Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of April 13-19, 2020. The TCM Film Festival was supposed to take place this weekend out in Los Angeles, but the Wuhan coronavirus hit and the braying desire of the bansturbators to make everybody else's lives a living hell too necessitated the cancellation of the festival, something which brought big changes to this week's schedule. But before that, we get another night of Star of the Month Jane Russell, as well as interesting stuff on other movie channels, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We get a second night of movies from TCM Star of the Month Jane Russell on Monday night, including one I haven't mentioned in a while, Macao, at 10:15 PM Monday. Russell plays nightclub singer Julie, on the boat from Hong Kong to Macao (neither of which were owned by mainland China at the time of course) with ex-serviceman Nick (Robert Mitchum) and salesman Trumble (William Bendix). Corrupt underworld casino owner Halloran (Brad Dexter) thinks Nick is the undercover police officer he's expecting to show up to try to lure him into international waters because Halloran had the last one bumped off. Halloran tries to bribe Nick to return to Hong Kong, but he's fallen for Julie and Halloran's proposal only makes Nick more curious. This brings Nick into danger. Thankfully, the women are there, both Julie and Halloran's girlfriend Margie (Gloria Grahame). Margie's jealousy may just allow Nick to escape.
I've been recommending a lot of Audie Murphy on StarzEncore Westerns lately, so this week I'll go in a different direction and pick a Hopalong Cassidy movie instead. This time, it's Lumberjack, on StarzEncore Westerns at 2:32 AM Tuesday. William Boyd once again plays Hopalong Cassidy, this time showing up with his sidekick California Carson (Andy Clyde) in a town where a woman Julie Jordan (Ellen Hall) has just become a widow. It seems that her husband owned a large spread and was engaged in a timber deal, and bad guy Keefer (Douglass Dumbrille) wanted a monopoly on the forestry sector. So he had the husband killed and is trying to shoehorn Julie out of the deal she signed. Keefer and his henchmen try to put all sorts of roadblocks in the way for Julie so that the deal fails and he can take over the land at public auction. Hopalong decides he's going to help Julie, and figure out who killed her husband. We've heard this plot before, only with standard-issue ranching rather than forestry.
TCM is running a salute to actor Clifton Webb on Tuesday in prime time, including what I think is the TCM premiere of a movie I really love, The Man Who Never Was, at 9:45 PM Tuesday. Based on the true story of Operation Mincemeat in World War II, the movie stars Webb as Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, who is given the task of trying to fool the Nazis into thinking the invasion from the Mediterranean is going to be somewhere other than Sicily. Montagu's idea is to plant a drowned military officer on a beach in Spain with information about the invasion being in Greece. But there's the big question of how to make this convincing enough to fool the Germans. That's all covered in a sort of reverse CSI, with Montagu using the roommate of his colleague, Lucy Sherwood (Gloria Grahame) as the phony girlfriend of the phony army officer. Once the Nazis find the dead man, they decide to investigate in the UK, sending in a neutral Irishman who is a Nazi sympathizer, Patrick O'Reilly (Stephen Boyd). Will the Germans uncover the hoax?
A movie that recently began appearing on the FXM schedule is The Big Gamble. It's going to be on again twice on Wednesday, at 3:00 AM and 1:15 PM. Stephen Boyd plays Vic Brennan, who is returning to his extended family in Dublin after spending several years in the merchant marine and picking up a Corsican wife Marie (Juliette Greco) along the way. While meeting all sorts of people as a sailor, Vic got an idea for a business, to start a trucking concern in one of the newly independent African countries, in this case Côte d'Ivoire. But he needs money to start up the business, which is why he's seeing the family. Eventually they agree to finance the proposition, with a catch: they're going to send along bookkeeper cousin Sam (David Wayne) to make certain the money isn't being misused. Sam, however, is thoroughly unsuited for such an adventure. Vic, Sam, and Marie set off, and their first job is to transport 300 cases of beer halfway across the country, with all the tropes about undeveloped Africa that you can imagine. Unfortunately, FXM is running a panned-and-scanned print, so the scenery doesn't look anywhere near as good as it should.
The TCM Classic Film Festival was supposed to take place this week, but was canceled thanks to the insane panicking over the Wuhan coronavirus. So TCM decided to change its schedule around and do a sort of virtual tribute to the festival, spotlighting a bunch of movies that ran at previous Festivals and showing a few that were set to be highlights this year. That, and they'll be showing some of the interviews they've done at previous festivals, including those with actors who have subsequently left us. The first Festival back in 2010 kicked off with the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, and TCM is showing it at 8:00 PM Thursday to kick off the Festival at home. You know the story; Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland in this version) leaves her humdrum small-town existence to go to Hollywood to try to make it big. It's tough, until she has a chance meeting with big star Norman Maine (James Mason). The two fall in love, and Esther, name changed to Vicki Lester, becomes a star. But Norman is an alcoholic, and his career is failing, as he becomes an anchor to Vicki. Charles Bickford plays the studio boss, while Jack Carson plays Norman's PR man.
