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TCM Genre movies schedule...

Whoops, I neglected to compile a December schedule last week. Catching up:

FRI 12/6
6:00 PM: Forbidden Planet (1956)

SUN 12/8
2:00 PM: Scrooge ('70): The Albert Finney version of A Christmas Carol. It's got ghosts, so it's fantasy.

MON 12/9
6:15 PM: 13 Ghosts ('60): William Castle horror film.

SAT 12/14
6:45 AM: Forbidden Planet again

SUN 12/15
2:00 AM: Death by Invitation ('71): Reincarnated witch seeking revenge for being burned at the stake.
3:30 AM: Incubus ('65): Shatner! Esperanto!
10:00 AM: A Christmas Carol ('38): June Lockhart's screen debut, apparently.

TUE 12/17
7:00 AM: A Midsummer Night's Dream ('35)
11:30 AM: Hamlet ('69): Again, ghost = genre. Actually there's a Shakespeare-movie marathon all morning and afternoon, but these are the ones with fantasy aspects.

THU 12/19
3:45 AM: Finian's Rainbow ('68): Leprechaun musical.
8:00 PM: Scrooge ('70) again
10:00 PM: A Christmas Carol ('51): The Alistair Sim version.
11:30 PM: Scrooge ('35): Sir Seymour Hicks as Scrooge.

FRI 12/20
1:00 AM: A Christmas Carol ('38) again
2:15 AM: A Carol for Another Christmas ('64): Another showing of the Rod Serling anti-war remix of the Scrooge story.

SAT 12/21
2:00 AM: The Stepford Wives ('75)
1:30 PM: Doctor Dolittle ('67)
4:15 PM: The Mouse That Roared ('59): I guess this vaguely counts as political SF, plus its sequel involved a Moon landing. And William Hartnell is in it. Directed by genre stalwart Jack Arnold.
5:45 PM: Jaws ('75): Directed by some other guy you may have heard of.

MON 12/23
6:00 PM: Scrooge ('70) yet again

TUE 12/24
6:00 AM: Beyond Tomorrow ('40): Ghosty, Christmasy romance.
1:15 PM: A Christmas Carol ('38) yet again

SAT 12/28
6:00 PM: Jason and the Argonauts ('63): Harryhausen!

SUN 12/29
4:00 PM: The Incredible Mr. Limpet ('64): Don Knotts is a cartoon fish. Wasn't he always?
6:00 PM: Forbidden Planet again

MON 12/30
2:45 PM: Tom Thumb ('58): George Pal adaptation with Russ Tamblyn.

And just in case I forget again, there's a "Lost Worlds" marathon on January 1:

WED 1/1 - THU 1/2/14:
8:00 PM: Journey to the Center of the Earth ('59) With James Mason, Pat Boone, and iguanas impersonating dimetrodons.
10:15 PM: The Lost World ('60): Irwin Allen version with Michael Rennie, Jill St. John, and lizards impersonating dinosaurs.
Midnight: The Valley of Gwangi ('69): Finally, real dinosaurs! By which I mean Harryhausen-animated dinosaurs!
2:00 AM: She ('65): With Ursula Andress and Peter Cushing.
4:00 AM: The Lost Continent ('68): Misleadingly named Hammer film about Sargasso Sea castaways.
 
TCM sure loves Forbidden Planet, it's a great movie but sheesh!

I might see if I can watch Jason and the Argonauts with my nephew and niece after doing my impersonation of its stop-motion skeletons so they can see what I was getting at.
 
I was about to say, it's Forbidden Planet month on TCM. Which is good. It's my second favorite movie of all time, so I'm glad that more people will be seeing it.

The Leprechaun musical is drawing me in with a horrible curiosity, kind of like a bad car accident.

Other than that, only a couple of interesting things. That's a great marathon on New Year's Day, though.
 
Time for January 2014. Every Friday night/Saturday early AM has a "Science in the Movies" spotlight, though only some of its installments are science fiction (others are historical films about major scientific advances or figures).

WED 1/1 - THU 1/2/14 (copied from last month's post):
8:00 PM: Journey to the Center of the Earth ('59) With James Mason, Pat Boone, and iguanas impersonating dimetrodons.
10:15 PM: The Lost World ('60): Irwin Allen version with Michael Rennie, Jill St. John, and lizards impersonating dinosaurs.
Midnight: The Valley of Gwangi ('69): Finally, real dinosaurs! By which I mean Harryhausen-animated dinosaurs!
2:00 AM: She ('65): With Ursula Andress and Peter Cushing.
4:00 AM: The Lost Continent ('68): Misleadingly named Hammer film about Sargasso Sea castaways.

SAT 1/4
2:15 AM: Countdown ('68): Sounds interesting... Robert Altman directs a fictional version of the race to beat the Soviets to the Moon, starring James Caan and Robert Duvall. Made with NASA cooperation.
4:15 AM: Marooned ('69): The sixties version of Gravity, basically. Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, and David Janssen are stranded in space. From the Martin Caidin novel.
6:30 PM: The Thing From Another World ('51): Need I say more?

