Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of April 12-18, 2021. Apparently there's a bunch of tedious gun-confiscation debating going on in the main forum which isn't going to change anybody's minds. So if you don't want to deal with that, why not watch some good movies instead? There are more Oscar-nominated movies on TCM, but some interesting, more recent stuff on some of the other channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
For those of you who like the films of Woody Allen, you'll probably like Interiors, which is on TCM at 5:00 AM Monday. Arthur (E.G. Marshall) and Eve (Geraldine Page) are a couple now pushing 60 with three adult daughters. Having gotten the children to adulthood, and thinking that Eve has been controlling, Arthur decides that he's going to ask Eve for a separation, something that leads her to have a nervous breakdown. This forces the three daughters to examine their parents' relationship and their own relationships within the family and to the men in their lives. Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) is the middle child and the one who gets the difficult task of caring for Mom after the breakdown, especially since Mom doesn't like her partner Mike (Sam Waterston). Renata (Diane Keaton) is a successful poet whose auther husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) resents her success. Flyn (Kristin Griffith) got away from the family to go to Hollywood to try to become an actress. Things get even more complicated when Dad meets Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) and starts a relationship with her.
A search of the site claims that I haven't mentioned Showdown since the last purge of the archives, so I'll point out that it's going to be on this week, at 8:34 AM Monday on StarzEncore Westerns. Rock Hudson plays Chuck Jarvis, who runs a ranch in New Mexico living with his wife Kate (Susan Clark) and also serving as the local sheriff. One day he hears about a train robbery and forms a posse to look for the gang that robbed the train. The problem is that the gang is headed by one Billy Massey (Dean Martin), who was an old friend of Chuck's many years ago. Well, that's not the only problem. It seems that after the robbery, instead of splitting the loot with the rest of the gang, Billy decided to run off with all the money, killing one of the other gang members and leaving to rest to chase him just like the sheriff is doing. And you've got a local prosecutor (John McLiam) who wants to administer much harsher justice than Chuck wants to.
Among the more recent movies this week is At Close Range, on Showtime 2 at 4:00 PM Monday. Sean Penn plays Brad Whitewood Jr., a young man living in the lower-class part of southeastern Pennsylvania with his divorced mom; Dad Brad Sr. (Christopher Walken) only comes into the scene periodically to give the family some money. Dad is in and out of their lives because he's spent time in prison, being the leader of a gang committing a whole bunch of robberies. But after one too many run-ins with Mom, Brad Jr. decides he wants to try bonding with Dad. It's a serious mistake, made worse when Brad Jr. forms a gang of his own to try to commit robberies too. Naturally, being inexperienced, their first heist goes wrong, and the police are able to start applying pressure on the members of Brad Jr.'s gang to get the goods on Brad Sr. Brad Sr. will stop at nothing to stop his son's friends from doing this, including committing murder. Chris Penn plays Brad Jr.'s brother Tommy, and Mary Stuart Masterson plays Brad Jr.'s girlfriend. It's all based on a true story, and Sean's then wife at the time contributed the song “Live to Tell”. Amazingly, the movie didn't get any Oscar nominations.
In the early days of sound, several Hollywood studios did revue movies as a sort of sound test for their silent stars. Universal did one, too, but theirs was different. That film, The King of Jazz, will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Tuesday. The title refers to Paul Whiteman, a jazz bandleader who famously commissioned George Gershwin to write something for the band; that something wound up being Rhapsody in Blue. The song is played here, in two-strip Technicolor, in a fairly spectacular sequence including giant grand pianos. There are a bunch of short comedy sketches mixed in (watch for Walter Brennan), and various singers who are remembered to differing extents. Bing Crosby is at the beginning of his career, not yet a soloist, but a part of the Rhythm Boys. Another memorably song is “Happy Feet”, which includes a frighteningly flexible dancer named Al Norman. A few of the segments survive only in audio, unfortunately.
I didn't realize that The Ladykillers got an Oscar nomination, so TCM can run it in 31 Days of Oscar. That airing is coming on at 10:00 PM Wednesday. Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) is a thief who's planned an armored-van robbery at one of the London train stations. To prepare for it, he rents a house from a seemingly sweet old lady, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). Together with Maj. Courtney (Cecil Parker), Robinson (Peter Sellers), Lawson (Danny Green), and Harvey (Herbert Lom), Marcus prepares for the robbery while they're all living in the Wilberforce house under the guise of being an orchestra. What they don't know is that Wilberforce is eccentric and has a habit of going to the police and informing them of all manner of things that are in fact perfectly legal. What's she going to do if she finds out that there's a real crime in her midst? Surely she's going to find out, since none of these heists ever goes quite according to plan. As expected, something goes wrong and Marcus has to try to talk his way out of it with Mrs. Wilberforce.
