Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of August 24-30, 2015. We're getting to the nitty gritty of the exhibition football season, which means that real football can't be far behind. Since we're still in Summer Under the Stars on TCM, we've got seven more interesting stars this week, as well as some worthwhile movies elsewhere. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The fun comedy 9 to 5 is airing a couple of times on Starz Comedy, first at 4:25 PM Monday and then 2:35 AM Friday. Jane Fonday plays Judy, a divorcÉe re-entering the workforce after a long absence, taking a jobe in a cube farm, although this being 1980, they didn't have that term yet. She finds that her big boss Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman) is a sexist jerk, treating all the employees like dirt except for his personal secretary Doralee (Dolly Parton), on whom he lavishes gifts and who all the other women think is only there for her physical assets. One day when Judy's immediate supervisor Violet has had enough and leaves early, she, Judy, and Doralee get together and the truth is revealed that Doralee doesn't like the attention. They fantasize about how to get rid of Hart, nearly kill him by accidentally spiking his coffee with rat poison, and then find out that he's embezzling from the company and that this is how they can get him. Sterling Hayden shows up at the end as the chairman of the company, and the famous title song earned an Oscar nomination.
Up against that first airing of 9 to 5 over on TCM is The Split, which begins at 4:15 PM Monday. Jim Brown stars as McClain, a career criminal who one day shows up back in his old haunt of Los Angeles. McClain's old partner in crime Gladys (Julie Harris) has an idea for a new heist: hold up an NFL playoff game. Because there weren't advance sales, the tickets were all paid for in cash, so there will be a lot of cash around. McClain agrees, and gets together a gang of criminals (Warren Oates, Donald Sutherland, Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Klugman) and together they do wind up robbing the joint. But of course something goes wrong. In this case, it's the fact that they leave the money for safekeeping with McClain's girlfriend (Diahann Carroll) until they can all join up together to split it. But she gets bumped off and the money disappears, and everybody thinks McClain knows where the money is. Rounding out the cast are Gene Hackman as a police detective, and James Whitmore as Diahann Carroll's landlord.
Tuesday's star on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is little-known today: Virginia Bruce. But I know you all like the more obscure movies I select, so you're all definitely going to enjoy Downstairs, which comes on at 8:00 PM Tuesday. The title refers to the people who live downstairs in the mansions owned by wealthy people back in the day, namely, the hired help. John Gilbert stars as Karl the chauffeur, who wants to get ahead and will do so by almost any means necessary. The head of the staff is Albert the butler (Paul Lukas), who has recently gotten married to Anna the maid (that's Virginia Bruce). As part of his attempt to get ahead, Karl has no compunction about trying to seduce Anna! That, and he's willing to try to blackmail the lady of the house, the Baroness (Olga Baclanova, whom you might recall as the "normal" woman in Freaks). John Gilbert wrote this himself because he wanted better roles than he was getting from MGM at this point in his career.
On Wednesday we get a day full of Greta Garbo. There's a documentary, The Divine Miss Garbo, at 3:45 AM Thursday, but I'll mention the feature film Mata Hari, airing at 1:00 PM. If you know your history, you'll recognize that name as a World War I spy for Germany who was arrested by the French and then executed by firing squad for her espionage. Here, Mata Hari is played by Garbo, an impeccably dressed woman who travels freely amongst the military elites. (Hari was Dutch, a neutral during World War I.) The movie has her being pursued romantically by a Russian general (Lionel Barrymore) whom she of course is using to get secrets; Hari however winds up falling in love with Russian pilot Ramon Novarro which is what gets Barrymore to spill the goods to the French spy agency, in the person of C. Henry Gordon. Lewis Stone plays Hari's spymaster.
Also on Wednesday is something completely different: Ride 'Em Cowboy, at 9:15 AM Wednesday on Encore Westerns. The stars of this one are Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, although this was early in their career. They play vendors at a venue that's booked a rodeo where the stars are Bronco Bob (Dick Foran) and his girlfriend Anne (Anne Gwynne). Bob turns out to be not quite as tough as he's portrayed himself, so he has to leave in a hurry with Anne. Bud and Lou, meanwhile, get in trouble with their boss so they hop a train, which just happens to be the same one taking Bob and Anne back to her father's ranch. Bud and Lou get jobs at the ranch even though they know nothing about the old west, which is to be expected since this is a comedy. One of the running gags involves Lou accidentally doing somthing that the local Indian tribe considers a marriage proposal, and trying to escape marriage for the rest of the film. There's also a lot of music, with Ella Fitzgerald singing "A Tisket, a Tasket".
