Thursday Movie Picks, December 14, 2023: Movies with "Day" or "Night" in the title

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. The theme this week is "Day or Night in Title", and since I have a feeling the series isn't going to be continuing next year, and because I don't see myself doing a post for the TV-themed Thursday Movie Picks in two week's time, I decided I'd do two posts for this edition of the blogathon, one with movies with "Day" in the title, and the other with "Night". Since the night comes after the day, I did "Day" movies first, and now we get "Night" movies, again with a very slight theme:

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Albert Finney plays a blue collar worker in England who doesn't like the sort of life that working-class Brits in those days were doomed to wind up in, so he decides to spend his money having fun. Unfortunately he has an affair with the wife of a co-worker, and a girlfriend who won't put out for him, leading to him knocking up the co-worker's wife. She shockingly wants an abortion (shockingly because abortion was not legal in the UK at the time).

Saturday Night Fever (1977). John Travolta plays a young man from Brooklyn working a dead-end job and living with his parents. He dreams of going to the disco on Saturday nights, and possibly escaping Bay Ridge if he can win the big dance competition. But to do that he's going to have to find the sort of dance partner who won't care for him in a romantic way. Family life is also becoming more complicated....

Uptown Saturday Night (1974). Sidney Poitier directed himself as a working man hoping to make enough money to move out to the country with his wife. Bill Cosby plays his cabbie friend who convinces him to go to an illegal casino one Saturday night, when the place gets held up and he loses his wallet. The next day he finds out that he's won the lottery. Except that the winning ticket was in the wallet he lost...

Thursday Movie Picks, December 14, 2023: Movies with "Day" or "Night" in the title

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. The theme this week is "Day or Night in Title", and since I have a feeling the series isn't going to be continuing next year, and because I don't see myself doing a post for the TV-themed Thursday Movie Picks in two week's time, I decided I'd do two posts for this edition of the blogathon, one with movies with "Day" in the title, and the other with "Night". Since the day comes first, we first get the three movies with that word in the title, slightly related in terms of phrasing and the fact that nuclear weapons are a theme:

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Michael Rennie plays an alien who comes down to earth, landing in Washington DC to try to warn mankind about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Of course the authorities don't know how to handle the alien and try to harm him, leading him to flee to a young widow (Patricia Neal) to see if she can help him. Barata klaatu nikto.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). British apocolyptic film with the idea that simultaneous nuclear tests send the earth off its rotation and orbit, causing climactic changes that threaten to burn the earth to a crisp. Can mankind start cooperating? And if so, can they figure out a way to reverse what happened?

The Day the Fish Came Out (1967). Bizarre farce about a British bomber that scuttles its unexploded nuclear bombs over a Greek island, and the crew (Tom Courtneay and Colin Blakely) trying to find the payload before the locals do, since the locals will get into the nuclear material which is highly dangerous. Meanwhile an archeologist (Candice Bergen), and a couple of American agents disguised as tourist resort developers show up on the island, with the agents looking for the missiles too.

Unfortunately I've never seen Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried. (I don't think anybody has, now that Lewis is no longer with us.)

Thursday Movie Picks, Septebmer 14, 2023: Non-English movies

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. Once again, we get the annual theme of movies not in English. I thought a bit about what movies to use. I've recently watched a couple of movies fitting the theme that I haven't yet blogged about, so I decided to hold off on using them. But then, what foreign movies have I watched that haven't been dubbed into English? I wouldn't have minded using a film like De Lift if I had seen a subtitled version instead of a dubbed version. But in the end I came up with three movies that fit the theme:

Arsenal (1929). OK, this is a silent movie, but it was made in Russian by the Soviet film director of Ukrainian descent Aleksandr Dovzhenko. During the early days of the Civil War that followed the October 1917 revolution, a committed communist stops the anti-communist Whites from taking control of the arsenal in Kiev. Dovzhenko's visuals here are almost as good as in his later Earth, although both are used for propaganda effect.

Walpurgis Night (1935). An early role for Ingrid Bergman in her native Sweden before coming to Hollywood, this movie deals with the falling birth rate in the country at the time. Bergman plays the secretary to a banker trapped in a loveless marriage in which the wife seeks out an illicit abortion. Bergman's character is also the daughter of a newspaper editor (Victor Sjöström) who writes editorials about the need for Sweden to have a higher birth rate. The two stories come together when the clinic where the abortions are performed is raided.

