Welcome to the latest installment of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 17-23, 2008. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

We're going to start off with this week's "Silent Sunday Night" feature, and it's one of the true classics of silent cinema: Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 12:15 AM Monday on TCM. Metropolis is a vision of a dystopian future, in which a small segment of humanity lives above ground in the lap of luxury, while the workers needed to produce this luxury slave away in underground factories, never seeing the light of day. That is, until they decide to go on strike.

TCM follows its "Silent Sunday Night" movies with "TCM Imports", which as the title implies are foreign movies. This week's is quite an interesting choice: the 1943 version of Titanic, 2:30 AM Monday. Now, we all know the story of the Titanic, the supposedly unsinkable ship that hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, killing something like 1400 people. But what's interesting about this movie version is that it was made in Nazi Germany. As such, there's a bit of propaganda, making the British ship owners out to be even worse than they were in real life, and replacing one of the ship's officers with a German, who is the sole voice of reason warning the English crew that they're headed for danger. What's also interesting is what happened behind the scenes: Joseph Goebbels, the man responsible for propaganda in Hitler's Germany, didn't like the idea of Germans seeing a movie about a sinking ship, since he found it an obvious reference to Germany sinking under the onslaught of Allied air raids. So, he had the movie's original director arrested; the director then died in his jail cell a few days later under mysterious circumstances. Talk about a severe critic! Let's just hope Packer fans don't treat Aaron Rodgers this badly! (On the other hand, the movie was released in occupied France, where it was immensely popular.)

Later on Monday morning, we have a Cary Grant movie for MsPacman: The Howards of Virginia, Monday at 7:30 AM on TCM. This is an odd role for Cary in that it's a historical drama, as opposed to all wonderful comedies he was making around the same time (1940). But at the time, Cary was trying to get his American citizenship, and apparently felt making such a movie would be a help. Set in colonial Virginia, it tells the story of a family (with Grant as patriarch) and their struggles to create a successful farm in western Virginia in the days leading up to the Revolutionary War, and then during the war as Grant's two sons also join the fighting colonists. (Oh, and for a laugh, Hollywood's rewriting of history had Grant's Mr. Howard being very close friends with Thomas Jefferson, played by Richard Carlson.)

We jump forward 24 hours, but move ahead 120 years, to another historical drama: This is My Affair, Tuesday at 6:00 AM on the Fox Movie Channel. Robert Taylor plays a Navy lieutenant asked by President McKinley stop a ring of bank robbers, which he attempts to do by infiltrating the group. Amongst the robbers are former Oscar winner Victor McLaglen, and stalwart 1930s heavy Brian Donlevy. Of course, this ring of bank robbers isn't enough of a story; we have to have a love triangle as well, and that's provided by the badly miscast Barbara Stanwyck, who plays a saloon singer who also happens to be the half-sister of Donlevy. McLaglen and Taylor both fall in love with her. (True, Stanwyck was nice to look at, but what was Fox doing trying to make her like Diamond Lou from She Done Her Wrong? )


After This is My Affair is over, you can change the channel for a completely different movie: Week-End Marriage, Tuesday at 8:00 AM on TCM. Loretta Young stars as a Depression-era woman working at a job as a secretary, who tricks a man (Norman Foster) into marrying her. Unfortunately, he loses his job, so she becomes the sole breadwinner in the family. This causes further problems when she becomes an executive secretary for a powerful businessman who's always traveling, requiring her to travel as well. The idea of a househusband would have been radical back in 1932, and with Young having to travel in her job, you can imagine that this would put even more of a strain on her marriage -- after all, it would only be natural for the husband to think that she's cheating on him with her boss. (After all, look at all those movies that have the boss cheating on his wife with his secretary.) It sounds like interesting material to mine for a movie, but unfortunately, the studio decided to go for the happy ending, and comes up with a deus ex machina that will make you scream bloody murder.

There's better stuff on on Tuesday, however: Alfred Hitchcock's Rope shows up on TCM on Tuesday at 5:00 PM. Farley Granger and John Dall play a pair of young men who take the adivce of their philosophy professor (James Stewart) to heart, namely, that some people are superior to others, but do so in a spectacular way: by killing a mutual friend they think isn't fit to live. Then, they stick his body in a chest and host a party for their friends -- including the dead man's parents -- and serve a buffet off the chest in which they've got the dead man's body! Hitchcock made this movie in a series of four or five very long scenes, each of which only has one cut at the point where Hitchcock would have needed to replace the film canister to continue filming. Despite this contrivance, however, the movie is quite gripping, and encapsulates Hitchcock's idea of suspense: we know there's a dead body, and who killed the man, but will the murderers get away with it? And if not, how will they be discovered?

