Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of August 15-21, 2016. The exhibition football games has started, but there's not much for Packer fans to argue about now that Jeff Janis! has broken his hand and is out of action. So why not spend the down time with some good movies? Once again, I've used my impeccable taste to select a group of movies that I know you will all love. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with Monday's star in Summer Under the Stars on TCM: Roddy McDowall. Among his movies is a lesser-known version of Kidnapped, airing at 9:45 AM. McDowall plays David Balfour, the Scottish adolescent who, having lost his parents, is about to inherit their estate. Except that evil uncle Ebenezer is trying to take it right out from under him! If the uncle can't kill David, he can do the next best thing, which is to have him kidnapped and put on a ship bound for America for a life of indentured servitude. On board the ship to American, David meets Alan Breck (Dan O'Herlihy) and makes a fast friendship with him despite their differences. The two engage in many adventures as David tries to get back to Scotland to get that inheritance. This version of Robert Louis Stevenson's story adds a love interest for David, in the form of Aileen (Sue England).
Once in a while, StarzEncore Classics plays a movie that's actually old enough to be considered a real classic. One example is Five Easy Pieces, which will be on at 3:30 AM Tuesday. Jack Nicholson stars as Robert, who's working on oil rigs and generally living a very blue-collar life. However, it turns out that he was a musical prodigy as a child, coming from a musical family and being very gifted on the piano. Not that he cares for that life, instead choosing to live with Rayette (Karen Black). However, he hears from his sister Partita (Lois Smith) that Dad has had a series of strokes, leaving him in rather poor health. Robert decides to travel up to the islands in Puget Sound to see Dad. But it's not all good times, as Dad obviously wasn't pleased his kid gave up the musical life, and Robert of course never liked that life and is uncomfortable coming back to it. Shades of Ingmar Bergman's later Autumn Sonata, but not nearly as brutal.
For those who like the more recent movies, Starz Cinema (531 on DirecTV; check your own box guide if you've got a different provider) is running the documentary Man on Wire at 5:40 AM. In 1973, the original twin towers of the World Trade Center were completed. One year later, the Frenchman Philippe Petit had a daring plan: he'd put up a tightrope between the two towers, and walk across! Now, of course, this was highly illegal, so he had to plan well in advance and get a group of trusted supporters who would help him in his endeavor. On August 7, 1974, that plan came to fruition. Man on Wire tells the story of the plan and the preparations, with interviews from those principals who were still living, as well as a reconstruction since obviously cameras weren't rolling at most point in the plan. The story was later made into the effects-driven movie The Walk, which came out last year. Watch the real people talking about the thing.
On Tuesday, we have the films of Anne Baxter. A younger Baxter plays a supporting role in Angel on My Shoulder, which in on TCM at 7:30 AM. The star is Paul Muni, who plays gangster Eddie. Eddie gets killed and sent straight to Hell, which is where he meets the Devil, in the form of Nick (Claude Rains). Nick realizes that Eddie looks surprisingly like a Judge Parker, who happens to be running for governor on a good government campaign. So Nick figures that if he can have Eddie take the judge's place, that those good government plans will come to naught. This will also give Eddie a chance to get back at the guy who offed him. However, the evil plans don't go quite according to plan. Eddie meets the judge's fiancée (Baxter) and falls in love with her, while all of Nick's plans to sabotage the political campaign wind up backfiring. It's hard to go wrong with Claude Rains and Paul Muni in your cast.
I know a lot of you like Westerns, so I'll recommend Fury at Showdown, which you can catch at 9:15 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Westerns. John Derek plays Brock, who has just been released from a year in prison for killing a man even though it was in self-defense. Brock is more or less a pariah wherever he goes, so he decides to go home to his kid brother Tracy (Nick Adams). Tracy is running the old ranch, and has taken out a loan. To pay for the loan, he and some of the other ranchers have taken out a contract to deliver beef along a new railroad line that's being built. But, of course, people are trying to stop the deal from going forward. Chief among them is Chad (Gage Clark), since it's his brother who was killed by Brock. But there's also the Sheriff. It seems that his daughter Ginny (Carolyn Craig) was in love with both Brock and the guy Brock killed, and the sheriff preferred the other guy.