The Shop on Main Street (1965). This movie, filmed in a small village in what is now eastern Slovakia, deals with the World War II years when Slovakia was a nominally independent puppet state aligned with the Nazis, who had of course turned the Czech lands into a protectorate under Reinhard Heydrich. A lowly carpenter whose brother-in-law is trying to get in with the government is given orders to run a dry-goods store which had previously been run by an elderly Jewish woman who is probably going to die soon anyway, and doesn't seem to have any clue of the danger Jews are in.

Thursday Movie Picks, August 31, 2023: Female Investigators (TV edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV-themed edition of the blogathon. And in keeping with the theme from three weeks ago, it's about women in the workplace, specifically women investigators. I could easily think of a couple of shows, but some of them I had already used, so in the end I wound up going with three shows that I've never really seen:

Police Woman (1974-1978). Angie Dickinson. Enough said. OK, maybe not enough said; I get the impression that this was considered tough back when it was made, but I have a feeling I'd have a different view of it watching from today.

Rizzoli and Isles (2010-2016). Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander play the title characters respectively, a Boston police detective and medical examiner investigating a series of cases that are copycats of a notorious serial killer, or would-be serial killer. This one kept showing up on one or another of the digital sub-channels that I'd turn on when making dinner for Dad before we moved out of the old place and moved to streaming TV.

Get Christie Love! (1974-1975). A few months back I was looking through the streaming channel guides, and saw what looked like an interesting blaxploitation movie called Get Christie Love!. It seemed surprisingly tame and the film quality looked off (and panned-and-scanned), and it was only on doing a bit of research that I discovered I was watching a TV movie that was more or less a pilot. Teresa Graves plays the titular character police detective. The reason the movie and show seem so tame is that star Teresa Graves found God around that time, eventually leaving acting all together, and wanted storylines that wouldn't be considered so offensive.

Thursday Movie Picks, August 10, 2023: Workplace, the Female Experience

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 the female experience in the workplace. Even though I'm generally a fan of older movies, you'd be surprised how many older movies could fit thi theme, in no small part because of all those intrepid lady reporters portrayed on the screen. OK, those movies probably weren't that realistic, and in the end I decided to go with a different set of movie, with one pre-Code and two more recent movies:

Female (1933). Ruth Chatterton plays the owner of the family automobile company, who just can't find the right man because everybody's intimidated by her. And then she goes slumming and runs into George Brent, only find out afterwards that Brent is really the automotive engineer that she's been trying to woo (professionally, not romantically) away from a rival company. Women are probably going to hate the ending to this movie.

Swing Shift (1984). Goldie Hawn plays a housewife living in Los Angeles with her husband (Ed Harris) in late 1941. Sure enough December 7 comes along, and hubby goes off to fight the war. Goldie and her best friend (Christine Lahti) go off to work in one of the aircraft plants. Goldie meets Kurt Russell, who's working in the factory because he's 4F and can't fight, and the two start a romnce, which is of course an issue since Goldie is already married.

Working Girl (1988). Melanie Griffith stars as a secretary at a stock brokerage trying to better herself by getting a business degree, eventually winding up as executive assistant to Sigourney Weaver. There, she finds that her boss is stealing her ideas and passing them off as her own. So she tries to turn the tables, but things get complicated when she falls in love with the guy (Harrison Ford) who's part of her scheme.

Thursday Movie Picks, July 27, 2023: Con artists (TV edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV-themed edition, and this month, that theme is "Con Artists". I have to admit that I stretched the theme slightly to come up with three shows to talk about:

It Takes a Thief (1968-1970). Robert Wagner plays the titular thief, who is in prison when he gets an offer from the federal government: we'll give you your freedom if you do some stealing for us. Late in the series' run, Fred Astaire showed up for a few episodes as Wagner's father to take an easy paycheck.

Frank Abagnale on To Tell the Truth (1977). If you recall the movie Catch Me If You Can, this episode was used in the movie, with Leonardo DiCaprio digitally edited into the show in place of Frank Abagnale. This is more or less the original episode, including the other game in the second half of the show. I suppose one could also say the two imposters in each segment are also engaging in a con of a sort....

