Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 22-28, 2013. It's hard to believe that the Packers' training camp is opening this week. But they don't have any games coming up to evaluate players, so there's still more time to relax with some good movies, especially if this week is as hot as last week was. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's set of interviews on Carson on TCM begins again at 8:00 PM Monday, and include: Mel Brooks from 1983; Dom DeLuise from 1976; Bette Davis from 1983; Burt Reynolds from 1972; and Fred Astaire from 1973. Astaire being the last of the interviewees, he gets the spotlight put on him the rest of the evening, with a night of films starring hmi and Ginger Rogers. My favorite of the ones in Monday night's lineup is The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, which is actually airing at 5:00 AM Tuesday. This is more or less the true story of Vernon (Astaire) and Irene (Rogers) Castle, a couple who would storm the world of ballroom dancing in the teens of the last century. Vernon actually started as a vaudeville comic, but met Irene, who had a raw talent for dancing, and realized the two could make it together. So the two got married and became successful dancers -- until World War I intervened. He flew in the war, but tragically died back in the States training other men how to fly the World War I-era fighter planes. This is better than the other Astaire and Rogers movies largely because it has a believable plot with the dance numbers almost secondary, which is the opposite of what Fred and Ginger's movies normally were.
Paul Henried returns with another night of movies on Tuesday. This Tuesday starts with a couple of movies that Henried made with last night's Star of the Month, Eleanor Parker. Interestingly, they're both also remakes of movies that starred Leslie Howard. At 8:00 is the 1946 version of Of Human Bondage, whicih I recommended last month; Henried plays the artist who meets and gives everything up for lower-class girl Parker. That's followed at 10:00 PM by Between Two Worlds. This is a remake of the 1930 movie (and earlier play) Outward Bound, except that it's updated for World War II. Several people trying to escape England by ship during World War II are making their way to the ship, when they're waylaid by an air-raid. They make it to the ship, only to find out that it isn't what it seems; instead, they seem to be dead and on their way to the next world. Henried and Parker play the suicidal couple; John Garfield takes the Leslie Howard role; Edmund Gwenn plays the steward who tells people what's really happened to them, and Sydney Greenstreet judges their eternal fates.
A movie that's generally considered one of John Wayne's worst is Big Jim McLain, which is coming up at 11:45 AM Wednesday on TCM. Wayne plays a lawyer working for the House Un-American Activities Committee who gets sent to Hawaii to investigate a bunch of people who are planning to engage in all sorts of shenanigans -- legal and illegal -- in the name of Communism. Wayne is aided by his partner, James Arness; all while pursuing one girl (Nancy Olson), and being pursued by another (Veda Ann Borg). The movie has long stretches that go heavy on the moralizing, and to be fair, it was made at a time (during the Korean War) when the Communists really were the unequivocal bad guys. But it's also over the top, not holding up well compared to movies where the federal agents are going after relatively apolitical mobsters.
On Wednesday night, TCM is honoring Mel Brooks. Well, actually, the AFI honored Mel Brooks several weeks ago, and TCM is honoring that on Wednesday night. At 8:00 PM, they'll be showing the AFI ceremony; that will be followed by several of Brooks' films. First of these at 9:30 is one that rarely shows up: The Twelve Chairs. This is based on a 1920s comic novel by the Soviet writers Ilf and Petrov. The story is about a former nobleman (Ron Moody) whose mother-in-law had a fortune confiscated by the Communists after the Revolution. However, she hid some of the jewels that comprised her fortune in a set of twelve chairs (hence the title) in a dining set. So, needless to say, our nobleman sets out to find those chairs, helped by a small-time con artist (Frank Langella; yes, the Nixon of Frost/Nixon). Of course, there's a catch: somebody else has learned about the existence of those jewels, an Orthodox priest played by Dom DeLuise.
The Thursday morning/afternoon theme is DoppelgÄngers. Most of the movies are dramatic, but there is at least one comedy showing up: Our Relations, at 8:00 AM. This is a Laurel and Hardy comedy, in which Stan and Ollie find out that they have long-lost identical twin brothers, named Alf and Bert respectively. Stan and Ollie being married, they don't want their wives to find out, but unfortunately for them their twin brothers are sailors (you can tell by the sea music that plays every time the twins show up) who have docked in Stan and Ollie's home town. Needless to say, Mesdames Stan and Ollie come across Alf and Bert, don't realize that these aren't Stan and Ollie, and watching the twins do things the wives wouldn't want husbands to do, like chase after women. Alf and Bert, for their part, wind up short on money while trying to hook up with some of those women.
