Briefs for a Happy New Year 2016

TCM is ringing in the New Year 2016 with a showing of the six Thin Man movies airing in order, starting at 8:00 PM with the 1934 original. William Powell and Myrna Loy are great, and the first movie certainly fits on New Year's Eve since the movie is set around the holiday season. But sometimes I wonder whether TCM could come up with something different to show. I don't know how many times they've put all the Thin Man movies together. The second one, at 9:45 PM, should also be seen for the presence of a young James Stewart as well as actress Elissa Landi, who as I think I've mentioned before died in the same town where I was born. She's got a street named after her; one of these days I'll have to get over there and photograph the street sign.

New Year's Day on TCM brings several science fiction movies, with Time After Time at 1:45 PM deserving another mention, even though I blogged about it just a few months ago. It's one of the lesser-known movies on tomorrow's schedule. I suppose in that regard I should also mention Things to Come at 6:45 AM, although that's not a movie I particularly care for.

Watch movies for the acting talent of the celebrities therein, and not for their political views. Jewish comic actor Jerry Lewis appeared on Catholic cable channel EWTN, where he had a rather interesting interview, apparently. It's been covered by outlets of all political stripes; probably the most irreverent one I've seen would be at Reason magazine. (Warning: the habitues in the comments are a very saucy lot.)

Here's to a happy and healthy 2016!

Juvenile talent shows

I've mentioned a couple of shorts in the past that are basically a bunch of different kids each showing off their talent, be it singing or dancing; collectively, all the kids do enough to make a one- or two-reeler. Among the ones I've blogged about are the slightly odd Show Kids and the odder Bubbles, the latter of which has a very young Judy Garland. Perhaps even weirder than these two is Kiddie Revue, which TCM is running tomorrow at 1:44 PM, or following A Night at the Opera (noon, 91 minutes).

This one is, like the other two, a revue of child talent acts and, like the other two, has a framing story. Where Show Kids is about kids trying to save a theater and Bubbles is presented by the man in the moon, Kiddie Revue is presented by a rather adult-acting master of ceremonies. The reason for that is that this short is supposed to be a spoof of The Hollywood Revue. That feature, which was basically a sound test for MGM's stars, was emceed mostly by Jack Benny, whose humor was already on full display. Benny wasn't dirty, but there's certainly a grown-up sensibility about his routines that makes seeing a kid try to imitate it reminiscent of Bugsy Malone. Weird and off, but also compelling and fun.

Go West, Young Lady

If you happen to have the Encore package, you'll have a chance to catch the entertaining comic western Go West, Young Lady, tomorrow morning at 6:20 AM. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so this wil be your only chance to catch it.

Penny Singleton stars at Belinda Pendergast, although everybody calls her Bill. Bill is on a stagecoach out to the old west town of Headstone, where she's going to live with her uncle Jim (Charlie Ruggles), who ones the local hotel. She happens to be on the same stage as Tex (Glenn Ford), who has been sent out west to be the town's new sheriff, the town having problems keeping a sheriff thanks thanks to Pete and his gang constantly terrorizing the town in an attempt to get everybody to leave so they can have the land. (Where's James Garner when you need him?) Anyhow, the stagecoach gets attacked by Indians along the way, which is where we learn that Tex isn't the greatest of shots, while Bill is a crack shot.

The stagecoach arrives in Headstone, and Jim is thrilled about two things. First is that his nephew Bill is on the coach; second is that the not only is the town going to get that new sheriff, that sheriff is going to be his nephew to boot! Well, isn't Jim in for a surprise. (Jim hadn't seen his late brother for decades, and so apparently didn't know that Bill is female; why Jim's brother never told him about this is not answered.) Jim is none too pleased when he learns that Bill is in fact a woman, as he thinks that a town like Headstone is no place for a nice woman like Bill.

Meanwhile, Tex and Bill begin to fall in love with it being obvious they should wind up together in the last reel, even though they have some problems along the way. Tex keeps taking a licking from Pete, while every time Bill tries to help him, things somehow backfire. And there's also a bit of a conflict involving Bill and Lola (Ann Miller), the saloon singer at Uncle Jim's hotel. She's taken a yen to Tex as well even though she's secretly in cahoots with Pete, and she too isn't happy with Bill's presence.

Go West, Young Lady isn't so much a western as it is a comedy set out west I suppose it could just as easily have been small-town New England or something similar. That having been said, it's successful as far as it goes, which isn't very far. The movie is only 70 minutes, clearly conceived to be a B movie without any pretensions of greatness. Still, it does try to pack quite a bit in. Among all the comedy and fights, there are also a couple of musical numbers, including a particularly humorous one with Miller dancing around Allen Jenkins, playing a deputy who's clearly a fish out of water. He'd be terribly miscast if it weren't the point that he's thoroughly unsuitable to be an old west deputy.