Fight Back! With David Horowitz (early 1980s). Consumer reporter David Horowitz hosted this show about how not to be scammed by the scammers and how to fight back if you did get scammed, as well as some Consumer Reports-sytle "news you can use" (in this episode, testing various brands of popcorn against each other).

Thursday Movie Picks, July 13, 2023: Book Adaptations

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This month, the movie theme is "Book Adaptations", which is unsurprisingly a fairly broad theme. I decided to go with a theme within a theme, and pick three movies, and pick three movies based on books about doctors. Two of the authors were in fact doctors, although the third was a minister:

The Citadel (1938). A.J. Cronin wrote this book about a British doctor (Robert Donat) who starts off working as the staff doctor for a bunch of coal miners, only to find that they want him to let them be malingerers. He moves to London where an old friend (Rex Harrison) gets him to work with rich clients, but his wife (Rosalind Russell) eventually convinces him to go back to working with the poor.

Magnificent Obsession (1954). Minister Lloyd C. Douglas wrote a bunch of heavy-handed books, starting with this one back in the late 1920s. It was made into a movie in the mid-1930s, but the material is ripe for the equally heavy-handed Douglas Sirk to make it into a melodrama. Rock Hudson plays a playboy who gets blamed for the killing of a beloved doctor because he needs the medical equipment at the same time it could have saved the doctor's life. The doctor's widow (Jane Wyman) hates Hudson for it, and things get worse when Hudson inadvertently causes an accident that blinds Wyman. Hudson decides he's going to become a doctor so he can do medical research that will restore Wyman's eyesight.

Coma (1978). Robin Cook wrote the book turned into this movie, in which a doctor (Geneviève Bujold) suffers the loss of a friend in an operation when the friend doesn't come out of anesthesia. Bujold investigates and gets the distinct impression that there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. Her boyfriend (Michael Douglas) wants to help her but can't be too up front about it, while her ultimate boss (Richard Widmark) is clearly trying to stop her.

Thursday Movie Picks, June 8, 2023: Seasons in the title

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This time out, the theme is a fairly easy one, and one that really calls for doing four movies: Movies with a season in the title. In the end, I decided on three movies, with a sort of cheat for the fourth season:

The Lion in Winter (1968). Katharine Hepburn won her third Oscar playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, the estranged wife of Henry II of England (Peter O'Toole). Over Christmas in 1183, the two and their surviving sons have a family reunion which devolves into a heated debate over who should succeed Henry II as king: Richard the Lionheart (Anthony Hopkins) is Mom's choice (and Anthony Hopkins did a great Star of the Month piece on Hepburn for TCM some years back, discussing this movie quite a bit as it was Hopkins' first big role), while John (Nigel Terry) is Dad's choice.

Autumn Sonata (1978). I think I've picked this movie before, but it's Ingrid Bergman's final feature film and earned her one final Oscar nomination. She plays a concert pianist, widowed for the second time, who decides that she's going to take a break from performing by visiting her daughter (Liv Ullmann). Her daughter, however, isn't a particularly good musician which dismays Mom, having decided to give up any attempt at a musical career to marry a country priest as well as take care of her sister since the two siblings have been estranged from Mom. It doesn't take long to understand why the daughters became estranged from Mom.

Summer Holiday (1948). A musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, this movie stars 27-year-old Mickey Rooney as a young man at the turn of the century about to graduate high school and go off into the big wide world, even though he doesn't know that much about greater world out there or about being an adult. In the 1935 version of Ah, Wilderness!, Rooney played the kid brother.

Finally, I'd like to mention, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941). That's because of the presence of character actress Spring Byington. Charles Coburn stars as a wealthy businessman who learns of labor unrest in a forgotten corner of his business empire, a department store, and decides to go undercover in the shoe department to learn for himself what's going on. Byington plays one of the clerks who winds up becoming a love interest to Coburn not realizing his true identity. The real star is Jean Arthur as another clerk; she's got a love interest in the form of union agitator Robert Cummings.