SUN 1/5
1:00 PM: Jungle Jim ('48): Not strictly genre, but it's based on an Alex Raymond comic strip, it stars Johnny Weissmuller and George Reeves, and it's the first in a series that has more fantasy elements in later installments.


FRI 1/10-SAT 1/11
8:00 PM: Bride of Frankenstein ('35)
9:30 PM: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ('41): Argh, why do they keep showing the lame Spencer Tracy version instead of the superb Fredric March version?
11:30 PM: The Thing From Another World again
1:15 AM: Forbidden Planet ('56)
3:00 AM: Solaris ('72): The Andrei Tarkovsky version.

TUE 1/14
5:00 PM: Mad Love ('35): Peter Lorre's American debut, as a mad doctor. Colin Clive, in a role reversal, plays his patient.

WED 1/15
4:00 PM: The Canterville Ghost ('44): Loose, WWII-themed adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story.


SAT 1/18
4:15 AM: These Are the Damned ('62): Originally called The Damned. Hammer horror film about radioactive mutant children (no, not the X-Men).

MON 1/20
9:15 PM: The World, The Flesh, and The Devil ('59): Harry Belafonte, Mel Ferrer, and Inger Stevens in the post-apocalypse.

FRI 1/24-SAT 1/25
Midnight: It Happens Every Spring ('49): Borderline-SF comedy with Ray Milland as a professor who invents a baseball that can't be hit and goes into pitching.
1:45 AM: The Man in the White Suit ('51): In a similar vein, Alec Guiness invents an indestructible fabric to the dismay of the garment industry.

SAT 1/25
4:00 PM: Robin and Marian ('76): Robin Hood's a legend, so he counts as genre, I guess. Sean Connery as aging Robin Hood.
8:00 PM: Jaws ('75)
10:15 PM: Alien ('79)

WED 1/29
9:30 AM: Sinbad the Sailor ('47): With Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
6:15 PM: Dr. Coppelius ('68): Based on the ballet Coppélia, about an inventor passing off a lifelike animated doll as his daughter.
8:00 PM: The Manchurian Candidate ('62)

FRI 1/31
2:00 AM: Trog ('70): Joan Crawford protects a revived "caveman."

FRI 1/31-SAT 2/1:]
8:00 PM: The First Men in the Moon ('64): H.G. Wells adaptation.
10:00 PM: The Time Machine ('60): Ditto.
3:45 AM: Charly ('68): Cliff Robertson adaptation of "Flowers for Algernon."
 
Last edited:
Thanks for posting that.

"Mad Love" is worth checking out for Lorre's creepy performance--and is actually a remake of "The Hands of Orlac"--an old silent movie starring Conrad Veidt.

Funny to see both "Trog" and "Gwangi" on the list. I first saw them at a triple feature at the Midway Drive-In--along with "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth."

(C'mon, TCM. When you gonna give us Victoria Vetri as a cavewoman adopted by a near-sighted brontosaurus?)
 
Christopher said:
Greg Cox said:
...along with "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth."

(C'mon, TCM. When you gonna give us Victoria Vetri as a cavewoman adopted by a near-sighted brontosaurus?)
Click to expand...

Does TCM take requests? Because that sounds like fun.
Click to expand...

I'll be honest. I haven't seen the movie since I was a kid, but I remember finding it very silly at the time--and enjoying it thoroughly. And, yes, as I recall, there was a sequence where Vetri was cast out of her tribe because she was a blonde (!) and ends up taking shelter from a storm inside a giant egg shell. Along comes a myopic momma bronto who finds Vetri inside the egg and naturally assumes that this voluptuous blonde cavewoman in a fur bikini is a newborn baby brontosaurus and adopts her as one of her own . . . .

I swear by the great blazing orb in the sky that I'm not making this up! :)

Digression: Hammer prehistoric movies got a lot of mileage out of the eternal conflict between blondes and brunettes. The same issue arises in ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. and, even more so, in PREHISTORIC WOMEN, where the brunettes have conquered the blondes and forced them into slavery . . . .
 
Thanks for the list Christopher, and I finally got around to watching Carol for Another Christmas when they ran it this time. It certainly is Serling in full-on preaching mode, but I still found it interesting overall. [once you get to Hiroshima you know subtlety is not on the menu...:eek:] Hayden is so good at that kind of character that his conversion doesn't seem very convincing.

I also kept thinking that with isolationism stirring around parts of the US political spectrum again, there are a few leaders who could use a good dose of this movie, hammy or not. :D
 
AKITA! When the Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is good for male hormones, I suspect it would lose a point or two if rated objectively. :) The movie looks way better with a nice uncut widescreen print which hopefully TCM provides.

Anyone know if TCM has shown Stalker? I'd like to see that instead of the more common Solaris.
 
Didn't they show When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth already? I'm pretty sure I remember that egg scene. Maybe I have it on DVD.

That's a pretty good schedule for January. I'll have to catch These Are The Damned. I'm pretty sure I've never heard of it, let alone seen it.
 
