Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of April 23-29, 2018. The NFL Draft is this week, when everybody raves about the players their team selected but nobody really knows what they've gotten for a couple of years. Since the draft isn't until Thursday evening, why not spend some time with some good movies instead. I've selected a bunch of interesting movies, and for those of you who think I only recommend old movies, I've actually got one from the 1990s this week. 
As usual, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is running a bunch of movies with Thomas Mitchell on Monday, even though it's not his birthday (Mitchell was born in July). You'll probably remember Mitchell most for his Oscar-winning turn in Stagecoach (on at 2:45 PM), but I'll recommend a different movie, Man of the People, at 7:00 AM. The actual Man of the People isn't Mitchell, but Joseph Calleia, playing Italian-American lawyer Jack Moreno. Mitchell is Grady, the man who runs the political machine in the local precinct. Jack has no desire to be a part of that machine, but unfortunately he finds that all the people he represents are somehow unable to get their day in court, thanks to Grady's machine. So Jack does take up with Grady, and quickly rises to become a shoo-in to be the next DA. At this point, the movie veers into ludicrousness, as Jack winds up taking on scam artists who claim to have a machine that can find gold 100 feet underground, and they're sucking every little old lady out of their savings. One of those ladies is the mother of Jack's girlfriend.
Up against Man of the People, StarzEncore Westerns is listing Foxfire, at 6:44 AM Monday. This one I wouldn't quite consider a western, although it is set out in Arizona. Jane Russell plays Amanda, a lovely socialite who's visiting Arizona to take her usual spa cure. This time out, she gets a flat tire (they had cars in westerns?) and is helped out by Jonathan (Jeff Chandler), a mining engineer who is the son of a college professor and an Apache woman. As so often happens in the movies, the two immediately fall in love and get married. And then they find out that married life isn't the bed of roses they thought it would be. Jonathan gets sent to supervise a mine project in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. There are problems with old Apache superstitions and at times Jonathan seems to care more about the mine than his wife. The local doctor (Dan Duryea) seems more interested in Amanda than Jonathan is. And so on. Can love bloom in the desert? As much as it is or isn't a western, Jane Russell is lovely to look at.
A more traditional western would be The Man from Colorado, which TCM is showing at 5:30 AM Tuesday. Glenn Ford plays Devereaux, commanding officer of a group of Union soldiers in the closing days of the Civil War. The war has broken him to the point that he's willing to order the slaughter of a group of surrendering Confederates. Anyhow, the men return to their homes in the Colorado territory and the government types, seeing what they thinks Devereaux's stellar service, make him a federal judge for the territory. Devereaux, meanwhile, makes his second-in-command, Del Stewart (William Holden), a federal marshal. The rest of the guys, for their part, were all mining for gold before the war, but had their claims taken over during the war by the big mining company. So they're all out for justice. But they're not going to get it from Judge Devereaux, who's become drunk on power and has his own ideas. Del is caught between the two sides.
There were several biopics about female singers in the 1950s. One of the lesser-known is The Helen Morgan Story, which will be on TCM at 11:30 AM Wednesday. Helen Morgan (played here by Ann Blyth) was a torch singer who worked on Broadway in the 1920s under Flo Ziegfeld, and even had a brief movie career at the dawn of the sound era. However, like several stars of the era, she succumbed to two things: men and drugs. She loves bootlegger Larry (Paul Newman), which is unsurprisingly a problem what with all those legal issues. Plus, Larry isn't really interested in marrying her. Then there's also a romance with lawyer Russell (Richard Carlson), which also presents problems considerin that Russell is married to another woman. So Helen does what any sad, frustrated woman would do, which is turn to alcohol. (Well, Jeanne Eagels turned to heroin.) It goes on like this, relatively wisely stopping before the booze killed Helen in 1941.
A movie on FXM Retro that I'm not certain I've recommended before is Hell and High Water, which you can catch at 11:30 AM Thursday. The plot is a bit far-fetched: A few years after the Communists took over mainland China, a group of western scientists starts investigating unexplained evidence of nuclear explosions in the Pacific. So they refit a Japanese sub and hire on American WWII vet Capt. Adam Jones (Richard Widmark, and don't you dare call him Pac-Man) to lead a crew to the source of the explosions and find out who's behind them and why. It's a dastardly plot, all right. It's the Chinese Communists, who plan to take a captured American bomber from the Korean war, put their bomb on it, and have the “American” bomber start World War II by bombing the Koreans! It's up to Jones and his crew to stop this nonsense. You'd think a good adventure story would be enough for an audience, but Fox decided they wanted more for the men in the audience, so they inserted their latest attempt at making a foreign star, Bella Darvi, into the plot as a scientific advisor to the submarine crew. (She never became a star.)
