Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of May 11-17, 2020. A lot of America is still stuck under cower in place ukases, giving people a lot of time to watch movies. There's more from Star of the Month Edward G. Robinson on TCM, another TCM spotlight, and a bunch of interesting stuff on other channels, as well as some relatively recent stuff by my standards. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We've got a pair of movies this week that are homages to the 1930s. The first comes in TCM's Monday night lineup of movies with some tap dancing in them, that being Pennies from Heaven at 4:00 AM Tuesday. Steve Martin plays Arthur, a seller of sheet music in Depression-era Chicago trapped in a loveless marriage to Joan (Jessica Harper). While traveling through eastern Illinois selling music to various stores, he sees a lovely teacher Eileen (Bernadette Peters) looking to buy something for a children's chorus and sets out to find her. They fall in love but it threatens to turn tragic as Arthur knocks Eileen up, costing her her job and blowing up Arthur's marriage. Arthur also gets wrongly connected to a murder he didn't commit because there's circumstantial evidence linking him to the crime scene. That story isn't bad, but the big hook of the movie is that Arthur and Eileen have musical fantasies along the way that break out into song-and-dance numbers of vintage 1930s songs, and those won't work for a lot of people.
A movie that recently showed up in the FXM rotation is Intent to Kill. It's on again this week, at 6:00 AM Monday. Juan Menda (Herbert Lom) is a South American leader who was attacked a year earlier and left with a brain injury that needs to be treated, so he's been flown under an assumed name to Montreal where British doctor Bob McLaurin (Richard Todd) is going to operate on him. But there are all sorts of problems. Menda faces elements in his country that want him assassinated, and they've learned he's in Montreal. So they've sent a trio of killers to Montreal, headed by Finch (Warren Stevens) to infiltrate the hospital and give him an air embolism that will kill him without the doctors suspecting a thing. At the same time, Dr. Bob's wife wants him to return to England, and is even willing to go to his boss (Alexander Knox) with a made-up story that Bob is having an affair with Dr. Ferguson (Betsy Drake). Except that Ferguson clearly loves him, and as the story progresses, Bob finds he has been falling in love with his colleague.
Looking through this week's selections, is appears that this week's most recently movie is only 30 years old, which you should know is pretty recent by my standards. That film is Cadillac Man, at 1:34 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Classics. Robin Williams plays Joey O'Brien, a car salesman in Queens who has all sorts of problems. One is professional in that he hasn't been selling enough, and his boss, in Glengarry Glen Ross style, says that if Joey doesn't sell 12 cars in the next two days, he's going to be fired. At the same time, Joey is also dealing with an ex-wife, and the two girlfriends (Fran Drescher and Lori Petty) he's juggling, one of whom is currently married. And he's got a loan from a loan shark who wants Joey to pay up, immediately if not sooner. If all of that isn't bad enough, things are about to get worse when Larry (Tim Robbins) comes crashing in to the dealership, despondent because he thinks his wife is cheating on him. Larry brandishes an AK-47 and takes everybody at the dealership hostage at gunpoint. But this might just be a blessing in disguise for Joey.
The Wednesday spotlight on TCM is a look at Hollywood's portrayal of Asian Americans, which takes up the first three Wednesdays of the month. One of the more interesting ones is The Crimson Kimono, at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Sugar Torch is a stripper in Los Angeles who is coming up with a new Japanese-themed act, except that she gets shot and killed before the act can go on. The Japanese theme, of course, leads to Little Tokyo, so the police assign detective buddies (and roommates) Sgt. Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and Joe Kojaku (no “who loves you baby” please, played by James Shigeta) to the case since Kojaku is Japanese-American and can presumably operate in Little Tokyo more easily. Somebody who should be able to help them is artist Christine Downs (Victoria Shaw), who draws a sketch of a man they're looking for. First Bancroft falls in love with Christine, and then Kojaku does too, with Christine falling in love with Kojaku. Except that would be an interracial relationship, something severely frowned upon in those days.
Our next movie may sound familiar to you, but I don't think I've recommended it before. It's Showdown at Abilene, which is on StarzEncore Westerns at 5:42 AM Wednesday. Jock Mahoney plays Jim Trask, the former sheriff of Abilene, Kansas who went off to fight in the Civil War. The war is over and Jim is returning home to find that life has changed quite a bit. Everybody thought he had died in the war, so Jim's old friend Dave Mosely (Lyle Bettger) figured that the best thing he could do to honor Jim's memory was not to leave Jim's girl Peggy Bigelow (Martha Hyer) a spinster and marry her. Dave has also become something of a cattle baron, but as you can probably guess from having watched all these programmer westerns I've mentioned, there's about to be a war between the ranchers and the homesteading farmers. Jim is going to be called upon to be the peacemaker, having been the former sheriff. But having fought in the war, Jim doesn't want to carry a gun any longer. If this sounds familiar, it's because it was remade as Gunfight in Abilene, which I mentioned not too long ago.