Go West, Young Lady is good, pleasant fun, if nothing that will ever be remembered as one of the all time greats. It's too bad Columbia/Sony hasn't figured out a way to put this on a Glenn Ford box set.

A night of dead people

Well, a TV channel like TCM running a bunch of old movies, it's only natural that a lot of the people you'll see have already died. More specifically, tonight's lineup looks back at some of the people who died in 2015, with six films each looking at one such person:

First, at 8:00 PM, we'll remember Louis Jourdan in Gigi. Well, the rest of you will; it's not one of my favorite musicals.
Then, at 10:15 PM, Lizabeth Scott gets to be a bad girl in Too Late For Tears.
At midnight, Theodore Bikel goes after Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones.
Colleen Gray plays the good girl in Kansas City Confidential at 2:00 AM.
Anita Ekberg plays a plane crash survivor in Back From Eternity at 3:45 AM; this one is a remake of Five Came Back.
Finally, at 5:30 AM, Betsy Drake, who was one of Cary Grant's wives, stars opposite him in Every Girl Should Be Married.

The Children's Hour vs. These Three

Tonight is the last night of the December spotlight on TCM, looking at girlfriends. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with The Children's Hour, the 1961 movie in which Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine are accused by a malicious child o having a lesbian relationship. Well, not quite that accused; the kid only claims to have seen them kissing. But as I've mentioned on a couple of occasions, this movie was based on a play by Lillian Hellman that had already been made as a movie once before, that being the 1930s film These Three starring Miriam Hopkins and Frances Dee as the teachers.

Well, tonight you're in luck, as These Three will be following The Children's Hour at 10:00 PM, giving you a chance to catch both of them and compare and contrast, as well as to decide for yourselves which one is the better movie. As I mentioned back in 2009, These Three had to be changed from Hellman's play somewhat thanks to Production Code strictures, so there's definitely enough different to make watching both of them worthwhile.

Haskell Wexler, 1922-2015

Cinematographer Haskell Wexlerhas died at the age of 93. Wexler worked with many of Hollywod's great directors from the 1950s on, winning two Oscars for his work on the movies Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Bound For Glory. Among other recognizable feature films Wexler did, there's:

The Best Man, the interesting political drama looking behind the scenes of a brokered political convention;
In the Heat of the Night, with black Philadelphia police detective Sidney Poitier helping white southern cop Rod Steiger solve a murder;
The caper movie The Thomas Crown Affair; and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Miloš Forman's disturbing look at a mental facility.

Wexler was also the director of a number of documentaries, with probably the most famous of these being Medium Cool, about the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

I presume TCM is going to run a programming tribute to Wexler sometime in January, but I haven't looked at the website yet to see if they've announced anything. Probably not, since Wexler's death was just announced yesterday evening and there's nobody around to schedule it and get the rights to the movies on a Sunday evening.

Request for information

What website do you use on your computer to get schedule information?

Originally, I used to use Zap2It, as they had a nice schedule that was almost in the old-fashioned HTML table style so that it loaded easily. And if you clicked on an individual channel to get that one channel's schedule, you'd get the two-week schedule in one long list you could scroll up and down, which made finding an entire set of programming for one channel exceedingly easy. But a few years back, they redesigned their website to focus more on TV gossip and made the schedule more difficult to navigate. Finding one's customized channel lineup became a pain in the ass.

So I started using TitanTV. Their schedule design wasn't quite as good, and if you wantd one channel, you could only get three days at a time and had to click through to get future days. They now have a "14-day" option, but it only shows a three-hour period for each of the 14 days. However, there's something far worse about TitanTV, which is that it seems to add arbitrary channels to my custom channel lineup. As a DirecTV subscriber and a movie buff, I've got a custom lineup of TCM, FXM, and the premium movie channels in the 500s, and nothing else. But if I don't use the cutsom lineup for a while (I generally use it once a week), I find that other channels start creeping in to the formerly customized lineup, to the point that I get a whole bunch of unwanted cruft and removing that is exceedingly tedious.

Most of the websites have the same information, since there are two or three companies that aggregate all of the schedule information and deliver it to the schedule sites or your box guide. But I'd like something that's efficient, not tablet-optimized, and not full of social networking garbage. (Really, who wants to "like" an "edit your customized channel lineup" page?) Any good ideas?