Irwin Allen's The Lost World was better than I expected, aside from the lizard "dinosaurs." A pretty impressive cast, including Claude Raines, Michael Rennie, Fernando Lamas, Jill St. John, and future Irwin Allen TV cast members David Hedison and Vitina Marcus. Kind of silly, but pretty fun.

Hammer's She started out slow, but got better. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were excellent and had some good material; I particularly liked Cushing's philosophical speech about age and the yearning for immortality. Bernard Cribbins was a lot of fun, and Ursula Andress was really nice to look at (and surprisingly well-dubbed; the lip sync and sound quality were handled so well that I never would've known her voice had been replaced if I hadn't read about it). But good grief, the racial politics are awful. Parts of the movie were really uncomfortable to watch. And the ending was weak and anticlimactic.
 
Greg Cox said:
...there was a sequence where Vetri was cast out of her tribe because she was a blonde (!) and ends up taking shelter from a storm inside a giant egg shell. Along comes a myopic momma bronto who finds Vetri inside the egg and naturally assumes that this voluptuous blonde cavewoman in a fur bikini is a newborn baby brontosaurus and adopts her as one of her own . . . .

I swear by the great blazing orb in the sky that I'm not making this up! :)
Click to expand...

I may have seen that film as a very young child, but I KNOW I saw a retrospective about fantasy films not too many years ago that used part of that sequence. So I'm vouching for Greg.

Sincerely,

Bill
 
I just finished watching one of the non-SF films being spotlighted in TCM's science-movies month, 1943's Madame Curie, a Mervyn LeRoy-directed biopic about Marie and Pierre Curie, played by Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. And it's a really good movie. It's as much a love story as a story about science, and it does a good job with both. Pierre is portrayed as maybe a bit too much the stereotype of a stiff, absent-minded intellectual, but the juxtaposition of that with his developing feelings for Marie is both hilarious and touching. I've never been that fond of Pidgeon's stilted delivery, but it worked well for the character, and there were times when Pidgeon did manage to show a lot more range than I'd expected. (I find myself wondering if this performance was a template for Russell Johnson when he played the Professor on Gilligan's Island.) And he and Garson had pretty good chemistry, so the love-story side worked well. And the movie was also very effective at portraying the adventure and wonder of science, and the importance of striving for new knowledge. Marie's dedication and brilliance were well-played. (And I loved how supportive Pierre was toward her. Whenever she was spinning some radical, wild theory, he didn't question or challenge, he just said "Go on," urging her to continue despite her own doubts.) The science was handled pretty authentically too, though I'm sure they took enormous liberties with the timing and biographies for dramatic effect. It becomes kind of a tearjerker toward the end, and effectively so. My eyes still aren't dry.

Oh, and the toddler who plays the 2-year-old Eve Curie (author of the book on which the film is based) totally steals the show in her brief scenes.
 
February schedule:

SAT 2/1
3:45 AM: Charly ('68): Cliff Robertson adaptation of "Flowers for Algernon."
6:00 PM: The Wizard of Oz ('39)

TUE 2/4
4:45 AM: Brigadoon ('54)

TUE 2/11
8:00 PM: Around the World in 80 Days ('56)

WED 2/12
4:00 PM: The Manchurian Candidate ('62)

SAT 2/15
6:00 PM: Field of Dreams ('89)

SUN 2/16
8:00 AM: Here Comes Mr. Jordan ('41)

MON 2/17
3:00 PM: Journey to the Center of the Earth ('59)

TUE 2/18
5:30 AM: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm ('62)
3:30 PM: Scrooge ('70): Albert Finney/Alec Guiness version of A Christmas Carol.
5:30 PM: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ('68)

WED 2/19
8:00 AM: On the Beach ('59): Post-apocalyptic classic with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire.
8:00 PM: Topper ('37)

THU 2/20
2:00 AM: Lost Horizon ('37): Frank Capra's Shangri-La film, with Ronald Colman and Spock's mother (Jane Wyatt). The restored 132-minute version.

SAT 2/22
10:30 PM: Hamlet ('48): There's a ghost, so it's genre (again). Laurence Olivier version.

SUN 2/23
11:30 AM: King Solomon's Mines ('50)
8:00 PM: The Adventures of Robin Hood ('38)

MON 2/24
4:15 PM: Mighty Joe Young ('49): Harryhausen's big ape!

TUE 2/25
8:00 PM: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir ('47)

FRI 2/28
12:30 AM: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ('32): Finally, the good version again!
3:45 PM: Charly again
 
Did anyone catch Alien, I've seen it a million times but I would've liked to hear Robert Osbourne opine, I was curious if he said anything interesting.

I'm curious about that Dr. Copellius movie on Wed, I'll probably record that, Sinbad, cult classic Trog (I know it's a turkey but I'm curious) and First Men in the Moon before the month is over. I don't know that I've ever seen First Men because I think I always mixed that up with A Trip to the Moon.

February doesn't look very interesting to me...:(
 
February is always a light genre time as it's mostly one of TCM's 2 special months, 30 Days of Oscar... everything has to have at least been nominated for an Academy Award. [the other is August Under the Stars, with each day featuring a single star's films]
 
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