Enemy Mine has been in the FXM rotation for a little while now, and I don't think I've ever mentioned it before here, so since it's on this week at 1:10 PM Thursday, I figured I'd point out its airing this week. The movie is set in a distant future, when Earth has begun to colonize space, only to come up against another species, the reptilian Dracs. In one of the battles, fighter pilot Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) gets shot down over an unknown planet, where he's forced to crash land. One of the Dracs, Jariba (Louis Gossett Jr.) has also crashed. But since it's such a harsh environment and there are no other combatants, the two form an unlikely alliance. But then to make things more complicated, Jariba is pregnant and dies in childbirth, forcing Davidge to raise a Drac alone and hope to fulfill Jariba's vow to make the kid a real Drac by reciting its heritage on the Drac home world. Not just getting off the planet but other complications abound. It veers into unintentional silliness, but it's still good fun.
A movie can get nominated for something like Best Sound without being otherwise memorable, allowing it to be used in 31 Days of Oscar. An example of this is Libel, on TCM at 6:00 AM Thursday. Dirk Bogarde plays Mark Loddon, a British nobleman married to American Lady Margaret (Olivia de Havilland) and living in the old family estate. However, Sir Mark has some severe memory problems resulting from his time as a POW in World War II and the attempt to escape from the POW camp. Canadian pilot Jeffrey Buckenham (Paul Massie), on a layover in London, sees a BBC program about Sir Mark's estate, which brings back some old suspicions. A visit to the estate confirms that suspicion, which is that this isn't Sir Mark, but fellow POW Frank Welney (also played by Bogarde), an actor who killed Sir Mark during the escape attempt and took Mark's place and wife. Jeffrey decides to write an open letter to a scandal sheet, which leads to the titular libel trial, with Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde-White as the barristers.
Another comedy that's even funnier than The Ladykillers is Airplane! You can catch it this week at 8:00 PM Friday on Starz Comedy. The nominal plot involves Ted Striker (Robert Hays), a Vietnam-era pilot who pursues his estranged flight attendant girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty) onto a flight. Too many of the people have the fish, which makes them violently ill, including the pilot Captain Oveur (Peter Graves). So they need an experienced pilot to land the plane, and of course there's Ted, even though after his experiences in Vietnam he has no desire to get into the cockpit again. Of course, Airplane! isn't a movie you watch for the plot, but for the humor, parodying a pretty good Dana Andrews movie called Zero Hour! along with the disaster films of the 1970s. Leslie Nielsen plays a passenger not named Shirley, and Robert Stack is down in the control tower. And don't tell the co-pilot he looks like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If you like gladiator movies, then you'll love Airplane!
Back on TCM, and for those of you who like older movies, we've got Manhattan Melodrama, at 2:15 AM Saturday. The movie starts off with a brief prologue of two childhood friends, Blackie (Mickie Rooney) and Jim, who survive a cruise-boat fire that kills a bunch of others and leaves the kids orphaned. Fast forward many years, and Blackie has grown up (played by Clark Gable) and become a big figure in the underworld, running gambling joints and speakeasies. Jim (played as an adult by William Powell), on the other hand, was the “good” kid, who would ultimately go to law school and become Manhattan DA, with an eye to running for governor. Jim has also married Blackie's former girlfriend, Eleanor (Myrna Loy). But things hit a snag when Blackie orders the murder of a man who could stand in the way of Jim's run for governor. It's going to be a high test of Jim's morals, something that stands in sharp contrast to the scum New Yorkers have elected to the governor's mansion for the past several decades.
Ricardo Montalbán doesn't get enough credit for how good of an actor he could be. Even in spite of mis-casting, he does a fine job in Mystery Street, airing on TCM at 2:15 PM Sunday. Montalbán plays Peter Moralas, a police chief out on Cape Cod (he's passed off as being part of the Portuguese-American community). One day, a skeleton is found in the dunes along the beach in his jurisdiction, and it turns out said skeleton is part of a missing-persons case. Vivian (Jan Sterling) was a nightclub dancer who may have gotten in trouble with a patron. But since she's only a skeleton, Moralas calls in Harvard forensic scientist Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) to help with the investigation. McAdoo determines not just that the skeleton was a woman, but that she was also pregnant at the time of her death, making murder much more likely. But who did it and why? Elsa Lanchester shines in a supporting role as the landlord of the rooming house where Vivian lived.