Thursday Movie Picks #244: Movies I thought I'd hate, but ended up enjoying

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is officially "Movies You Thought You'd Hate, But Ended Up Enjoying", but for me it's going to be slightly different. I generally don't sit down to watch a movie if I think I'm liable to hate it, although to be fair there arent that many movies I think I'm going to hate. Movies I'm not certain I'd care for, sure. Movies that I had no idea what I'd think of them, but ended up hating? Women in Love, I'm looking at you. But there are a couple of movies that, either during one of the TCM hosts' introductions or a couple of minutes in, I wasn't certain I would like, but by the end I did. So I picked three of those:

We're Rich Again (1934). Grant Mitchell plays a man in heavy debt trying to marry off his daughter (Joan Marsh) to a rich guy (Reginald Denny), but there are complications in the form of a debt collector, a distant cousin (Marian Nixon), and a rich guy (Buster Crabbe, going through the movie wearing nothing but swimming trunks and saying nothing until the final scene). Grant Mitchell's character goes through lie after lie to keep the debt collector at bay, and that sort of "comedy of lies" is something I've stated quite a few times is something I don't particularly care for. But this one winds up being so bizarre that I enojyed it. Billie Burke is playing yet another ditzy wife, and Edna May Oliver plays a polo-playing granny to add to the confusion.

For Pete's Sake (1974). Another movie that's a bit of a comedy of lies, and it has Barbra Streisand, not my favorite actress, to boot. She plays a housewife to Michael Sarrazin who loses a bunch of money during the early 70s recession in a stock deal gone wrong, and borrows from loan sharks to keep her husband from finding out. Of course, when she can't pay back the loan sharks, complications ensue. This one played out more like a 30s programmer, only with 70s stars and a bigger budget, and wound up being fairly good.

Antonia's Line (1995). When this one showed up in 31 Days of Oscar last year, the host (I think it was Dave Karger, but I don't remember) commented that this was often referred to as a "feminist" movie by a feminist director (Marleen Gorris). That immediately made me worry that we'd get something didactic and/or preachy, but that didn't happen. The movie tells (in flashback) the story of a woman who returns to her home village in the Netherlands after World War II and then raises her daughter and, ultimately, extended family. t's got a few characters who I found a bit too quirky, but for the most part it was just a really nice slice-of-life movie that just happened to be about a widow who tries to make it through life without a man for the most part.