Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of August 31-September 6, 2020. Although we're entering a new month, we still don't have a Star of the Month on TCM this week, instead getting one final day in Summer Under the Stars. However, the monthly spotlights do show up, along with something for the Labor Day weekend. There's also interesting stuff on some of the other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is still August 31, so we have one more day of Summer Under the Stars this week, that honoring French actor Alain Delon. Among the movies is Rocco and His Brothers, at 8:00 PM Monday on TCM. Delon plays Rocco Parondi, one of several brothers from a peasant family in southern Italy. Brother Vincenzo (Spiros Fokas) is living in Milan in the wealthier industrial north, so Mom (Katina Paxinou) moves the rest of the family up to Milan. Each brother tries to make a life for himself in Milan, with Simone (Renato Salvatori) taking up boxing and meeting a prostitute Nadie (Annie Girardot) with whom he falls in love and starts a relationship. Unfortunately, that relationship doesn't quite work out, so after it's finished, Rocco decides that perhaps he should start seeing Nadia since, after all, she seems to like him where she didn't have such strong positive feelings for Simone. Of course, Simone gets terribly jealous and that leads to some very bad things.
A programming feature TCM is running throughout the autumn (well, starting this week through November or maybe early December) is Women Make Film, a salute to female directors. Every Tuesday in prime time going into Wednesday morning, there will be a much of movies directed by women, with 100 or so directors spotlighted. One of this week's movies is Mädchen in Uniform, which will be on at 7:15 AM Wednesday. Made in Weimar Germany, the movie tells the story of Manuela (Hertha Thiele), a girl of 14 who gets sent to a girls' boarding school because Mom died and Dad is in the army. There, she's placed in the dormitory with faculty advisor Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck). All of the girls look up to von Bernburg, but for Manuela, is something more than just admiration. Life isn't always a joy for the girls because the school has a strict headmistress and tight financial constraints, so when the girls get a party after putting on a play for the headmistress, Manuela gets drunk on punch and tells the other girls how she really feels about von Bernburg, with disastrous consequences.
There are several movies titled Easy Money, and two of them are on this week. The one I'm recommending is from 1983, and is showing on MovieMax at 11:39 AM Thursday. Rodney Dangerfield plays Monty Capuletti, a photographer of children living with his wife Rose (Candy Azzara) and two kids. Rose's mom, Mrs. Monahan (Geraldine Fitzgerald) owns a department store and thinks Rose never should have married Monty because he spends too much time with his friend Nicky (Joe Pesci) drinking and gambling. Rose dies suddenly in a plane crash, and wills the department store to Monty. But there's a catch. Monty has to live clean for a year – no drinking, drugs, smoking, or gambling, and he has to get his weight down; otherwise the store goes to Rose's cousin Clive. Monty resents the idea of being told how to live his life at first, but everybody else sees so many dollar signs that not only his family, but Nicky and his other friends, try to keep Monty on the straight and narrow. Clive, for his part, tries to sabotage it, since if Monty fails, Clive gets the department store.
One of September's spotlights is a look at the so-called heroes on the so-called frontline, or doctors, with movies about doctors every Thursday in prime time. This first Thursday has some biopics, with one I'm not certain if I've recommended before being Sister Kenny at 10:00 PM Thursday. Rosalind Russell plays Elizabeth Kenny, who studied nursing in Australia and after graduating returned to her home in the outback circa 1910. One of her patients is a young girl diagnosed with “infantile paralysis”, a euphemism for polio. At the hospital, Dr. McConnell (Alexander Knox) thinks the girl will never walk again and for Kenny to treat the symptoms as best she can, but she's not having any of that, continuing to treat the girl by “spasming” the muscles and other physical therapy that eventually works, more or less. Of course, normal doctors think that perhaps these patients never had polio at all. Kenny continues to make sacrifices for her patients, including not marrying her boyfriend, Kevin Connors (Dean Jagger).
This weekend is Labor Day weekend, and TCM is spending the weekend with an end-of-summer salute to concert movies. On Friday through Sunday nights, there will be a whole bunch of “in concert” films, including ABBA: The Movie at 3:30 AM Saturday. Everybody's favorite Swedish band from the 1970s play themselves in this movie about the group's March 1977 tour of Austalia. There's a framing story about about Ashley (Robert Hughes), a small-town DJ, whose boss gives him the task of getting an interview with ABBA for a special program the station wants to do on the group and its tour. So Ashley follows the band around Australia as thy give performances, Ashley constantly getting kicked out of media appearances and doing the best he can talking to regular Australians about why they like the band. Of course, the real reason to watch this is for not just the concert performances, but the backstage footage of the group, such as the scene of them commenting on the Australian tabloids. This was directed by a young guy named Lasse Hallström who went on to bigger things.