Alfred Hitchcock returns for our next underrated movie, Saboteur, Wednesday at 2:30 PM. This 1942 film is very much like Hitchcock's earlier The 39 Steps, and the later North by Northwest, in that all three have a man on the run from the law when he's accused of a crime he didn't commit, only to find that he also has to keep one step ahead of the people who did commit the crime. In Saboteur, that "wrong man" is played by Bob Cummings, a worker at a World War II era airplane factory in Los Angeles. Somebody's committed sabotage, killing Cummings' best friend, but he's the one accused of it. So, he sets off where the only clue leads him. Along the way, he meets a skeptical model (played by Priscilla Lane) who at first doesn't believe him, as well as the usual group of offbeat Hitchcock characters whom he mines as opportunities for dark humor. In this case, there's one particularly fun scene involving a troupe of circus freaks. Eventually, Cummings and Lane make it to New York City, where we get a great sequence in the Radio City Music Hall theater, as well as the finale on the Statue of Liberty.

Another movie with a climax at a famous tourist attraction is Niagara, Thursday at 4:45 AM on Cinemax. Marilyn Monroe plays a woman married to Joseph Cotten (gotta love those Hollywood pairings), although she's in love with another man. She and her lover plot to have Cotten murdered at Niagara Falls, but things don't exactly go to plan: Monroe and Cotten meet another couple before the planned murder, and after Monroe has Cotten declared missing, the other woman (Jean Peters) thinks she's seen Cotten. So what actually happened? Well, I'm not giving that part of the story away! But Niagara is a really fun little movie: Marilyn Monroe shows she can actually act, and isn't just the blonde airhead she got typecast in in all those comedies; also, there's some nice location photography of the falls and the areas on either side of the falls (although just how beautiful it is depends on the quality of the print).

Hollywood likes to remake movies, probably because it's a cheap way of coming up with an idea for a movie. But not all of the remakes should have been made. One that you can watch and judge for yourself is The Jazz Singer, Thursday at 6:00 PM on Flix. You know the 1927 classic, starring Al Jolson as the cantor's son who is disowned by his father because he wants to be a jazz singer. It was remade in the 1950s with Danny Kaye as the "jazz singer". But this is the usually-panned 1980 version. The Al Jolson role here is played by Neil Diamond, while the father is played by Laurence Olivier. Oh, it gets worse: the love interest is played by Luci Arnaz. I suppose the story is timeless, even if it's badly executed. And readers of a certain age may recall that the Neil Diamond songs were quite popular; today, however, songs like America might be even more irritating than John Mellencamp's This is Our Country. (I however, find myself humming []iLove on the Rocks[/i] as I write this....)

This Sunday is Easter, and TCM is showing a number of appropriate movies. They're starting off on Saturday night, with the 1943 musical Cabin in the Sky, Saturday at 10:15 PM. Notable for its all-black cast, this movie stars Eddie "Rochester" Anderson as an inveterate gambler who get shot at, leading to a fight between God and Satan for his soul. Ethel Waters plays his long-suffering wife, and sings the Oscar-nominated song "Happiness is a Thing Called Joe", while Lena Horne plays a temptress who tries to lead Anderson astray. Watch for brief appearances from some of the great jazz musicians of the 40s. Louis Armstrong has a too-small role as one of Satan's "idea men", while Duke Ellington leads the orchestra at a jive joint in the climactic scene. Although the movie didn't get the attention it deserved when it was released, since lots of areas wouldn't show an all-black movie, the story is one that ranscends race and is a joy to watch. It's only too bad that MGM couldn't have given it the Technicolor treatment.

On Easter Sunday itself, TCM shows Sidney Poitier building a church for a group of nuns in Lilies of the Field, at 11:15 AM; and
the life of Jesus in the 1961 version of King of Kings, at 5:00 PM.

Finally, what's interesting is how TCM decide to follow up their Easter movies: a documentary on Joan Crawford at 8:00 PM Sunday, followed by Mildred Pierce at 9:30 PM. There's a nice uplifting Easter story!

Good stuff as always. I've been bugging Netflix for two years to add "The Bridges at Toki Ri" with William Holden, Grace Kelly and Mickey Rooney. Great flick I remembered from seeing it more than 20 years ago about a Korean War fighter pilot. Found it on TCM last night and truly enjoyed it.