A Lady of Chance

I finally got around to watching A Lady of Chance, which I DVRed back at the beginning of November when Norma Shearer was TCM's Star of the Month. Thankfully, it's been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you can catch it any time you want.

Shearer plays Dolly, whom we first see working as a switchboard operator at a swanky big-city hotel. However, that is just a front for what she really does, which is wooing the rich guys who stop by the switchboard desk to ask for a number or place a long-distance call. She then intends to get money out of them, if not quite honestly. In fact, she's definitely quite a bit less than honest, as we learn when Brad (Lowell Sherman) and Gwen (Gwen Lee) come into the hotel. Brad used to be Dolly's partner in crime, back when she was going under the alias "Baby Face" (watch for a great process shot of her with her old Baby Face hairdo). Well, Brad figures that Dolly is angling to get a bunch of money from one of the rich men, and wants some of it for himself. So he blackmails her: she either involve him in her scheme, or he'll go to the police since she's violated her parole.

Needless to say, Dolly eventually decides to go along, if not without a little more "persuasion" from Brad. They bilk th eman out of $10,000, but Brad is just as honest as Dolly, giving the cash to Gwen to hide under the pillow, while telling Dolly that the man stopped payment on the check! She knows better, and beats Brad at his own game, snatching the money with a ploy of her own and running out on the two of them, getting out of town before the two of them realize what happened.

Cut to Atlantic City, which is where Dolly is now plying her trade. That's because there's a cement convention going on, and she figures there have to be some rich men at the convention. Sure enough, while at the telegraph stand, she spots a man named Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown) writing a letter to his mother that he's looking to put through a million-dollar deal. Ah, here's a rich man! Dolly runs into him again and he's clearly smitten with her, it being love at first sight for him and just another job for her. Eventually he proposes marriage to her, which is how Dolly is going to get rich.

Except that she's not. They get back to his home town in Alabama and find out that he's living in a run-down house with a start-up business that hasn't actually made any big deals yet -- he's only invented a better type of cement and is hoping to sell the rights to manufacture it on a large scale. Dolly, realizing that she's not going to be rich, says that she's going to leave. But then she has a change of heart and actually returns home, much to Steve's surprise. Brad and Gwen don't realize either that Steve isn't rich or that Dolly actually does love him. They've tracked her down again, and plan to get some of the money that Steve doesn't have. Except that before Dolly can tell them Steve doesn't have the money, Steve comes home with the good news that he's sold the rights to his concrete for $100,000. So he's going to be rich after all; Brad and Gwen can bilk him; and dammit, they expect Dolly to be in on the act. But of course, she really does love him by now.

A Lady of Chance is a fun movie, if fairly predictable in its plot and with an ending that doesn't quite fit and leaves a gaping plot hole. Norma Shearer is good; Lowell Sherman is wonderful playing the sort of role that a Jack Carson might have had a decade later; and Johnny Mack Brown is extremely photogenic and does a good enough job with his aw-shucks character. All in all, there's not much to complain about here.

Christmas Saturday schedule alert

Those of you enjoying the Bowery Boys movies are out of luck, at least for one week. This Saturday being part of the Christmas weekend, TCM has decided to put the normal 10:30 AM movie series aside for a week, instead running East of Eden at 10:00 AM tomorrow.

The Bowery Boys movies will return on Saturday, January 2. The Dick Tracy movies, however, have reached the end of the series, not that there were many in the series. On January 2 in the slot before before the Bowery Boys movie, TCM will be running the first of the Rusty the Dog movies; this series will be running at least through the end of January. I haven't checked to see whether it will be picking up fter the end of 31 Days of Oscar.

Merry Christas to all!

Christmas on FXM

I've blogged a couple of times this month about TCM's Christmas programming. FXM, on the other hand, is doing about as much as they did last year. That is, they'll be running the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, the one starring Alastair Sim, several times.

There will be four back-to-back showings this evening, starting at 7:00 PM and running every two hours, ie. at 9:00 PM, 11:00 PM, and 1:00 AM. The movie is only 86 minutes, but there won't be quite that many commercials as there will also be an 11-minute "FXM Presents" installment at the end of each two-hour block promoting some upcoming movie or a show on one of Fox's other channels. There will also be three airings on Christmas day, two in the FXM block at 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM, but one immediately before that in the FXM Retro block at 1:30 PM, which implies that this one airing will be commercial-free.

Last year, I commented that I thought they would be running a colorized print, but it turns out that the print was in black-and-white, although it wasn't exactly a high-quality print. I would presume that they'll be running the same print this year.