Last week when Laurence Olivier was part of Summer Under the Stars, one of the movies shown was The Prince and the Showgirl, also starring Marilyn Monroe. That movie is the subject of the film My Week With Marilyn, which you can see at 9:20 AM Friday on Showtime Women. Kenneth Branagh plays Olivier, making the movie in England in 1956. Young film student Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) gets a job on the set as Olivier's assistant director. Monroe (Michelle Williams) was famously difficult to work with, and Olivier wants to make certain she shows up on time and the shooting goes as smoothly as reasonably possible, so Colin gets assigned to make certain Marilyn is where she's supposed to be. The two become friends of a sort on what turns out not to be such an easy shoot. Marilyn has problems with her husband at the time, Arthur Miller, while Olivier's then wife Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond) is jealous and thinks Laurence might be pursuing Marilyn. (In her defense, Laurence left Vivien a few years later for his co-star in The Entertainer, Joan Plowright.)
If you want silly but fun entertainment, you could do a lot worse this week than to watch The Prize, which will be on TCM at noon Saturday. Paul Newman plays Andrew Craig, a mystery writer who for some reason was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He shows up in Stockholm for the awards ceremony along with the science winners, most of whom have their own personal issues. One of the winners is physicist Dr. Stratman (Edward G. Robinson), who is nice to Craig the first time they meet. But the next time, Stratman is acting funny and doesn't actually recognize Craig despite their having met. Craig, having written a bunch of mysteries, decides he's going to investigate this real-life mystery, which ultimately involves Stratman having been replaced by a doppelgänger. There's also a lot of personal danger for Craig, including a humorous escape into a meeting of… Swedish nudists! Kevin McCarthy plays an American co-winner of the Medicine prize; Diane Baker plays Stratman's niece; and Elke Sommer plays the woman assigned by the Nobel committee to chaperone Craig around Stockholm.
One of the movies that's returning to FXM after an absence is Compulsion. It's got two airings this week, at 1:15 PM Saturday and again at 6:00 AM Sunday. Based on the infamous story of Leopold and Loeb, the film stars Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell as 1920s law students Arthur Straus and Judd Steiner respectively. They think they're superior to everybody else, and, wanting to know what the whole range of human emotions feels like, they decide to go on a thrill killing, with dominant Arthur badgering submissive Judd into it. Of course, the two get caught eventually, and their notorious case is going to go to trial. Their wealthy parents hire renowned defense attorney Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles), and he comes up with a unique defense. His plan is to have the two young men eschew a jury trial, instead going for a bench trial where Wilk has only to bamboozle a judge with pleas of leniency that a mob of a jury would never contenance. The cast also includes E.G. Marshal as the DA; Martin Milner as a fellow student who finds the key piece of evidence linking Arthur and Judd to the crime; and Diane Varsi as Milner's girlfriend.
A search of the website claims it's been a couple of years since I've mentioned Yellow Sky. It's on again this week, at 6:45 AM Sunday on StarzEncore Westerns. Gregory Peck plays Stretch Dawson, the leader of a gang of bank robbers including among others Dude (Richard Widmark) and Half Pint (Harry Morgan). In order to make a hasty getaway after one robbery, they flee into a section of the desert known for having even less water than most deserts. The crossing nearly kills them, until suddenly they come across a watering hole near a ghost town. Except that it isn't quite a ghost town, as there's one old man (James Barton) living there with his granddaughter Constance Mae (Anne Baxter), nicknamed Mike. All of the robbers figure out there has to be a reason the guy is still living here, and the obvious reason is that he must have found gold in the abandoned gold mine. Also, the guys find themselves falling in love with Mike to varying degrees, which brings some dissension to their ranks. Stretch, for his part, begins to think about keeping Mike and Grandpa safe from the other robbers.
Our final selection this week is The VIPs, which you can catch at 1:45 PM Sunday on TCM. The setting in London's Heathrow Airport, where a bunch of people are hoping to get on a transatlantic flight. Unfortunately, the airport is fogged in, so no flights can get out, leaving some wealthy people in the VIP lounge. Les (Robert Taylor) is an Australian businessman who has to get to a meeting in New York to save his corporation, traveling with his secretary (Maggie Smith). Liz Taylor plays Frances, married to Paul (Richard Burton), but leaving him, having left a “Dear John” letter at home that he's not supposed to get until after the plane is in the air. Max (Orson Welles) is trying to leave Britain so as not to fall afoul of residency laws that would stick him with a huge tax bill. And fallen Duchess of Brighton (Margaret Rutherford, who won an Oscar), is going to America to take a job she hopes will save the old family manor back in the UK. Their stories intertwine in what turns into a grand all-star movie reminiscent of early 1930s Hollywood.