Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of April 2-8, 2018. It's the first full week of a new month, so we get a new Star of the Month on TCM, as well as a couple of spotlights. There are also a lot of interesting movies on other channels, and I've selected a bunch of stuff that I know you'll all find interesting. At least, it's all a hell of a lot more interesting than baseball. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start this week going out west with Richard Widmark. Widmark did a surprising number of westerns in his career, and this week I'll mention Backlash, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 5:18 AM Monday. Widmark plays Jim Slater, a madn who has come west looking for information into his father's death. It turns out that his father was one of five men killed in an Apache attack. But – there was a sixth white person involved in the party, and the party had been transporting a whole bunch of gold, so the presumption is that the sixth person got the gold which was never found. This also presents other problems, because with it being public knowledge that five guys were killed in a gold transport, you've got relatives of the other four dead guys trying to find out what happened to their relatives, and what happened to that gold. Amongst those relatives is Karyl (Donna Reed), who wants to know what happened to her husband. The relationship between Jim and Karyl grows more complicated….
Now that we're in a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, it's going to be William Holden, whose career spanned the late 1930s through to just before his tragic death in the early 1980s. TCM will be running Holden's films every Monday in prime time, and this first Monday has some of Holden's earlier films. One that I don't think I've mentioned before is Dear Ruth, which will be on at 1:45 AM Tuesday. Ruth (Joan Caulfield) is a young woman living in one of those middle-class suburbs with her judge father (Edward Arnold), mother, and kid sister Miriam (Mona Freeman), although she's going to be moving out once she marries her fiancé Albert (Billy De Wolfe). One day, into this idyllic existence comes Lt. William Seacroft (William Holden), announcing that he and Ruth have been exchanging letters for a couple of years now while he was off fighting in World War II, and he'd like to meet her in person. The only thing is, Ruth claims to have no memory of having written these letters. That's true, because Miriam used her name to do it. But Will fell in love with Miriam's image of Ruth, and Will is just such a good guy especially compared to Albert….
If you want early Bette Davis, you'll get that in Cabin in the Cotton, at 7:30 AM Wednesday on TCM. Davis is third-billed, behind leading man Richard Barthelmess playing Marvin Blake. Marvin and his family are white sharecroppers growing cotton for the Norwoods; Madge (that's Bette Davis) is the daughter in the family. After Marvin's dad dies, Marvin studies to become bookkeeper at the Norwood company store, putting him squarely between two factions full of enmity. The Norwoods don't trust the sharecroppers (they are, after all, stealing cotton), while the sharecroppers constantly believe the Norwoods are out to cheat them in every way possible (Norwood has been cooking the books). Madge is acting like she's in love with Marvin, although it's more the fact that he's just so exotic because he's a sharecopper and all that. The right woman for Marvin would probably by cousin Betty (Dorothy Jordan, who gets credit above Davis who wasn't a star yet.) Eventually the dispute between the growers and the Norwoods and other landowners threatens to reach a burning point, and Marvin has to try to come up with a solution.
TCM is putting a spotlight on director Michael Curtiz every Wednesday in April starting at 6:00 AM. Unfortunately, they couldn't get any of the silents Curtiz made in his native Hungary (I know at least one survives but I don't know how many do), so it's his Hollywood work which was mostly at Warner Bros. One I don't think I've recommended before is Jimmy the Gent, which you can catch at 3:00 AM Thursday. James Cagney plays Jimmy, a sort of private investigator who specializes in finding the living relatives of rich people who died without a proper will, so that Jimmy can get them their money. Of course, sometimes it's less than honest as Jimmy uses any means necessary to find the heirs, and wouldn't be averse to passing off non-relatives as relatives. This causes his right-hand woman and would-be girlfriend, Joan (Bette Davis again), to want something better, so she leaves Jimmy's firm to take a job with much more polished rival Charles Wallingham (Alan Dinehart). When Jimmy sees Wallingham's operation, he decides that the way to win Joan back is to start showing class. Along the way he learns a few things about Wallingham's honesty.
If you think I only recommend old movies, this week I've got something relatively recent: Bird on a Wire, at 8:55 AM Thursday on HBO Comedy. Goldie Hawn plays Marianne, a New York attorney who has to fly out to Detroit to do a business deal. While stopping for gas there, she's served by attendant Bobby Ray (Mel Gibson), who she thinks looks suspiciously like her old boyfriend Rick who died 15 years earlier when the two were engaged. That's because he is Rick, and has spent the last 15 years in the Witness Relocation program, having testified against a pair of drug agents who were actually dealing drugs. One of those two, Sorenson (David Carradine), has recently been released from prison and is now looking for Rick. Marianne saves Rick from Sorenson once, and the two begin a cross-country search for Rick's retired FBI handler. A fun, if well-trod, movie in the romantic chase genre. The Wisconsin folks here will have some fun with how the movie gets Wisconsin wrong: first Rick and Marianne take a Great Lakes ferry from Detroit to Racine, and then there's a chase scene through Racine's bustling Chinatown. (A lot of the filming was done in Vancouver, BC.)