Star of the Month Edward G. Robinson returns on Thursday night, with this week being dedicated to some of Robinson's more comedic roles. He really could do comedy, and shines in A Slight Case of Murder, which shows up at 9:45 PM Thursday on TCM. Robinson plays Remy Marco, a bootlegger during Prohibition who decides he's going to stay in the brewing game after Prohibition ends. The problem is that the beer he's beeing putting out is terrible, and the bankers, led by Post (John Litel), are out to foreclose. Meanwhile, Remy has problems in his personal life, as his wife Nora (Ruth Donnelly) wants to be a society lady, while his daughter Mary (Jane Bryan) is returning from finishing school and is in love with a state policeman. Things are about to get a whole lot worse when they go to Saratoga for horse season. A couple of Remy's enemies plan to ambush him, but get bumped off by another enemy, so bodies just keep mysteriously showing up for poor Remy even though he's completely innocent in their killings.
Friday night's lineup on TCM sees three movies about families who have their lives turned upside-down by crime. The night starts off with the 1956 version of Ransom! at 8:00 PM Friday. Glenn Ford plays Dave Stannard, a well-to-do businessman with a wife Edith (Donna Reed) and a young son Andy. One day Andy goes off to school, but when the bus comes back at the end of the day, Andy's not on it. Andy was supposedly taken away by the family doctor, who knows nothing about it, so Mom and Dad know that Andy was kidnapped, something that more or less breaks Mom. The police are waiting for the ransom call to come in and otherwise want to keep the case under wraps as much as possible. But, unsurprisingly, the media find out, and being the dishonest shits they've always been (just look at how they've spent the past two months trying to induce mass panic over the coronavirus), make a major case out of it, which causes Dad to do something quite drastic. Leslie Nielsen gets one of his dramatic roles here, as the reporter who gets closest to Mr. Stannard. This was remade in the 1990s with Mel Gibson in the lead role.
I'm not certain if I've recommended Midnight Run before. But it's on this week, and you've got a chance to catch it at 7:53 PM Saturday on Thriller Max (part of the Cinemax package). Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) is that rare thing, the allegedly honest cop who got kicked off the force at the behest of mob boss Jimmy Serrano (Dennis Farina). So now he's working as a bounty hunter. Jonathan “Duke” Mardukas (Charles Grodin) is an accountant who embezzled millions from Serrano and the Mob, got caught, but then jumped bail. The cops haven't been able to find Duke so call in Walsh, who of course finds Duke. But that's only half the battle. The other half is getting Duke back to Los Angeles to testify, Narrow Margin style. The FBI have their own plans, as does Serrano who has more obvious reasons for stopping Jack and Duke. There's a rival bounty hunter, and finally Duke himself isn't exactly the best person to have with you on a cross-country trip.
If you want something that's undemanding entertainment, you could do a lot worse than to watch The Crimson Pirate, airing at 3:30 AM Sunday on TCM. Burt Lancaster plays the titular pirate, Captain Vallo, sporting a ridiculous blond dye job. He and his crew take a ship where one of the passengers is Baron Gruda (Leslie Bradley), who is traveling to the Caribbean to quell a rebellion led by El Libre. Vallo, on hearing this, comes up with an audacious plan to sell Gruda's guns to El Libre and his men on one side, and then turn over El Libre to Gruda to get the bounty on the other side. Vallo's first mate Humble (Torin Thatcher) doesn't like this, for good reason, as it turns out that Gruda is unsurprisingly trying to screw the pirates over. It doesn't help that Vallo falls in love with one of the rebels, Consuelo (Eva Bartok), who happens to be El Libre's daughter. Lancaster's former real-life circus partner Nick Cravat plays Vallo's best friend Ojo, as a mute because in real life Cravat apparently had a really thick New York accent. Thoroughly unrealistic, but good production values and a rousing adventure. (And for the ladies, Lancaster spends way too much time shirtless.)
TCM is honoring Danny Aiello, who died back in December, on Sunday evening with a pair of his movies. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with The Purple Rose of Cairo. Aiello isn't the star here; he plays Monk, the layabout husband of Depression-era waitress Cecilia (Mia Farrow). Life is boring for Cecilia, who spends most of her time dreaming about the movies, to the point it costs her her job. She keeps going back to see a movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo, a not very good movie with a plot that probably would have been hoary for viewers back in 1935. It's so trite that during one of the showings, character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) decides he's had enough of it and walks out of the movie, literally walking through the screen and meeting Cecilia. But of course there's no way that Baxter can possibly be real. Meanwhile, the other actors in the movie, as well as the studio bosses, are in a frenzy trying to figure out what's going on. Directed by Woody Allen before he and Farrow had their big falling out.