Thursday Movie Picks, May 25, 2023: TV Theme Songs/Scores (TV edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. As it's the last Thursday of the month, it means we get another TV version of the blogathon. This month, the theme, no pun intended, is TV Theme songs or scores. We did this one back in April 2021, and at that time I did a theme-within-a-theme of classical music being used as TV themes. However, in the intro, I mentioned another possible theme, and so I've decided to use that theme. All three themes were written by Mike Post, who gave us a bunch of memorable themes in the late 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, all three themes were also released as singles and became Top 40 hits:

The Rockford Files (1974-1980). James Garner plays Jim Rockford, an ex-convict turned private investigator who lives in a trailer in Los Angeles that also doubles as his office. If you think the Los Angeles locations are nice, perhaps you should try the next show instead...

Magnum, P.I. (1980-1988). Tom Selleck's mustache plays Thomas Magnum, a Vietnam vet who, having been demobbed, is now in Hawaii where he's a private detective working for reclusive (and unseen) author Robin Masters. Serving as intermediary and Magnum's nominal boss is Higgins (John Hillerman). Magnum often enlists the help of two friends, helicopter pilot TC (Roger E. Mosley) and bar owner Rick (Larry Manetti) in his cases.

Hill Street Blues (1981-1987). Ensemble series looking at the lives of police officers in a precinct in an unnamed large city, led by Lt. Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti).

Thursday Movie Picks, May 11 2023: Period Dramas

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 an easy one, "Period Dramas". It's been used before, more or less, so I wont be surprised if one of the movies I pick is one I've already used. The other two I'm pretty certain I haven't only because I've just seen them recently. And since this was an easy theme I decided to go with three movies all set in the same era, the Napoleonic era:

Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951). Gregory Peck plays Hornblower, a naval captain who gets sent to Mexico to find an ally against Napoleon and winds up finding the betrothed sister (Virginia Mayo) of the Duke of Wellington. He gets into a bunch of adventures along the way, and then gets into more adventures upon his return to England when he's asked to participate in the naval blockade of France.

Désirée (1954). Jean Simmons plays Désirée, a young woman in southern France during the late Revolution who meets Napoleon Bonaparte (Marlon Brando) on his way up to power. She keeps meeting him and becomes a well-to-do society wife in Paris once he's in power. The two are even in love although for political reasons they can't do anything about it. The political situation gives both of them an out, however.

The Duellists (1977). Harvey Keitel plays a French officer circa 1800 who has a thing for duels. The only thing is, he picks one with Keith Carradine, a fellow officer, that ends inconclusively. Keitel wants his revenge, and keeps challenging Carradine to a duel every time they run into each other over the years as they rise through the ranks of the military. Based on a story by Joseph Conrad, and the feature film debut for director Ridley Scott.

Thursday Movie Picks for April 27, 2023: Lukewarm second season (TV Edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's also the final Thursday of the month, so that means a TV-related edition. This time out, the theme is "lukewarm second seasons". That is, shows that had a good opening season followed by a not-so-good second season. This was a bit tough for me, so in the end I decided to pick three shows that I think all got canceled midway through the second season:

I'll Fly Away (1991-1993). Sam Waterston plays a widowed (technically the wife is in a sanatorium to start the series and dies midway through the first season) North Carolina district attorney dealing with the earlier years of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Regina Taylor plays the family's common-sense maid. As you might guess, the show touched on Important Issues, but in the second season it got even more blunt and preachy. After the show's cancellation, PBS produced a two-hour TV movie to wrap up the story arc.

The Mole (2001-2002). Anderson Cooper hosted this competition show in which the producers had one of the contestants be "the mole", a player who may or may not be sabotaging the other contestants, with the others having to figure out who the mole is and getting eliminated if they don't know enough. I don't think the second season was that much worse than the first, although for whatever reason it got pulled midway through the second season. Well, there was the twist about polling the remaining players about which fellow contestant they liked least, and then offering that contestant a cash payout to leave, which seems like a lousy twist. ABC eventually rebooted it, with celebrities, which is even worse.

Twin Peaks (1990-1991). Apparently, this may not have been cancelled during the second season, as the first season was a mini-season. I was a freshman in college when the show was on, and it was a huge deal among certain people, although I never got it, and it just seemed to keep getting weirder and weirder.

