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Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of May 22-28, 2017. Memorial Day is coming up this weekend (finally, a three-day weekend!), so we get a bunch of war movies. But there's also another night of Star of the Month Clark Gable, more Creature Features, and interesting stuff on other channels. I've used my good taste to select a bunch of movies that I know you'll all like. And as always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.

 

We'll start off this week again with something over on StarzEncore Westerns: The Iron Sheriff, at 6:11 AM Monday. The sheriff here is Galt, played by Sterling Hayden. He's one of those no-nonsense, law-and-order types, and dammit he's going to make certain justice is done. This presents a big problem, however, when a stagecoach is held up, and the driver, Walden is killed. Walden, before dying, is able to tell the authorities that he was shot by… Benjie Galt (Darryl Hickman), who as you can probably guess from the name is the sheriff's son. Now the sheriff, being the good dad that he is, wants to defend his son, despite his sworn duty to uphold the law. And it seems as though the more evidence Galt gathers, the more the finger points at his son. However, it also turns out that Benjie had taken a hankering to Walden's daughter Kathy (Kathleen Nolan), and perhaps Walden didn't like that and had it in for Benjie. And of course it also turns out that about half the town could have done the deed. This is really less of a western and more of a murder mystery/courtroom drama set in the old west.

 

TCM is showing a whole bunch of Laurence Olivier movies on Monday, and I could recommend all of them. Since all of you complain about old movies, however, I'll recommend the most recent of the ones that are airing, A Little Romance at 3:45 PM. Diane Lane plays Lauren, a precocious girl stuck in Paris while her mother Kay (Sally Kellerman) has followed her husband and Lauren's stepdad (Arthur Hill) there for work. Meanwhile, Kay has her eyes on the director of a movie filming in Paris. At the shooting location, Lauren tries to get away and runs into the equal misfit Daniel (Thelonious Bernard), and the two immediately hit it off. This, despite the fact that Lauren's mom doesn't approve of the relationship. Lauren and Daniel run into Julius (that's Olivier), an elderly man who tells them fantastic stories about the life he's lived, including the legend that if you kiss at sunset under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, you'll be in love for life. So Lauren and Daniel enlist Julius' help in running off to Venice. What they don't know is that he's actually a petty criminal, even though they're not really in any danger with him. This is a delightful little love story.

 

It's been quite some time since I recommended Act of Violence. It's on again at 7:45 AM Tuesday on TCM. Robert Ryan plays Joe Parkson, a former POW in World War II who shows up in the town where his former commanding officer, and fellow POW, Frank (Van Heflin) lives. Frank doesn't talk much about the war, as he's tried to move on by getting married to Edith (Janet Leigh) and starting a family. It's clear, though, that Frank doesn't want to see Joe again, and is unnerved by Joe's arrival. Frank has something to hide, and that something is a secret Joe knows. So Frank tries to escape, but Joe remains hot on his tail. Finally, Frank hooks up with a prostitute (Mary Astor) who knows people, and is able to offer Frank the services of somebody who might deal with Joe for good. But Frank isn't certain he wants that, and might finally be willing to open up to Edith about the war. Robert Ryan is excellent as always, and Heflin is also quite good. Janet Leigh doesn't have much to do here, to be honest, but she's fine in what she does do.

 

Fatal Attraction is on several times this week, including 1:06 PM Tuesday on StarzEncore Classics and 12:16 AM Thursday on the regular StarzEncore channel. (Or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed.) Michael Douglas plays Dan Gallagher, a successful New York lawyer with a nice wife Beth (Anne Archer) and daughter Ellen. However, one day Dan runs into Alex (Glenn Close), who seems, well, interesting. So Dan has a weekend-long relationship with her that he breaks off when Alex implies she wants it to go further than he does. End of story. Oh, of course not. Alex is a nut job, and she harasses Dan constantly. When that doesn't do the trick, she decides to show up at Dan and Beth's apartment, informing them that she's pregnant and that it's Dan's child. If that's not bad enough, she decides to become more and more obsessive, to the point that Dan and Beth clearly recognize their and their daughter's lives are in danger. But how can you shake off an obsessive psychopath? A wonderfully suspenseful movie.

 

Clark Gable fans will enjoy Lone Star, which is on TCM at 11:45 AM Wednesday. It's the early 1840s, and while there are some people who want Texas to be an independent republic, there are others who want it to be a state. So former president Andrew Jackson (Lionel Barrymore) recruits cattle baron Deveraux Burke (Gable) to try to influence prominent Texans into joining the United States. Specifically, it's to influence Sam Houston (veteran character actor Moroni Olson) who had been for annexation but is now wavering. But the real power behind the idea of remaining an independent republic is fellow cattleman and Texas senator Tom Craden (Broderick Crawford, playing the same guy he always did), who's going to stop Burke any way he can. Further complicating matters is that Burke meets and falls in love with a newspaper editor Martha (Ava Gardner) who just happens to be Craden's girlfriend as well.

