Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of February 15-21, 2016. Football returns this week in the form of the Champions League, but I know a lot of you think that's boring. (I have no idea why.) So for those of you who don't like the Champions League, why not spend some time with some good movies? As always, I've looked through the TV schedules and used my good taste to pick out some movies I know you'll all like. Times listed are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I've recommended several of Sonja Henie's movies over on FXM. I'm pretty certain I've recommended Sun Valley Serenade among them, but I can't recall the last time I did. You've got another chance to watch on FXM Retro this week, at 9:15 AM Monday. Henie plays Karen, a war refugee (the film was released in 1941) whose passage to America was sponsored by Ted (John Payne), the pianist for Phil Corey's (Glenn Miller techincally not playing himself) band. Karen immediately falls for Ted, but he doesn't fall for her. Instead, he's in love with the band's singer Vivian (Lynn Bari). This obviously causes problems even though you know who is the right girl for Ted. A young Milton Berle plays the band's manager, while the musical number beyond Henie's skating introduce a very young Dorothy Dandrige. This is also the movie that introduced the Glenn Miller song "Chattanooga Choo Choo", which earned an Oscar nomination.
I've recommended Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House a bunch of times. A movie with similar themes that doesn't show up quite so often is George Washington Slept Here, which will be on TCM this Monday at 2:00 PM. Jack Benny and Ann Sheridan star as the Fullers, a couple living in a nice New York apartment. Well, not much longer, because they're being evicted for violating building rules. So they have to find a new place to live, and Mrs. Fuller thinks she's found just the place: a house out in the country that is famous for George Washington's allegedly having spent a night there. There's only one problem: the house is a serious fixer-upper. Very serious, as we can see from Mr. Fuller falling through the floor or down the stairs. And there's no water, and the guy they've hired to fix the place (Percy Kilbride, later Pa Kettle) seems to be causing more problems, especially with the neighbors. Perhaps the couple can get their uncle (Charles Coburn) to help foot the bill.
It's been a while since I've mentioned this film, but Encore Suspense is showing The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, at 9:35 AM Tuesday. To be honest, there's really not much suspense here: the story is based on the famous 1929 Chicago gangland massacre, and the movie is told in a docudrama format. Not only that, but all of the characters are introduced by voiceover so that we know who they are, and we are told right on meeting each of them what eventually happens to them. Still, it's a very effective way of telling the story, since it covers the events that led up to the massacre, things which involved a lot of complex goings-on between the rival gangs looking back at a couple of former gang leaders who got bumped off. (Hymie Weiss is played by Reed Hadley, who handled the voiceover for all those Fox docudramas of the 1940s. Now you get to see what he looks like.) Jason Robards plays Al Capone; Ralph Meeker plays rival gang leader Bugs Moran; George Segal plays Moran's right hand man Pete Gusenberg.
For a rousing action flick, you could do far worse than to watch The Guns of Navarone, which you can catch at 11:30 AM Tuesday on TCM. The title refers to a Greek island in the Aegean past which ships would have to go to get to the island of Kiros, where a bunch of British troops are basically under siege from the Nazis. But of course there are guns on Navarone (duh, the title), and the place is nearly impregnable. The only possible way to get on the island would be a sheer cliffside ascent, so Mallory (Gregory Peck) is hired to help get a team of commandos up the cliff. Unfortunately, things go wrong and Mallory gets a lot more than he bargained for, especially with munitions expert Miller (David Niven). Eventually they do make it up the cliff, only for Miller to discover that apparently somebody's tampering with his explosives, which of course means there's a traitor in their midst. And then we get an action-packed finale. Anthony Quinn and James Darren play Greeks on the mission.
Over on Encore Westerns, one that I haven't recommended before is Cattle Empire, airing at 1:45 AM Wednesday. Joel McCrea stars as John Cord, a man who's just gotten out of prison after several years. He had been a trail boss leading cattle drives, and on one of those drives the men he had hired basically destroyed a town. So obviously, those townsfolk don't like Cord, and when he shows up in town again, they're none too happy about it. Except that they have a problem. They have a bunch of cattle, and they need to get the cattle to the railway so they can transport it and earn the money they badly need. And Cord is just about the only person around who can lead the cattle drive. So they have to suck it up and let him lead their cattle on a drive. There are other complications, such as the fact that the guy with the cattle married Cord's former love interest, and there's a rival cattleman who also wants Cord to lead a cattle drive of his herd.