On Thursdays in prime time in April, TCM will be running a Victorian film festival. That is, all of the movies are set in the UK's Victorian era; there aren't that many surviving movies from that time. This first Thursday in April looks at crime in Victorian Britain, and I'll recommend The Hour of 13, which comes on at 2:00 AM Friday. Peter Lawford plays Revel, a dashing young man who gets invited to all the society parties hosted by widows. Of course, Revel is really a jewel thief, and he uses his invites as an in to steal some lovely jewels from the lonely rich ladies. There's something crimping his style, however, which is a serial killer who has been killing London bobbies. One of the killings coincides with a jewel theft, and the police start to relate the two. Revel has to find the real cop-killer. Complicating matters is that Revel has met Miss Jane Frensham (Dawn Addams), daughter of the Scotland Yard Commissioner, and fallen in love with her, this even though she's engaged to another man. If all of this sounds familiar to you, that's because the movie was based on an old book which had already been turned into a movie once before, as the Robert Montgomery vehicle The Mystery of Mr. X.
I thought I recommended The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw not too long ago, but a search of the site says no, so I'll point out that it's going to be on FXM Retro at 11:10 AM Friday. Kenneth More plays Jonathan Tibbs, the younger generation of a British gun manufacturing family in the Victorian era. He hasn't shown much interest in the business, so his uncle decides to send him to America to open up a new market in the Wild West and to teach him a bit about business. Tibbs goes off armed with his wrist holster that allows a man to concealed carry a pistol, and to draw it surprisingly quickly, which helps out when the stagecoach is attacked near Fractured Jaw. Sadly, the town is plagued by a war between two opposing ranchers, and there isn't much law here, so the mayor (Henry Hull) comes up with the brilliant idea of getting Tibbs to take the job since, after all, Tibbs showed his usefulness with a gun. Not that Tibbs is really any good at it, of course, which sets up much of the film's comic premise. Jayne Mansfield co-stars as the owner of the local bar/hotel who helps Tibbs take on the job.
If you want to feel old, consider that this year marks 50 years since the release of the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair, which will be on TCM at 4:00 PM Saturday. (Next year will be 20 years since the remake.) Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is a Boston bank executive who has decided to pull off the perfect crime: he'll rob his own bank! The bank robbery goes off without a hitch, and the police are unable to get any leads. So the bank's insurance company sends in insurance investigator Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), who isn't quite so bound by the law and who has incentive in the form of a commission to crack the case. She fairly quickly suspects Thomas Crown of having led an inside job and is even bold enough to tell him so. Complicating matters, however, is that the two fall in love with each other, so the question of who is the hunter and who is the prey remains an open one. And of course there's the famous erotic chess game scene.
You'll all recall the 1933 classic King Kong, and as well as the fact that Peter Jackson did a version of King Kong in 2005 (has it been that long?). There was also a 1976 King Kong, which is scheduled on StarzEncore Classics at 8:24 AM Sunday. In this version, Charles Grodin plays Fred Wilson, head of an oil company planning to do some exploratory work on an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean. There's an anti-drilling stowaway Jack (Beau Bridges), and a shipwreck survivor Dwan (Jessica Lange) who get picked up along the way. When they get to the island, they find out it's not uninhabited, but in fact has natives and a giant ape, and the natives sacrifice women to appease Kong. So what better than to sacrifice Dwan? Fred and Jack go in after her, Kong falls in love with Dwan, Fred takes Kong back to the States to recoup his losses because the oil isn't suitable for drilling, and you can guess the rest of what happens. One of my earliest film-viewing memories comes from the local public library re-showing the 1933 Kong around the time that the 1976 Kong was released.
Finally, there's a documentary and an interview this week. Every year at the TCM Film Festival, they get some big star of the past to sit down and do an extended interview; that interview is then edited down into a program. Last year Ben Mankiewicz interviewed Michael Douglas, and that interview will be showing up on Tuesday night, around a pair of Douglas movies. The first showing of the interview will be at 8:00 PM, with a repeat at 11:30 PM for the benefit of the folks out on the west coast. In between they're showing Michael Douglas in The China Syndrome.
I recommended a pair of Bette Davis movies above. In fact, Thursday is the anniversary of her birth, so TCM is running her movies all morning and afternoon, before concluding with the documentary Bette Davis: The Benevolent Volcano, at 6:45 PM.