An actor who played mostly supporting roles gets the spotlight on TCM on Thursday: Monty Woolley. He started off in the late 1930s in movies like Everybody Sing, airng at 7:30 AM. Judy Garland stars as the teenage daughter of actress Billie Burke and Reginald Owen. She gets kicked out of musical school because she's supposed to be learning classical music but wants to do swing instead. Since nobody in her family seems to care enough to pay attention to her, she turns to the servants. The cook (Allan Jones) is only a cook by day; at night he sings in a nightclub. This is something our young heroine can latch on to, because she could use a job. Dad's bad financial deals have left the family in a parlous financial state, and if only Judy could sing there, or even put on a show.... The plot is a mess as is the case with a lot of 1930s musicals, but this is a movie you watch for Judy Garland's singing, if you like that sort of stuff.
For Friday on TCM, we get a day of Ingrid Bergman's movies. Bergman had a scandalous relationship with Italian director Roberto Rossellini in the early 1950s that led her to leave Hollywood for several years and make movies with him as director, such as Journey to Italy, at 11:45 AM. Bergman plays Katherine Joyce, married to Alex (George Sanders). A couple of her uncles die, and they had a villa in Naples that they've bequeathed to her. So the husband and wife go off to Naples to settle the estate. But, their marriage has been in a parlous state for years, and with this trip to Naples, they finally admit what they've been unwilling to mention all this time. So the two decide that they'll spend some time apart from each other to determine whether they can repair their marriage. He goes to Capri; she travels around the ruins. Will they be able to put their marriage back together? You'll have to watch the movie to find that out.
Moving ahead to Saturday, TCM brings us 24 hours of George C. Scott. Scot won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Patton, which is airing at 5:00 PM. Scott plays Patton, the controversial World War II general who was the US military commander of occupied Germany after the war until his views got him fired and then he died in a car accident at the end of 1945. He had been a tank commander in World War I, but the movie only looks at Patton's role in World War II, where he again leads the tanks, becoming the one general the Nazis fear the most. But he constantly fought with British General Montgomery and wound up as a subordinate to four-star general Omar Bradley (Karl Malden). Ultimately, it's a portrait of a man who knew little other than how to be at war, and when there was no war, didn't know what to do.
The last star for this week in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Gary Cooper on Sunday. One of Cooper's lesser-seen movies is One Sunday Afternoon, airing at noon on Sunday. Gary Cooper plays Biff, a dentist married to Amy (Frances Fuller). One Sunday, his old and former friend Hugo (Neil Hamilton, of TV's Batman 30 years later) calls up looking to have a tooth pulled. While doing the job, Biff thinks back to when they were friends and what happened to screw up their relationship. Mostly, it was Hugo's doing. Hugo was a smooth operator and when the two guys were on a double date Hugo wound up taking the better-looking woman, Virginia (played by Fay Wray) away from Biff, leaving him with Amy (who would be better for Biff anyway). Then, when a business deal goes bad, Hugo arranges things so that Biff will have to take the fall for it even though it's Hugo who's thoroughly guilty. Biff spent several years in jail as a result, which is where he learned dentistry. If the plot sounds familiar, that's because the movie was remade in the early 1940s as The Strawberry Blonde.
Once again, there's not much on FXM Retro that I haven't recommended several times before, but there is another chance to catch The Iron Curtain, at 1:30 PM Tuesday and 11:50 AM Wednesday. This is one of Fox's docudramas from the late 1940s, looking at the case of Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews). Gouzenko was a cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa just after World War II, and was in charge of getting intelligence back to the Soviet authorities in Moscow -- the Soviets used a whole lot of front groups with unwitting dupes to get their info. Amazingly, Gouzenko was allowed to bring his wife (played by Gene Tierney), something that didn't normally happen since the Soviets wanted to keep family behind to give the people sent abroad a reason not to try to escape. She especially learns that the average Canadian is a decent, upstaning person, and when the couple has a kid and the Soviets recall the whole family, Igor decides to defect and tell the Canadian authorities just what the embassy is doing to them. This is all based on a real case, and Fox did a lot of establishing shots at the actual locations in the case.
Last but not least, we've got an interesting short worth seeing this week: Show Kids, at about 5:35 am Wednesday. The plot involves a kid whose parents run a theater that's going broke, so to raise money, the kid gets all his talented friends together and they put on a talent show. The short was done in color, and while some of the acts are interesting, some of them wind up looking a bit creepy 80 years on, which is of course interesting in a different way.
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