Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 29-July 5, 2015. There's a holiday this week, so it should be a good time to catch up on your vintage movie viewing, since I know we all have a lot of movies to catch up on. This is also a weird week in that there's no TCM Star of the Month: In June it showed up on Wednesday nights, while in July we won't be getting one until Monday, July 6. That doesn't mean there aren't enjoyable movies on, of course. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's first selection is the ultra-B movie Zombies on Broadway. After the death of Robert Wheeler of the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy pair, RKO didn't have a good comedy team. In the 1940s, they tried pairing Wally Brown and Alan Carney. Here, the two play publicity agents for a nightclub owner (Sheldon Leonard, who is probably best known for producing The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV). The owner's new club, the Zombie Hut, is about to open, and advertising that he's going to have a real zombie on opening night. So it's obviously up to the two publicity men to procure the zombie. This, of course, is easier said than done, as there are no zombies in America and they have to go down to the Caribbean, where they find a professor (Bela Lugosi) who apparently does know how to create zombies. The plot is incredibly dumb, but that actually serves to make the movie charming: It's so idiotic it turns out to be fun. And this is decades before zombie movies became bloated and formulaic.
If you want more RKO B stuff, you could try Conspiracy, which is on at 6:45 PM Tuesday on TCM. Allan Lane plays Steve, an American in the merchant marine. While approaching port in one of those European fascist dictatorships that were common in the 1930s, another crewman pulls a gun on Steve and makes him send a coded message. The other crewman gets shot for his part, and Steve would be arrested except that he jumps overboard and swims to safety. Once ashore, he gets rescued by the dead sailor's sister Nedra (Linda Hayes). It turns out that the dead seaman was part of a ring of saboteurs trying to overthrow the evil dictatorship, or at least that's Nedra's story. Unsurprisingly, everybody tries to find Steve.
Wednesday is the birth anniversary of Charles Laughton, to TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with his movies. One that I don't think I've mentioned before is The Tuttles of Tahiti, airing at 9:30 AM. Laughton plays Jonas Tuttle, the apparently mixed-race patriarch of a family that's been living in Tahiti for generations. His nephew Chester (Jon Hall) is able to salvage a shipwreck, which should mean good money for the family. But Jonas would rather live a carefree existence, and is perfectly willing to spend all that money, not caring about where his sustenance is going to come from. It's a really odd little movie for having a bunch of white people play Polynesians, as well as for having been released about six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the South Pacific would have been under threat from Japan, if not already conquered. Unsurprisingly, though, Laughton is good as always.
Wednesday night on TCM brings a bunch of revisionist westerns. Most of these come from later in the western cycle, but the night concludes with The Paleface at 4:30 AM Thursday. This is a Buster Keaton silent two reeler, starring him as a white man who just happens to run afoul of the Indians by being white, so they try to burn him at the stake. Obviously he survives, and it turns out that the Indians are angry at the whites because some white oil barons tried to steal their land for the oil rights. But because Buster survived, the Indians figure he must have been sent by their gods to take on the other white men, and Buster duly obliges, becoming an honorary member of the tribe in the process. Buster Keaton always had inventive sight gags, and The Paleface is no different.
Elsewhere among the westerns is Chuka, airing at 12:10 PM Thursday and 3:30 AM Friday on Encore Westerns. Rod Taylor plays the title role, that of a gunfighter who, at the opening, stops a stagecoach from being attacked by Arapahoe Indians and helps get the passengers to safety at the nearby fort. The only thing is, it's not really going to be safety at the fort, because it's commanded by an incompetent Colonel Valois (John Mills), who has been given a minuscule command of people who are thoroughly unfit to serve anywhere else, which is why they've all been stationed to this outpost. The Colonel has been treating the Arapahoes like dirt, while his subordinate Sergeant Hahnsbach (Ernest Borgnine) has been treating the soldiers like dirt. So it's no surprise that at least some of the soldiers, notably Major Benson (Louis Heyward), are thinking of mutiny. And it's no wonder the Arapahoe want to attack. There's also eye candy in the form of Bond girl (from Thunderball) Luciana Paluzzi.