A search of the site claims that it's been closing in on two years since I've recommended The Wrong Box before. It'll be on again this week at1:30 AM Friday on TCM as part of the theme of the Victorian era, this week looking at Victorian manners. Masterman (John Mills) and Joseph (Ralph Richardson) are brothers who are also the last surviving members of a tontine, a sort of insurance scheme in which the payout is made to the last survivor. Masterman is poor and sickly, living with grandson Michael (Michael Caine), who needs money to keep studying medicine. Masterman gets the idea of killing Joseph, and invites Joseph (the two don't really get along) to come on the spurious grounds that he's dying. Joseph, meanwhile, is in great health as a sprightly man but also a pompous bore. He's also got a couple of nephews (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) who want that money, as well as a niece (Nanette Newman) who doesn't seem to care. Except that when she meets Michael, the two fall in love. All sorts of complications ensue when the nephews thing Joseph has died in a train crash and try to keep the box containing his remains (of course, he's not dead at all) from being found.
Famed director Miloš Forman died last week at the age of 86. He won Oscars for directing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus, but the movie that's airing this week is Man on the Moon, at 12:55 AM Saturday on HBO Signature. This is the biopic of Andy Kaufman, whom older readers will recall from his years as Latka on the TV sitcom Taxi; here, Kaufman is played by Jim Carrey. But Kaufman was more than that, doing insane stand-up and proclaiming himself the “Intergender Wrestling Champion”, whatever that means. It's that last one that got real professional wrestler Jerry Lawler (playing himself) to challenge Kaufman to a series of bouts, before Kaufman died of cancer at the tragically young age of 35. Danny DeVito plays Kaufman's manager George Shapiro, while Courtney Love plays his girlfriend Lynne.
The Gumball Rally is back on TCM, at 6:00 PM Saturday. The movie starts off with bored executive Michael (Michael Sarrazin) at a meeting in New York. He's so bored that eventually he calls up a bunch of people and tells them one word: “Gumball”. They of course, all know what it means: it's time for another edition of the “Gumball Rally”, an irregular auto race from New York to the parking lot for the Queen Mary in Long Beach CA, with relatively little in the way of rules. Certainly, adhering to posted speed limits is not part of the plan. So a ragtag bunch of teams show up in New York: two old guys in a Rolls, two younger ladies in a Porsche, Michael in his Cobra, rival Gibson (Gary Busey) in his Camaro, and so on. Some of the people haven't quite planned enough, and that includes the police. They consider the rally highly illegal and plan to stop it, but the racers always seem to be one step ahead.
I've recommended quite a few Elvis movies before. I can't recall whether I've recommended Clambake, which is going to be on StarzEncore Classics at 5:13 AM Sunday. Elvis plays rich scion Scott who would prefer to find a woman who likes him for who he is and not his money. While on vacation, he meets Tom (Will Hutchins), who's on his way to a working vacation as a water skiing instructor. So Scott offers to trade places with Tom to see if he can find a woman who likes him without knowing he's loaded. And he actually does find a nice young woman in Dianne (Shelley Fabares). There's only one catch. She was hoping for a man with money, and to that end was pursuing rich guy Jamison (Bill Bixby). But Scott is just so damn nice that Dianne can't resist. If only she knew he was really rich…. It all culminates in the climactic motorboat race. The soundtrack isn't as memorable as many of the earlier Elvis movies.
Executive Suite was already on TCM once this month, as part of the Star of the Month salute to William Holden. But it's going to be on again at noon Sunday. Treadway is the head of a furniture manufacturing company with five vice-presidents. He's never said anything about which of the five he'd like to see succeed him, and that causes a huge problem when he suddenly drops dead in the street one Friday afternoon. So an emergency meeting of he board is called to deal with the matter. VP Carswell (Louis Calhern) has already sold some of his stock, bascially engaging in insider trading. VP Shaw (Fredric March) thinks he's the one who's going to be the new President. Alderson (Walter Pidgeon) has dedicated his life to the company, while Dudley (Paul Douglas) has been cheating on his wife. And Walling (William Holden) is the one who really knows what's going wrong with the company. There's also Treadway's widow Julia (Barbara Stanwyck). The all-star cast includes Shelley Winters as Dudley's mistress; June Allyson as Mrs. Walling; Dean Jagger as another executive; and Nina Foch earning an Oscar nomination for her small role as a secretary.