On Thursday, TCM is shining a light on the films of Angie Dickinson, who was sexy back in the 60s but is in her 80s now. Maybe Beef still finds her sexy. One that I don't think I've recommended before is Jessica, which comes on at 1:30 PM Thursday. Filmed on location in Italy by a joint US/Italian production company, the movie stars Dickinson as Jessica, a nurse who got married but whose husband died on their wedding night. Unlike Mrs. Benjamin who joined the army, Jessica decides to go off to Italy to be a midwife in a small Sicilian village. The men, unsurprisingly, find her hot, which the wives see as a problem. They're jealous, and worry that Jessica will steal one or more of the men. So they decide, Lysistrata-style, that they're going to go on a sex strike. If they don't have sex with their husbands, none of them will get pregnant, and there won't be any need for a midwife! Agnes Moorehead plays Italian, and creepy Maurice Chevalier plays the town priest.
Over on FXM Retro, Thursday sees a showing of April Love, at 11:40 AM. Pat Boone (yes, the singer and father of Debby; young people ask Blair Kiel about Debby) plays Nick, a juvenile delinquent. After getting arrested, he gets put on probation and remanded to the custody of his aunt Henrietta (Jeannette Nolan) and uncle Jed (Arthur O'Connell), who own a farm out in Kentucky. Cousin Jed Jr. died recently, leaving Jed Sr. disconsolate, so having another young man to help work the farm may help. It turns out that Nick is the only one who can tame the horse that's gone wild since Jed Jr. died. Meanwhile, on a neighboring farm there are two daughters Fran (Dolores Michaels) and Liz (Shirley Jones). Nick falls for Fran, but Liz is the one to fall for him. She's also good with horses, so we know she's really the right one for Nick. But will Nick figure this out? And will he stay out of trouble?
Ruby Keeler's films show up on TCM on Friday, with one I haven't mentioned before being perhaps the most bizarre film of her career (not that that's saying much): The Phynx, at 4:00 AM Saturday. George Tobias and Joan Blondell are the President and First Lady of Albania, basically living in a gilded cage while Col. Rostinov (Michael Ansara) keeps them hostage and entertained by kidnapping a bunch of American stars to bring them. So the US Spy Agence comes up with a plot to create a rock band that will go on tour to Albania, and rescue all those stars. Yes, the plot of the movie is utterly daft, but what makes this movie worth a watch is two things. One is that it's so bad that it has to be seen to be believed, while the other is that there are a lot of cameos of old-time stars. There's Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O'Sullivan; Keeler; Rudy Vallee; Busby Berkeley; Martha Raye; and even James Brown and Col. Sanders! And that's only the half of it.
We get some more conventional stars over the weekend on TCM. First, on Saturday, there's 24 hours of Humphrey Bogart movies, including Dead Reckoning at midnight Sunday (ie. 11:00 PM Saturday LFT). Bogart plays Rip Murdock, an army colonel returning from the war with his best friend Johnny (William Prince), who is up for the Congressional Medal of Honor. However, Johnny goes missing before he can be awarded the medal, so Rip investigates what happened while he tries to find his friend. The search quickly takes him to Gulf City, FL, where Rip finds that Johnny had a past. It turns out that Johnny had been having an affair with nightclub singer Coral (Lizabeth Scott) and when her husband found out, the husband was found shot dead, with Johnny being the prime suspect, which is what lead him to flee and join the army under an alias. Rip investigates and finds that the truth is far more complex. There's a lot going on here and it's confusing, so just sit back and watch Bogart and Scott, who just about make the film work.
Our last star for this week is Bette Davis. One I've recommended before but will recommend again just because it's so good is The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, at 6:00 PM Sunday. Bette Davis plays Elizabeth I, the Queen of England who was famously the “Virgin Queen” even though she had a series of male suitors. The latest is Devereux, the Earl of Essex (Errol Flynn). He's creating a stir in the royal court and building up a lot of enemies, so Elizabeth, despite being in love with him, sends him on a campaign to quell rebellion in Ireland. The campaign fails, ultimately giving Elizabeth a reason to dispose of Essex for the sake of England. Davis is superb as the tough-as-nails woman in a man's world, but able assisted by a great cast of supporting actors. Poor Olivia de Havilland gets another small supporting role as Lady Penelope; Vincent Price is Walter Raleigh; Alan Hale Sr. plays the Irish rebel leader, and so on. The movie is also shot in sumptuous Technicolor.