TCM Week – July 30-August 5

Interesting week on TCM. Leslie Howard month wraps up and Summer Under The Stars kicks off with two of my favorites, John Wayne and Myrna Loy. As always, all times are Eastern.

Monday, July 30
9:30 p.m. Island in the Sky (1953)
***TCM PARTY***
Captain Dooley (John Wayne) is the pilot of a plane that crashes “so far north that the area is barely on the map.” He’s in charge of the stranded crew, which has very limited provisions, only a wood fire for heat and barely any juice for the radio signal. Can the Duke keep everyone alive until they’re rescued? Look for us on Twitter with #TCMParty…watch and tweet along with our guest hosts @biscuitkitten and @ScribeHard.

Tuesday, July 31
Star of the Month: Leslie Howard
8:00 p.m. The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935)
This is one of my favorite Leslie Howard films ever. In the 1790s, an apparently shallow British nobleman, Sir Percy Blakeney (Howard), defies the evil French revolutionary Chauvelin (Raymond Massey) by spiriting his fellow aristocrats away from the guillotine and out of France. Also starring the beautiful Merle Oberon as Lady Marguerite Blakeney and luxuriously produced by Alexander Korda, this is perhaps not the most realistic film ever made about the French Revolution, but it may be the most fun.

Beginning early Wednesday at 1:30 a.m., TCM has booked three mystery films starring Joan Blondell: There’s Always a Woman (1938), co-starring Melvyn Douglas and Mary Astor; The Famous Ferguson Case (1932), directed by Lloyd Bacon; and Miss Pinkerton (1932), with George Brent. I haven’t seen any of these, but Blondell’s sassy presence is enough to get me to set the DVR.

Wednesday, August 1
John Wayne
Summer Under The Stars kicks off today. It’s difficult to go wrong with anything on the schedule…seriously…it’s John Wayne. If you need to start somewhere, and can only DVR one movie today, I recommend Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956) or Rio Bravo (1959).

Barbarian-BTS-loy-novarro-low — 1933: (Left to right) Hollywood stars Myrna Loy (1905 – 1993), Ramon Novarro (1899 – 1968) and Louise Closser Hale relax in the sun during takes for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production THE BARBARIAN. (Photo by Margaret Chute) via doctormacro.com

Thursday, August 2
Myrna Loy
Loy is another favorite of mine who is mostly known today as Nora Charles in The Thin Man series, but she made around 80 films before she became a star in 1934 with the first of those films. So the films she made before that are lesser-known. There’s five of them this morning beginning with The Great Divide (1929) at 6:00 a.m. and including The Naughty Flirt (1931), The Barbarian (1933), When Ladies Meet (1933), and The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933). Then tonight at 8:00 p.m., Loy has a supporting but pivotal role in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the best movies ever made. It’s also our ***TCM PARTY*** for tonight. Look for us on Twitter with #TCMParty…watch and tweet along!

Friday, August 3
Johnny Weissmuller
What can I say, a lot of people dig Tarzan pictures. Maybe I’ll check some of them out.

Saturday, August 4
Marilyn Monroe
The film I haven’t seen today is Clash By Night (1952) and it’s got an interesting director and cast. Directed by Fritz Lang, it stars Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan and Monroe. I’m expecting something in noir, seeing as Lang directed M, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Big Heat, etc.

Sunday, August 5
Claude Rains
You can’t really go wrong with anything today either. I say that a lot. If I’m forced to pick, I’ll go with The Invisible Man (1933) and Mr. Skeffington (1944). Did you know that in addition to being a great actor, Rains was an acting teacher? Two of his most famous students were Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud.

TCM Week – July 2-8

It’s always so weird when July 4 falls in the middle of the week and TCM runs some of the best movies in the middle of the night. I shouldn’t complain though, Leslie Howard is the Star of the Month. As always, all times are Eastern.

Tuesday, July 3
8:00 p.m. Gone the with Wind (1939)
***TCM PARTY***
During the daytime hours, TCM has 12 hours of Ann Rutherford’s movies scheduled. She very sadly passed away on June 11. Rutherford is probably best known as Carreen O’Hara, Scarlett’s nice sister, in GWTW but I also liked her as Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1940), showing today at 10:45 a.m. I’m definitely going to record Two O’Clock Courage (1945), an early Anthony Mann film, starring Rutherford and Tom Conway (brother of today’s birthday boy George Sanders). Rutherford appeared at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2011 Look for us on Twitter with #TCMParty…watch & tweet along.

Stand-In (office) — Lester Plum (Joan Blondell) tries to educate Atterbury Dodd (Leslie Howard) about the picture business.

midnight Stand-In (1937)
Star of the Month Leslie Howard plays an uptight banker sent to overhaul a Hollywood studio; Joan Blondell is the title character, a sassy former child star, who decides to help him, if he’ll only let her; Humphrey Bogart is the beleaguered producer burdened with a dud film, a histrionic leading lady, and a drinking problem. This has been one of my favorite movies since I saw it last year and my friend Classic Film Freak was kind enough to post my review.