 

Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, is coming up this weekend; more on that later. TCM is getting an early start on summer on Thursday, showing a bunch of summer-themed movies like Summer Holiday at 2:45 PM. This is a remake of the 1935 film (and earlier Eugene O'Neill play) Ah, Wilderness! Set in a small New England town in 1905, Richard Miller (Mickey Rooney) is a young man about to graduate high school and take on the world. However, he doesn't have that much experience with the real world. Instead, his life has been focused on his family (parents Walter Huston and Selena Royle; drunk uncle Frank Morgan; and parents' cousin Agnes Moorehead). The drunk uncle and cousin are right for each other but don't realize it; that's a subplot in the movie. There's also Muriel, the girl next door (Gloria DeHaven), who is right for Richard but he doesn't realize that. So Richard goes off one night and begins to learn about the real world when he meets chorus girl (she was a prostitute in the original) Belle (Marilyn Maxwell). Mickey Rooney was also in the 1935 movie, playing the kid brother.

 

I movie coming back to FXM Retro after a while is High Time, which will be on at 7:40 AM Tuesday and 6:00 AM Wednesday. Bing Crosby plays Harvey Howard, a widower with grown children who made a financial success for himself in life as a restaurateur. However, going into business at an early age meant that he had to sacrifice some things in life, such as going to college. And now that he no longer has a wife and young children to look after, he decides that now is the time go get that college education. That, and to do it the way traditional students do it, which is by becoming a regular freshman and living in the dorms like everybody else does. Naturally, this is going to cause all sorts of culture shock both for Harvey and for the traditional-age freshmen. But having an older man around can help somebody like a Gil Sparrow (teen singer Fabian), who is having romantic difficulties with Joy (Tuesday Weld). However, Harvey winds up with some romantic problems of his own, as he and the French professor (Nicole Maurey) fall for each other and Harvey isn't certain the relationship is right. Watch for a young Gavin MacLeod as a science prof.

 

It's been a good year and a half since I've recommended Men Must Fight. It's going to be on TCM again at 10:00 AM Friday, and is well worth a watch. Diana Wynyard plays Laura, who in 1914 goes off to Europe to be a nurse in World War I and meets pilot Geoffrey (Robert Young). He gets killed in action, but not before impregnating Laura. Young diplomat Edward Seward (Lewis Stone) realizes Laura's plight, and since he likes her anyway, he marries her and offers to raise the child as his own. Fast forward to 1940, which is in the future from the time the movie was made (1933). America has a pacifist movement, led in part by Mrs. Seward, while Europe seems to be preparing for war again and Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, is trying to figure out a way to achieve peace. Laura's child, Bob (Phillips Holmes), is all grown up and working as a research chemist and a girlfriend in lovely Peggy (Ruth Selwyn). Sure enough, war winds up coming to America, in a pretty dramatic way, and Bob is forced with a crisis of conscience. He's always tended towards agreeing with his mother's pacifism, but the braying crowds no longer want pacifism once America has been attacked. This is a surprisingly prescient movie, made more poignant by the fact that Holmes would become a training pilot for the Canadian Air Force in World War II and die in a training accident.

 

This is Memorial Day weekend, which means we're going to get a bunch of war movies. One that I think I haven't mentioned before is Hell to Eternity, airing on TCM at 2:45 AM Saturday. Jeffrey Hunter stars in the more or less true story of Guy Gabaldon (1926-2006), a Mexican-American kid in Los Angeles who was taken in by a Japanese-American foster family in the 1930s, which is how he learned the Japanese language. Of course, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were interned, including Guy's foster parents. So what's a young man to do? When Guy turned 18 he enlisted in the Marines and was shipped off to the Pacific theater, where he served with distinction, using his knowledge of Japanese to persuade hundreds if not thousands of Japanese soldiers to surrender. Gabaldon is played by Jeffrey Hunter who doesn't exactly look Mexican-American, but there was only so far Hollywood could go in 1960.

 

A different sort of war movie is 36 Hours, which will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Sunday. James Garner plays Maj. Pike. A US Army officer in late May 1944 who has some critical knowledge about the upcoming D-Day invasion. He's on an assignment to neutral Lisbon to pass false information about that invasion, but the Nazis decide to drug him to try to get the real information out of him. As part of the scheme, they set up an elaborate camp made up to look like an Allied military hospital as it would be in 1950, in the attempt to convince Pike the war has been over for years, that he's been suffering from amnesia, and that he can safely be debriefed. Of course it's still 1944 and the “debriefing” is all a hoax designed to get the real information from Pike. Rod Taylor plays Maj. Gerber, the Nazi officer in charge of the operation, while Eva Marie Saint plays Anna, a Jewish nurse whose knowledge of English makes her useful to the Nazi scheme.

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