I mentioned above that TCM is re-running some of the interviews with people from previous TCM Film Festivals during the Home Edition. Each of the honorees also gets a related movie, in most cases starring them. A couple that are really worth mentioning are Eva Marie Saint, whose interview is on at 2:00 PM Friday. She has a great story about being a kid back in the 1930s and learning not to put her elbows on the table, never mind all the movie stuff. That interview will be followed by North By Northwest at 3:00 PM.
Peter O'Toole gave a long interview at the festival a few years before he died, and the producers at TCM had the difficult task of editing it down into a one-hour show. But they did, and we get that interview again st 9:00 AM Sunday. That will be followed at 10:00 AM by Lawrence of Arabia, which isn't my favorite movie, but it made O'Toole a star and is one that lots of people think is one of the greatest of all time.
If you want a movie that's just plain fun, you could do a lot worse than to see Smokey and the Bandit. It's airing this week at 10:47 AM Friday on StarzEncore Classics. Burt Reynolds plays the Bandit, who along with his truck driver friend Cledus (Jerry Reed) gets a special job but one that isn't going to be easy. A local politician in Georgia wants a trailer's worth of Coors beer for a big event. But back in the 1970s when the movie was made, Coors was only sold west of the Mississippi. So the two are going to have to make a beeline for Texas and then back to Georgia to pick up that beer. This is a big problem in part because states have strict rules on alcohol distribution thanks to the 21st Amendment, and because to bring that beer back in time, they're going to have to break every speed limit known to man. After picking up the beer, the two are stopped by Carrie (Sally Field), who is set to be married to a man she doesn't want to marry, the son of local sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason). The sheriff is determined to catch both Carrie and the speeding, bootlegging scofflaws, jurisdiction be damned.
In 2016, the TCM Film Festival celebrated the 90th anniversary of Vitaphone, the sound-on-disc process first used for Don Juan (sound effects and score only; no dialogue) and a series of shorts that did have talking and singing. They ran a couple of late-1920s Vitaphone shorts, and those will be in a half-hour block at 10:30 AM Saturday. First up is Baby Rose Marie, who is the same Rose Marie who would go on to do the Dick Van Dyke Show, the Hollywood Squares, and have a final act in her 90s telling the story of her life. Then there's Don't Get Nervous which isn't particularly noteworthy to be honest. Finally is Lambchops, which is George Burns in his early 30s and his wife Gracie Allen doing one of the routines they had been doing in vaudeville. It's easy to see why Burns and Allen were popular and the highlight of so many of the 1930s variety movies they were in.
One of the spotlights on TCM this month was Peter Bogdanovich movies on Saturdays in prime time before Noir Alley. Due to the scheduling of the TCM Film Festival at Home, this Saturday's movies have been pre-empted. But Bogdanovich has presented movies at the Festival in the past, and will be co-hosting a pair of those movies on Saturday night, starting with Casablanca at 8:00 PM. This is another one where you know the story. Humphrey Bogart plays Rick, who runs a café in Vichy-era Casablanca, where people try to escape to Portugal and then the west. Two letters of transit have shown up in Casablanca, and Captain Renault (Claude Rains) wants to know who stole them and where they are. Who should show up at Rick's but Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), with whom he had a torrid affair in Paris before the Nazis occupied it while her husband Victor was in a concentration camp and possibly dead? But Victor isn't dead, and shows up in Casablanca too. What will Rick do? This one is filled with lots of great performances.
You have to love it when Hollywood gets Wisconsin badly wrong. Another Wisconsin-set movie filmed nowhere near the place is The Great Outdoors, which shows up on Starz Comedy at 3:18 PM Sunday. John Candy plays Chet Ripley, a Chicago father who decides he's going to take his wife Connie (Stephanie Faracy) and two sons on a vacation up to one of those Wisconsin lakeside places that Chet remembers from his own childhood. (In fact, that's the same Bass Lake used in Leave Her to Heaven substituting for Wisconsin.) Things unsurprisingly go wrong from the start, and only get worse when some unexpected visitors in the form of Connie's sister Kate (Annette Bening), her obnoxious husband Roman (Dan Aykoryd), and their two daughters. Chet is all ready to pack up and leave, but the elder son is beginning to like the place since he's met a nice local girl he likes. And Roman actually has non-obnoxious reasons for bothering Chet on his family vacation.