Wednesday, July 4
Patriotic movies are scheduled all day today and two of the most interesting are The Scarlet Coat (1955), about the beginnings of the U.S. Secret Service at 9:15 a.m. and The Devil’s Disciple (1959). You really can’t go wrong with Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) either.

Thursday, July 5
7:00 a.m. Evelyn Prentice (1934)
This is an interesting pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy outside of the Thin Man series. He plays a lawyer whose wife (Loy) hasn’t really done anything to deserve being blackmailed. The film was rushed into production after the huge success of The Thin Man to capitalize on their chemistry. It’s so good you sort of won’t believe it when they’re supposed to not be getting along.

5:45 p.m. Penelope (1966)
I haven’t seen this movie. I recorded it last year before we changed cable companies, it was one of the movies that was on the DVR and there was no way to transfer it. But Natalie Wood and Peter Falk are in it, so I’m going to record it again.

Ace_in_the_Hole-low — This sounds a lot more foreboding in French.

8:00 p.m. Ace in the Hole (1951)
***TCM PARTY***
In the first of guest programmer Spike Lee‘s picks for tonight, a reporter who’s been demoted to a small-town newspaper tries to leverage a catastrophe into a return to the big time. Watch and tweet alone with our special guest host @WillMcKinley.

Friday, July 6
Certainly if you haven’t seen The Manchurian Candidate (1962) at 3:45 p.m. or Bye Bye Birdie (1963) at 6:00 p.m., check those out. I’ll be trying to catch at least one Jimmy Stewart Western of the three that are scheduled: The Man from Laramie (1955) at 8 p.m., The Naked Spur (1953) at 10 p.m. and Two Rode Together (1961) at midnight.

Saturday, July 7
6:00 a.m. Seven Women (1966)
Anne Bancroft, Sue Lyon, Margaret Leighton, and Flora Robson play missionaries in John Ford’s final feature.

4:15 p.m. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room.”

Sunday, July 8
It’s really difficult to go wrong today. My favorite favorites:
2:15 p.m. The Thin Man (1934)
Sometimes well enough really should be left alone. See above. Celebrate that this isn’t going to be remade by watching the original and best.

6:00 p.m. My Favorite Year (1982)
A 1940s radio show writer (Mark Linn-Baker) struggles to keep playboy thespian Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole doing his best Errol Flynn) sober and upright, at least until the latter can guest star on that week’s show.

midnight Bande à part (1964)
Two thugs and a girl attempt to rob her aunt’s house with complications to be expected from a director, Jean-Luc Godard, whose biggest influences are the bright and dark sides of Hollywood — musicals and film noir.

Reckless Review: Thirteen Women

Back in December, TCM had a day of Myrna Loy films and I recorded a bunch of them, including a goofy little pre-code picture called Thirteen Women (1932). I have to say, though Loy is excellent in it, this is an extremely odd picture. She plays a mysterious psychotic named Ursula who was bullied at a posh school by a bunch of mean girls and has set out to get revenge on them. This she does in a peculiar and ludicrous way. Capitalizing on the spiritualism craze of the time and the mighty power of suggestion, Ursula sends each woman a fake astrological chart, accompanied by a letter predicting death, dismemberment, or other calamity. She signs the letters with the name of the fake swami she works for. Each recipient then becomes so obsessed with her letter that the prediction comes true.

I always knew Loy’s beauty was spellbinding, but in this, despite five pounds of spackle, she actually hypnotizes men. Fixed in her gaze, the “swami” passes out. Ditto the chauffeur she employs to do her evil bidding later on. She forces him to send Irene Dunne’s son poison candy, but Mom has the sense to get it tested at the police lab. The chemist says, “This candy is fine but it was tampered with. If anyone had eaten it, they’d have died.” Then it isn’t “fine”!The film is full of odd moments like that: The first classmates/victims are two sisters in a trapeze act..sort of a weird career choice for alumnae of the type of upper-crust school they were all supposed to have attended. And if you actually count, only 10 women are accounted for. I remember reading that 15 minutes were cut from the film somewhere along the way. Single moms who have the nerve to be happy, career women, and sex talk remain, so God only knows what was cut. Maybe it would make more sense with the missing piece. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The film keeps asking us to identify with the sorority girls, portrayed by Irene Dunne, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, and Peg Entwhistle, among others. But it also keeps showing us the remains of this group’s adolescent clique-y-ness and their complete gullibility, so that, though the maniacally evil Ursula has the most exaggerated eyeliner caught on celluloid until Divine made his debut, she is the most consistently watchable and interesting character. Mostly the film is a soap-y curio from a time when every house had a Ouija board. Don’t try to make too much sense of it, just suspend your disbelief and enjoy this showcase for Loy’s gorgeous looks and make-the-best-of-it dramatic talents.