Thursday Movie Picks, April 13, 2023: Erotic Thrillers

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Erotic Thrillers", which might be a bit tougher than it looks if you're a fan of classic movies like I am. That's because the Production Code kind of put a limit on just how erotic you could get, at least for normal definitons of erotic. If you're turned on by Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery in Tugboat Annie, well, more power to you, I suppose, although I can't imagine most people considering them Hollywood's most erotic screen team. That would be Wheeler and Woolsey. In any case, I was able to come up with three selections with varying degrees of eroticism:

Spellbound (1945). More suspense than thriller, I suppose, but there's that ridiculous kiss between Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman superimposed over a shot of a long corridor of doors opening up one after the other. It's as obvious an allusion as the cutting to horses for the Robert Mitchum/Gloria Grahame kiss in Not As a Stranger. That having been said, Alfred Hitchcock did come up with a pretty good movie even if the Freudian psychology is laid on thick.

Cape Fear (1962). Gregory Peck plays an attory who was witness to a crime and whose testimony helped put the perpetrator (Robert Mitchum) in jail. Mitchum has served his sentence and is out of jail, looking for revenge. But he's going to take his own sweet time doing it, unnerving Peck and his family. There's a ton of eroticism in the climax when Mitchum cracks open an egg and pours it on the skin of Peck's wife (Polly Bergen) who is only wearing a nightgown.

Basic Instinct (1992). Yeah, you know the scene of Sharon Stone spreading her legs. She plays a writer who is one of the main suspects in a murder being investigated by Michael Douglas; the two wind up falling in love (gee, there's a surprising plot twist) as he's investigating her.

Thursday Movie Picks, March 30, 2023: Book/TV show pairings

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the final Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV-themed edition of the blogathon. The theme for the previous edition was pairing books with movies, so it's unsurprising that this time around the theme is pairing TV shows with books. I, needless, to say, decided to go with my offbeat sense of humor once again:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, paired with The Joy of Painting (1983-1994). Somehow, I can't imagine James Joyce writing about happy little clouds.

The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, paired with The Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon (1966-2010). When Jerry Lewis hosted the telethon out of Las Vegas to raise money into research for muscular dystrophy, the telethon ran roughly 21½ hours, from 9PM ET on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend through to 6:30 PM Monday. However, a good 15 minutes or more of every hour was for the local affiliates carrying the show to raise money for local interests. A lot of flavors of the day showed up, along with some people who were on the way down from fame, before changing tastes and Lewis' advancing age finally made the MDA decide to change the format. The 1976 telethon did produce this memorable moment:

The Big Book, paired with Cheers (1982-1993). You know everybody, not just Sam, was an alcoholic to spend that much time at a bar.

Thursday Movie Picks, March 9, 2023: Books to pair with movies

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 an interesting one: picking books to pair with the movies. This doesn't have to be books adapted into movies, and certainly not the book version of a movie. In the end, I decided to go with my typically weird sense of humor and pick three, well, interesting combinations:

Book: 2021 International Building Code Illustrated Handbook. Movie: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948). Anybody who's built their dream house, or renovated, will appreciate Blandings. The movie may be 75 years old, but it's still fresh and funny because it's true, as I learned from when my parents renovated the old place and again now that we're moving. My dad was a building inspector but retired at least a dozen years ago now, so I'm not certain what the new code says about lintels:

Book: A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn, 1980). Movie: Wilson (1944). Two bigger steaming piles of shit from a history standpoint you'll have a hard time finding. Despite what a loathsome, odious creature Woodrow Wilson was, at least Alexander Knox brings life to the movie and should have walked away with the Oscar if the Academy hadn't been on some sort of drugs thinking that Going My Way was good in any sort of way.

Book: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Julia Child, 1961). Movie: Soylent Green (1973). Yes, I know there was the movie Julie and Julia. But I think this is a more interesting pairing.

Thursday Movie Picks, February 23, 2023: Romance tropes: Friends to lovers (TV edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's the final week of February, which means that we have one more romance-themed entry to the blogathon; and, because it's the last Thursday of the month, that means it's a TV edition. This time, the theme is "friends to lovers". It was a theme that I have to admit was a bit difficult at first, but ultimately I came up with three shows:

Frasier (1993-2004). Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) moves from Boston after the cancellation of Cheers back to his home town of Seattle, where he lives with his father (John Mahoney), who is retired on disability. Dad's physical therapist Daphne (Jane Leeves) and Frasier's brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) fall in love over the course of the series, and if memory serves they got married after Niles' divorce from his never-seen wife, although that would have been after I stopped watching regularly.

