Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of July 31-August 6, 2017. Training camp is in full swing, but there aren't any meaningful games yet. So there's another opportunity to spend some time with a bunch of interesting movies. Tuesday is August 1, which on TCM means the start of the annual Summer Under the Stars, where each day brings the movies of a different star. And of course there are good movies on the other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off over on StarzEncore Westerns this week, with The Shooting, which will be on twice Monday, at 12:38 PM and 10:46 PM. Warren Oates plays Will, a mine owner, in partnership with another man and with a slow man as an employee. Will returns to the mine one day to find his partner has been killed and the slow man doesn't know what happened. Into all of this comes a woman (Millie Perkins), who is looking for an escort to a town on the other side of the desert. But on the way, she starts acting strangely, and Will begins to wonder what she really wants from him. This feeling is only heightened after the party picks up Billy (Jack Nicholson), a notorious sharpshooter. It's clear that the woman is looking for revenge for something more than she is looking for a way across the desert. But what, and what effect will it have on Will?
On Monday night, TCM is honoring Diane Keaton. Well, actually, the AFI already honored her, and TCM will be showing the AFI's tribute program at 8:00 PM, with a repeat at 1:00 AM for the benefit of viewers on the west coast. TCM is also showing a couple of Keaton's movies, including Manhattan Murder Mystery, at 2:30 AM Tuesday. Keaton is reunited with Woody Allen; this time the two play married couple Carol and Larry. One evening as they're returning to their apartment they run into an older couple in their apartment, Paul and Lillian. The seem to be happily married, but a few days later Carol finds that Lillian has died quite suddenly. And Paul doesn't seem to be bereaving quite as much as Carol thinks he should be, so Carol gets the idea that perhaps there was some foul play going on and Paul knows more than he's letting on. Larry of course thinks that this is nuts, but Carol invites her friend Ted (Alan Alda) to help in the investigation, which gets Larry involves, since Larry thinks Ted is trying to put the moves on Carol. And then Carol think she's seen Lillian quite alive, making things more complicated.
Tuesday is August 1, which means the start of Summer Under the Stars on TCM. Each day, TCM will have 24 hours of movies featuring a different star. The month kicks off with Marilyn Monroe, her day kicks off with one of her earliest movies, Ladies of the Chorus, at 6:00 AM. Monroe plays Peggy, who is one of the chorus girls, along with her mother Mae (Adele Jergens), a fortysomething cougar who was once a burlesque queen back in the day. The star of the show quits, and Mae gets Peggy to take the lead's role, something that makes Peggy a hit and in demand by all the sugar daddies out there. Randy (Rand Brooks) eventually proposes, but Mae is worried that high society won't accept Peggy because of her occupation, and wants the truth known before Peggy meets Randy's parents. Of course, things don't go quite as planned. Can Peggy find true happiness? This was made before Monroe became a star, but after she hit the big time, Columbia re-released this B movie giving her top billing. Still, Monroe is more than good enough in this fluff.
I see that Mommie Dearest is on this week; StarzEncore Classics is running several times including 12:21 AM Wednesday. This one is based on the book by Christina Crawford, adopted daughter of actress Joan Crawford (played here by Faye Dunaway). Joan, of course, was that great actress first at MGM for nearly two years and then moving to Warner Bros. where she won the Oscar for Mildred Pierce. But she didn't have a family, and wanted children. So she adopted two of them, and they all lived happily ever after. Oh no, of course they didn't live happily ever after, at least not according to Christina. Joan was a perfectionist, and supposedly beat the crap out of Christina for the littlest thing, most notably using wire hangers instead of wooden. And the ill treatment continued into adulthood if you believe the movie. Of course, the movie is so over the top it's tough to know what to believe. But that is what makes the movie so much fun. It's easy to pan everything about the movie, and yet, it's mesmerizingly entertaining. Howard da Silva plays Louis B. Mayer, who dumped Joan after all those years at MGM, while Steve Forrest (Dana Andrews' kid brother in real life) plays a made-up love interest for Joan.