On Thursday night, TCM takes a look at teachers who have a memorable influence on the students they teach. One of those teachers is played by... William Shatner?! Certainly; in the days before he became Captain Kirk, he was actually a serious actor. And The Explosive Generation, airing at 4:00 AM Friday, isn't anywhere near as bad as you might think. Shatner plays a high school teacher teaching what is more or less a life skills course about how the seniors are going to navigate life after graduation. They start asking him about dating, and when he lets them write anonymous essays, the hormone-filled teens ask about sex in ways that imply that things have gone father than Shatner might have thought. Or the parents, who find out what Shatner is doing and get angry, thinking he's encouraging them to have sex. They want him fired; the teens obviously don't. This is certainly a product of the early 60s, but still interesting.
This last week of FranÇois Truffaut on TCM on Friday night begins with a movie I am extremely pleased to be able to recommend: Day For Night, at 8:00 PM. Truffaut himself plays Ferrand, a movie director making a movie called "Je vous prÉsente Pamela", which is fictitious in that Truffaut never made such a film and the film-within-a-film is only part of the story of Day For Night. And that story is about the behind-the-scenes actions of the making of a movie, with everything that can go wrong -- and God knows there's enough going wrong on the set of "Je vous prÉsente Pamela"! The lead actress (Jacqueline Bisset) is still recovering from a nervous breakdown; she's recently married but spends time with the lead actor (who isn't her husband). One of the supporting actresses (Valentine Cortese) is an alcoholic who can't remember her lines, and who had a bad relationship with a supporting actor (it ended badly because he's really in the closet). There's a lot of romantic shenanigans going on here. And then there's the cat that can't take direction. Even though everything that can go wrong does, Ferrand continues making the movie. It's a lot of fun, and one of Truffaut's easier movies to get.
Another movie that's as dated as The Explosive Generation is Mr. Mom, which you can catch at 12:45 PM Saturday (and again at 10:05 PM Saturday) on Encore Family. Michael Keaton plays an auto worker and father married to stay-at-home mom Teri Garr (this is the early 80s, when there were still some stay-at-home mome). He loses his job in the early-80s recession, and to make ends meet, she gets a job in advertising. This being the 80s, there are the usual jokes about men being utterly incompetent doing domestic work, but there's more to the movie than that. Garr's character is good in her work, which leads to business trips taking her away from the family and romantic advances from boss Martin Mull; Keaton's character stars spending time with the neighborhood housewives, ultimately being pursued by Ann Jillian.
20th Century Fox produced a lot of B-grade dramedies in the late 1940s and early 1950s. One that I haven't recommended before is Mother Didn't Tell Me, airing at 9:15 AM Sunday on the Fox Movie Channel. Dorothy McGuire plays a woman who gets sick, goes to see a doctor (William Lundigan) and falls in love with him. Since he's single, she starts seeing him romantically, and eventually gets married to him, only to find out that being married to a doctor isn't all it's cracked up to be. For one thing, he's always getting called out on house calls, including on their first date. It doesn't help that a former assistant in the doctor's office (June Havoc) had decided she wanted to become a doctor, and once she gets out of medical school she's going to go into practice with the good doctor, since the two had agreed this long before he met McGuire. It's almost enough to break up a marriage!
I've recommended A Kiss Before Dying before, but it's so much fun that it's worth another viewing. It's airing at 6:00 PM Sunday on TCM. Robert Wagner plays a college student with a domineering mother (Mary Astor) who is trying to get into mining, and is wooing a mine owner's daughter (Joanne Woodward). Unfortunately, he's also knocked her up, and that's going to get Daddy (George Macready) to disown her. So Wagner devises a plan: kill his girlfirned but have it look like suicide! Woodward dies, and sister Virginia Leith meets Wagner during the morning period. He begins to woo her, but she suspects that her sister's death isn't all it's cracked up to be... Who knew Robert Wagner could play such an evil bastard? The movie is based on a novel by Iral Levin (of Rosemary's Baby and Stepford Wives fame), and filmed in brilliant, garish color on location in Arizona..
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