I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). Astronaut Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) finds a bottle that just happens to contain a genie named Jeannie (Barbara Eden) who is happy to serve her new master, but who seems to keep getting her master into all sorts of comedic predicaments. The two finally got married halfway through the show's final season.

Grace and Favour (1992-1993). Better known in the US as Are You Being Served? Again!, the series starts off with the death of old Mr. Grace, bequeathing the few people (the mens' and ladies' wear departments from the original series, naturally) still working at the store a country hotel in a rural part of England. The place is next to a working farm, and the farmer's daughter Mavis falls in love with Mr. Humphries (John Inman) along the way. During an appearance Inman made on US public TV during one of the many pledge drives stations have, he suggested that if there had been a third series of episodes produced, Humphries and Mavies would have been married which would have given Inman one more chance to dress up as Mr. Humphries' mother.

Thursday Movie Picks, February 16, 2023. Romance Tropes: Forced Proximity

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're still in February, which means another romance-themed edition of the blogathon. This week, the theme is characters who fall in love through forced proximity. I'm using two movies that I'm pretty certain I've already used, and a third that I just watched the other day and will be doing a full-length post on in the near future. Or, in other words, sorry for the fairly lazy post:

The 39 Steps (1935). Robert Donat is handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll for a good portion of the movie, and the two kinda-sorta fall in love along the way. Well, technically, Carroll really only learns Donat is worth falling in love with after she gets out of her handcuff and overhears the bad guys saying things that confirm the story Donat has been giving her. This is one of Alfred Hitchcock's first great thrillers, certainly in the "man on the run" genre.

The African Queen (1951). Humphrey Bogart takes Katharine Hepburn down the river in east Africa of 1914 in order to get away from the Germans at the start of World War I. The two hate each other at first because he's an alcoholic and she's a missionary who nowadays would be called a Karen, but as they have to work together to survive, they begin to fall in love.

Romancing the Stone (1984). Kathleen Turner plays a romance novelist whose sister gets kidnapped in Colombia. She goes to pay the ransom, and gets involved with a quest for a missing jewel along with soldier-of-fortune Michael Douglas. The two have to stay together to stay one step ahead of some other bad guys and the Colombian military (and/or rebel groups).

Thursday Movie Picks, Feb. 9, 2022: Romance Tropes: Cinderella Stories

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're still in February, which means another romance-themed edition of the blogathon. This week, that theme is Cinderella stories, defined as a poor(ish) girl getting selected by a rich guy. With that in mind, I went with three films that have that basic theme, although large parts of all three are darker than certainly the ending of Cinderella:

Possessed (1931). Joan Crawford plays a small-town girl who sees a bunch of rich folks partying on a train stopping in town, and decides she wants to be with the rich people. Eventually she does make it to New York, where she's introduced to wealthy lawyer Clark Gable. She becomes his mistress, although things get mighty complicated when a old boyfriend from her hometown (Wallace Ford) shows up and then when Gable decides to run for governor. This is not to be confused with the 1947 movie Possessed, also starring Crawford but having a totally different plot.

Hot Saturday (1932). Nancy Carroll plays a bank teller in a strait-laced small town where the big excitement for the twentysomethings is to go to the dance pavilion on the lake on weekend evenings. One night there, her boyfriend Edward Woods gets too handsy with her, so she escapes across the lake, winding up at the vacation house of wealthy playboy with an undeservedly bad reputation Cary Grant. He's a gentleman to her, but he's also seen dropping her back off at her house, so Woods decides to start some nasty gossip about her. A young Randolph Scott plays a geologist Carroll's family would like her to marry. This is an extremely pre-Code picture.

Forever Amber (1947). Linda Darnell plays Amber, an orphan in provincial England during the Cromwell era who, wanting better things, escapes to London just in time for the Restoration. There, she meets and falls in love with a privateer (Cornell Wilde) who unfortunately can't shake his love for the sea. She also becomes one of the mistresses of King Charles II (George Sanders), all while rising through London society until her dark past comes to light.

Thursday Movie Picks, February 2, 2023: Travel Romance

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This is my first time back after a little while, mostly because I couldn't think of any movies to fit the previous several themes. For February, the theme is romance in its various guises, and I should be able to come up with selections for the three movie-themed editions. Feb. 23, with its TV focus, might be a bit more difficult for me. Anyhow, the form of romance for this week's theme is "Travel romance". I had several ideas in mind, but thought about saving a movie or two for one of the other themes. Ultimately, I wound up with three movies from over 80 years ago, one of which I might have used quite some time ago:

One Way Passage (1932). William Powell plays a criminal who is being extradited from Asia back to America to face the death penalty. Kay Francis plays an heiress who is terminally ill. They're on the same boat, meet, and fall in love, each not knowing about the other's fate and not about to hurt the other by revealing their own fate.