A few weeks back I mentioned the Tyrone Power historical action movie Prince of Foxes. That's going to be on FXM Retro again this week, but the historical action movie was a genre Power worked in a lot, so I'm going to mention a different one this week: The Black Rose, airing on FXM Retro at 3:30 AM Wednesday. Power here plays Walter of Gurnie, a Saxon living in a 13th century England ruled by the Normans (in reality, there was no longer much animosity between Normans and Saxons by the end of the 13th century). As a result of being Saxon, Walter has been disinherited, so he takes up with his archer servant Tristram (Jack Hawkins) to go east in search of fortune and to redeem himself. Along the way they meet up with a kept woman Maryam (CÉcile Aubry) and free her, before running into General Bayan (Orson Welles) who is on his way to China in a mission reminiscent of Marco Polo. Except that Bayan has designs on conquering the place. It's full of historical inaccuracies, but a pretty rousing adventure nonetheless.
A different sort of western is The Sheepman, which you can catch on TCM at 7:00 AM Wednesday. This one is a more light-hearted western, starring Glenn Ford. He plays Jason Sweet, a man who at the beginning of the movie comes into town and introduces himself to everybody in a variety of off-putting ways. It turns out that he plans to do something far more off-putting: raise sheep, having recently won a flock of sheep in a poker game. This is a cattle town, and cattle and sheep can't graze together since sheep destroy the grazing for the cattle. So for fairly obvious reasons, the rest of the town wants to get Jason out. Chief among these is the big cattle baron Col. Bedford (Leslie Nielsen) who, it turns out, also has a past history with Jason. Also coming between the two of them is Dell (Shirley MacLaine), who unsurprisingly becomes a love interest for both of the two leading men.
I've recommended the movie A Star is Born several times before, but I don't think I've recommended the 1976 version yet. That's coming on on TCM at 12:15 AM Thursday. In this, the third version of the movie (fourth if you count What Price Hollywood from 1932), the setting is changed from Hollywood to the world of rock and roll. Barbra Streisand stars as Esther Hoffman, playing the Vicki Lester character as a pop singer on the way up. She meets John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson), who is already on the way down thanks to his multiple substance abuse problems. They fall in love, but you know what's going to happen, although the earlier versions of the movie didn't have groupies to tempt the Norman Maine character. And it doesn't help that this one is so totally about Streisand. There's a reason why I've always preferred the Janet Gaynor version, but this version at least provides laughable material to see how a movie can go so wrong. And if by some chance you do like the singing of Barbra Streisand, you've got that in spades.
A movie that's a guilty pleasure of mine is The Fury. It's coming up at 9:00 PM Friday on Encore Suspense. Kirk Douglas plays Peter, a secret agent who, while on vacation, finds his son Robin (Andrew Stevens) kidnapped by fellow government agent Ben (John Cassavetes). It turns out that Robin has some sort of psychic/telekinetic powers, and so it's only natural that the government would want to take these powers and weaponize them! Dad, understandably, is none too pleased about this, and goes on a quest to find his son. This leads him to the Paragon Institute which trains other adolescents with psychic powers, where he finds Gillian (Amy Irving). She's their best student, but she doesn't quite know how to harness her powers. And having to go with this strange man to find a fellow psychic is going to put quite a mental strain on her. Stay for the wonderfully gory finale.
I can't remember whether I've posted here on The Southerner before, but it's coming up this week, at 4:30 AM Saturday on TCM, and is worth a watch. The title character is played by Zachary Scott, in the same year he was Monty Beragon in Mildred Pierce. Here, he's Sam Tucker, a white sharecropper living with his wife (Betty Field), their two children, and his grandmother (Beulah Bondi). He gets the idea that he'd like to farm his own land despite not having the money for it, but comes up with an idea to farm an unused piece of land and then use the first year's crops to help pay off the mortgage. Needless to say, when the family gets to the land, they find it's a disaster area, with the house in more need of fixing than the one in George Washington Slept Here, as well as all sorts of problems with planting, bad neighbors, family members getting sick, and then a flooding rain. The movie also romanticizes the main family a bit too much, but is still a very worthwhile film.
