak), although she's already being pursued by their boss.  And then Joey meets a former chorus girl who made good by marrying a sugar daddy, and is now a widow (Rita Hayworth).  Joey could use her money to get what he really wants, which is a club of his own.  It's based on a musical by Rodgers and Hart, and has Sinatra singing such standards as "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" and "The Lady Is a Tramp".

Friday morning and afternoon's theme on TCM is another day of prison movies.  There are a couple of the famous prison movies here, along with decidedly B-stuff like Condemned Women, at 9:00 AM.  Anne Shirley, who had just come off of playing Barbara Stanwyck's daughter in Stella Dallas, plays the "good" girl, wrongly conviceted of a robbery her boyfriend committed.  The other reasonably good prisoner is played by the lead, Sally Eilers (I told you this was a B movie).  The other good person is the new prison doctor (Louis Hayward), but he's constantly being thwarted by the evil matron.  Meanwhile, you've got the queen bee prisoner (Lee Patrick) concocting an excape plan that could never work in real life.  Everybody tries, but this isn't the greatest material here.

This second week of dystopic looks at the future in TCM's Friday Night Spotlight kicks off at 8:00 PM with Soylent Green, which I've recommended multiple times in the past.  I can't remember whether I've ever recommended Mad Max, which comes on at 2:30 AM Saturday, before.  This is the original from 1979, before the sequels made a parody of the genre.  The setting is Australia, in a post-apocalyptic future.  Max (Mel Gibson before the drunken anti-Semitic rants) is a highway patrol officer in a society that's degrading rapidly, with motorcycle gangs taking over.  In fact, it's one of those biker gangs that's responsible for having killed Max's police partner and his own wife and daughter, in revenge for Max having killed one of the biker gang's leaders.  This was the movie that made Mel Gibson a star.

This week brings what I believe is the TCM premiere of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat.  It's airing at 8:00 PM Saturday as this week's TCM Essential, and will be getting another airing later in the month as parto of the Sunday Alfred Hitchcock retrospective.  The movie starts off with Tallulah Bankhead looking impossibly glamorous in a small boat with debris around.  She's a survivor of a Nazi U-boat attack on a ship crossing the Atlantic, and this is one of the lifeboats.  Soon, other survivors show up, from an injured sailor (William Bendix) to an avowed socialist (John Hodiak) who starts off hating Bankhead but you know is going begin to fall for her.  Eventually showing up is Walter Slezak.  He plays a survivor from the U-boat, which was also destroyed by one of the ships in the convoy.  He seems to be the only one with any idea where the lifeboat is going, and is clearly a danger to the others since they'll be made prisoners, but they're also dependent upon him for their survival.  Lifeboat deals with disturbing themes such as mob justice and the lengths one would go to to survive, and is one of Hitchcock's most underrated films.