They Met in Bombay (1941). Clark Gable is a jewel thief in Bombay trying to get one of those named jewels that were a big thing back in old-time movies. Rosalind Russell shows up, also with plans to steal the jewel. Although they're rivals, they have to help each other escape from India, which they do on Peter Lorre's steamer to China. Along the way, they fall in love. And then the Japanese invasion of China comes to them....

Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence (1939). A very young Glenn Ford decides he's going to beat the Depression by using the money he's saved up to buy some land in Arizona and become a farmer. However, he doesn't have enough money to get to Arizona, winding up as a hobo, which is how he meets Jean Rogers, a Spanish immigrant who is in the country illegally. By the time the two wind up at the farm in Arizona, they've fallen in love.

Thursday Movie Picks #441: Winter Sports

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the first day of winter, the theme is Winter Sports. It's another one that's not overly difficult, with the biggest challenge being whether or not I've used the movies before. In one case, I did have to check. But you also get a bonus short this week.

I Met Him in Paris (1937). Claudette Colbert is engaged to Lee Bowman, but wants to take a trip to Europe before settling down and marrying. In Paris, she meets Robert Young, who is married but doesn't tell her, and Young's friend Melvyn Douglas, who keeps trying to sabotage Young's plans to be with Colbert. Douglas eventually falls for Colbert too, with Bowman showing up for the climax. When Colbert gets bored of Paris, she goes to the Swiss Alps, with Young and Douglas following her and engaging in various sporting events, notably a bobsled run.

Downhill Racer (1969). Robert Redford plays a downhill skier who is trying to make the US Olympic team, although he's a bit of a renegade, the sort of trope we've never ever seen in a movie before, have we. Or the romantic interest (Camilla Sparv) who could derail Redford's chances. At least with all those scenes in European mountain resorts, we have some nice scenery to look at.

For Your Eyes Only (1981). Probably Roger Moore's best outing as James Bond, with the main story being about the attempt to get a British submarine nuclear guidance system from a sunken sub before the Soviets do. There is an extended section in the Italian Alps where Bond meets a young figure skater, and where they watch the biathlon where the East German competitor is really a hired hitman whose job it is to get Bond, leading to the obligatory ski chase.

And for the short, TCM just re-ran Snow Gets in Your Eyes (1938) the other day, about a department store worker (Roger Converse) who tries to win his would-be girlfriend (Virginia Grey) by entering the store's promotional contest -- an indoor ski jump, in an era when department stores had several floors and apparently high enough ceilings to run an indoor ski jump contest.

Thursday Movie Picks #440: Flowers in the Title

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Movies with flowers in the title", which is another one that's fairly easy. I had several films in mind, and decided to search the blog to see whether I had used them before. This got rid of a couple of films, but I still had enough left to do a post this week:

The Blue Gardenia (1953). Surprisingly, a search of the blog claims I haven't even done a full-length post on this movie, let alone use it in the Thursday Movie Picks. Anne Baxter plays a woman who, jilted by her husband, goes on a date with another man (Raymond Burr). She gets so drunk that she doesn't remember much of that night other than trying to defend herself from Burr's sexual advances. The problem is, Burr's body is found the next morning, leading Baxter to think she might have killed him.

Lilies of the Field (1963). Another movie that I'm somewhat surprised not to have used in the blogathon before. Sidney Poitier plays a handyman traveling through Arizona on his way to California. There, he gets waylaid by a group of nuns (led by Lilia Skala) who are refugees from East Germany. They think they've found just the man to build them their new chapel out in this desert they've relocated to. Poitier is skeptical, but of course they've got God on their side.

The Name of the Rose (1986). Sean Connery plays a 14th century monk who arrives at an Italian monastery for a religious conference together with his novice (Christian Slater). They arrive to the news that there's been a mysterious death just before their arrival that may have been suicide, but then again it may have been murder. Connery investigates, even though there may be quite some danger to him.