With summer here, some of you may fondly remember the beach movies that Frankie Avalon made with the late Annette Funicello. They were such a hit that other studios tried to cash in and make their own surf movies with other musical stars. One of the most hilariously bad is Surf Party, airing on FXM Retro at 12:30 PM Thursday and 4:30 AM Friday. Terry (Patricia Morrow) is a girl from Phoenix who takes two of her friends out to California to see her beach bum brother Skeet (Jerry Summers). Out in California, they meet surf shop owner Len, who was played by Bobby Vinton of all people! Terry falls for Len, while her friend Sylvia (Lory Patrick) falls for Skeet. Third friend Junior was played by Jackie DeShannon, before she told us to put a little love in our hearts. She falls for Milo, who's trying to impress Skeet who is apparently the king of the surf bums. Trying to gum up the works is killjoy police sergeant Neal (Richard Crane). This one has bad acting (who thought Vinton or DeShannon could act?), horrible dialogue, and incredibly bad surfing scenes that are so obviously of people standing in front of rear projection and making gyrating movements. Watch it for a good laugh, because it truly is that amazingly awful.
Thursday night on TCM sees another round of Treasures from the Disney Vault, the every few months series of stuff from Disney that TCM gets to show in exchange for cross-promoting some Disney attraction. This time, the night kicks off with a couple of cartoons at 8:00 PM, followed at 8:30 PM by Johnny Tremain. Based on a book you probably had to read back in middle school, Johnny Tremain (played by Hal Stalmaster) is an adolescent apprentice to a silversmith in early 1770s Boston, which is all well and good until he has an accident with molten metal that bruns one of his hands beyond recognition, which is a problem for a would-be silversmith. But being the 1770s, there's a revolutionary spirit in the air in Boston, and young Johnny gets involved with the Sons of Liberty and a bunch of the historical events of the day, up to the start of the Revolutionary War. This is a Disneyfied version of the American revolution, complete with one of the more execrable songs out there.
Charles McGraw was a star of RKO's tough guy movies of the early 1950s, with probably the most notable of those films being The Narrow Margin. The one that made him a star, however, was The Threat, which is airing at 4:45 PM Friday. McGraw plays Red Kluger, a vicious gangster who's in prison in California. Except, of course, that he's going to break out, which he does right at the beginning of the movie. And when he does break out, his plan is to get revenge on the people who put him in prison. So he commandeers a delivery truck, and goes on to kidnap the detective (Michael O'Shea), the DA (Frank Conroy), and his ex-girlfriend (Virginia Grey) who, Red thinks, snitched on him. He then takes them to the middle of nowhere, where he expects to be picked up by plane. Except of course that things don't quite work out that way. When RKO's B movies were good, they were really good, and this one is 66 minutes of nonstop action.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the blaxploitation movie Trouble Man. This week brings another blaxplotiation film: Cleopatra Jones, Sunday at 3:15 AM on TCM. Jones, played by Tamara Dobson, is a US Special Agent fighting the war on drugs using her own brand of kung fu, and standing about nine feet tall if you count the heels and afro. (How she can do the kung fu moves with those shoes is a mystery.) She also goes styling around town in a kickass Corvette, at least by 1973 standards. She burns a field of poppies in Turkey which were owned by the powerful drug lord "Mommy" (Shelley Winters!), and Mommy vows to gain revenge. Mommy gets the local police to put the hurt on Cleopatra's friends. But really, how could anybody gain revenge against somebody like Cleopatra Jones? Fans of old TV will also note the presence of Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch (er, Antonio Fargas) as one of Mommy's underlings.
And now for the shorts. I suppose I could recommend the Traveltalks shorts, of which there are two this week: a 1935 visit to Honolulu at 10:45 PM Monday, or a 1938 visit to Sydney, Australia at 11:05 AM Wednesday (following the aforementioned The Tuttles of Tahiti). But, this week also brings one of the old Believe it or Not shorts, which were presented by Robert Ripley himself back in the days when unblievable things like this were much harder to come by. That's on at 10:24 Thursday.
For the travelogues, there's a non-Traveltalks one airing this week: Season in Tyrol, at 5:39 AM Friday. The first time I saw this one, I thought it was going to be a making-of featurette for something like Where Eagles Dare that was filmed in the Alps. But no, this is a regular travelogue, made quite a few years after the studios generally stopped making shorts, looking at the four seasons of Tyrol in what would probably be really nice color if the short were restored and presented in widescreen. Still, there's a lot of looking at Austrian tradition and the Austrian countryside in this two-reeler, which winds up being just as entertaining as the old Traveltalks shorts.
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