Ray Milland is the star for Wednesday, and his day concludes with a movie that he also directed: Hostile Witness, at 4:00 AM Thursday. Milland plays Simon Crawford, a prominent London barrister, who unfortunately suffers in multiple ways when his daughter is killed in a hit-and-run accident. He goes off to a sanatorium to recover, and returns seemingly cured. But a couple of things happen. One is that evidence comes to light that his neighbor, a prominent judge, might have been the man behind the wheel in the accident that killed his daughter. And then that judge is found killed in a botched burglary. So of course Crawford is arrested and put in the dock. And he doesn't like the barrister representing him (Sylvia Syms) so he comes up with the brilliant idea of defending himself! Doesn't everybody know that's always an idiotic idea? It's kind of like directing yourself in a movie.
I've mentioned Michael Shayne a couple of times in the past. Shayne was a private eye played seven times in the early 1940s by Lloyd Nolan. (There were later movies with Hugh Beaumont after WWII.) FXM Retro has shown a couple of them, and now on the schedule is Blue, White, and Perfect, at 4:40 AM Friday. Michael, at the insistence of his long-suffering girlfriend, decides to give up being a detective, instead taking a job at a defense plant. Except that that's going to be short-lived, because Michael soon finds that somebody has stolen some industrial diamonds! So of course Michael starts doing some sleuthing, and figures out that there's a smuggling operation going on, engineered by the Nazis, and that the trail leads to Hawaii. Of course, the baddies are on the trail, trying to throw him and his girlfriend off the ship as they sail to Hawaii. George Reeves, later Superman on TV, plays a federal agent Michael meets on the ship who is part of the investigation into the diamond smuggling.
On Thursday we get a silent star in the form of Lon Chaney. Chaney played a whole bunch of different types of characters, but the oddest might be in Mr. Wu, which TCM is running at 3:00 PM Thursday. In this one, Chaney plays two Mr. Wus, one being the very elderly grandfather (in the film's prologue) of the other. The main action has the younger Wu being a wealthy man and strict traditionalist in early 20th century China, with a daughter of his own, Nang Ping (Renée Adorée). China at that time had a lot of foreigners coming trying to impose their business and religious interests on the country, and young Basil (Ralph Forbes) meets Nang Ping and falls in love with her. But of course he's going to have to break her heart by telling her he has to go back to Britain with his family. Nang Ping, however, has a surprise for him: he's knocked her up! Mr. Wu, understandably, is none too happy about this, especially because he'd already picked out a good husband for his daughter.
Friday on TCM is given over to the films of Claire Trevor, who won an Oscar for Key Largo (2:00 AM Saturday). This time around, however, I'll mention a film I don't think I've mentioned before: Born to Kill, at 8:00 PM Friday. Trevor plays divorcée Helen, who while in Reno runs across two dead bodies that are obviously murder victims; she decides not to do anything about it. On the train to San Francisco, she meets Sam (Lawrence Tierney), not realizing that he's the killer – and he doesn't realize she saw the bodies. Even though she's planning to marry Fred (Philip Terry), she has an attraction to Sam who, for his part marries Helen's wealthy half-sister Georgia (Audrey Long). But Sam and Helen are both rotten at the core, so you know in some way they're meant for each other. Meanwhile, back in Reno, a friend of the two murdered people has hired a private investigator (Walter Slezak) who cottons on to the fact that Sam and Helen are carrying on some sort of relationship….
Sunday's star is Robert Mitchum, that great star of noir over at RKO. One of his earliest movies, before he signed at RKO, is When Strangers Marry, at 7:30 AM Sunday on TCM. Kim Hunter plays Millie, a small-town girl waiting tables who has rather impulsively married traveling businessman Paul (Dean Jagger, not yet fully bald). Millie gets a call from Paul to come to New York to be with him, so of course she goes even though she's never been to the big city before. In New York, she meets Fred (Mitchum), who was in love with Millie and to be honest probably still is in love with her. And that's not the only problem Millie has. Paul has a big air of mystery about him, and as events unfold, Millie gets the distinct feeling that her husband may actually be a murderer, which as you can guess is a pretty big problem for her. William Castle directed, over a decade before he'd go on to do fun schlock horror, and Neil Hamilton plays a police lieutenant, in between his time as a leading man in the early 30s and playing Commissioner Gordon on Batman in the 1960s.