Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of April 4-10, 2022. Apparently there is going to be a baseball season, but we all know the Brewers are going to screw it up, so what's the point. And as there's also no point in rehashing the debate about crappy free-agent wide receivers, why not spend the downtime with a bunch of interesting movies? We've got a new Star of the Month on TCM as well as a new TCM spotlight for April, and a bunch of movies on other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is the birth anniversary of actor Anthony Perkins, who was born 90 years ago. TCM is unsurprisingly spending some time on Monday morning and afternoon with his movies. He's probably best known for playing Norman Bates in Psycho, although that movie isn't on the schedule. Perkins did get one Oscar nomination in his career, for the movie Friendly Persuasion, about a family of Quakers in southern Indiana who have to deal with the Civil War coming to their neck of the woods. That movie is part of TCM's lineup, at 8:00 AM.
If you want a chick flick (waves at Goldie), one that's up your alley is Heartburn, on Epix2 at 6:10 AM Monday. Meryl Streep plays Rachel, a divorced New York food writer. At a friend's wedding, she meets Mark Forman (Jack Nicholson), who also knows somebody in the wedding party. Mark is also a writer like Rachel, but he writes about politics and works in Washington DC. As often happens in movies, they quickly fall in love, and soon get married even though Mark is also divorced thanks in part to his reputation as a womanizer. They move to a fixer-upper townhouse in Washington, and Rachel has to adjust to her new life in a new town where everybody knows her husband but not so much her. Worse is the possibility that Mark may still be pursuing other women, which goes on even as Rachel gets pregnant and has a child. Probably just as well known for the Carly Simon song it spawned:
We're into the first full week of a new month, which means that it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This month, it's Errol Flynn, and his movies will be showing up every Monday in prime time, heading into Tuesday morning and afternoon since they've got 41 movies over four Mondays. This first Monday includes some of Flynn's great swashbuckling roles, starting with the one that made him a star, Captain Blood at 8:00 PM, followed by what is probably Flynn's iconic performance as the title character in The Adventures of Robin Hood at 10:15 PM.
Not many movies have an ichthyologist as an important character. One that does is the 1934 version of Imitation of Life, which TCM is showing at 10:00 PM Tuesday. Claudette Colbert plays Beatrice Pullman, a World War I widow with young daughter Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) who winds up with a maid in the form of Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers). Delilah is also a single mother with mixed-race daughter Peola (Fredi Washington) in need of a place to live, and the two mothers wind up almost as much partners (in a non-sexual sense) as maid/boss. Delilah makes great pancakes allowing the two to set up a breakfast place, but it's when a businessman suggests boxing the batter that their business really takes off and the two women become financially successful. Delilah, as a black woman, can't take her rightful place in society, but Peola is light-skinned enough to pass for white, which she immediately tries doing, much to Mom's sorrow. A subplot involves Beatrie's ichthyologist boyfriend Stephen (Warren William), who Jessie also falls in love with.
A movie showing up in the FXM rotation that I don't think I've mentioned in a while, if at all, is Wizards. This week you can catch it at 6:00 AM Wednesday. The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic world that destroyed mankind as we know it, leaving some of mankind's ancestors like dwarves and elves in a Middle Earth-type existence, while the Earth's surface is inhabited by mutants. The queen of the fairies, Delia, has given birth to twin sons; one, Avatar, is pure good; the other, Blackwolf, is evil. Blackwolf has decided that he's going to try to take over Earth and use the mutants to do so, along with technology and propaganda in the form of archived speeches from Adolf Hitler. Avatar has to try to stop this. Among the voice actors in this is Mark Hamill, a few months before Star Wars mad him really famous.
One of this month's programming features on TCM is addiction in recovery, to be examined every Wednesday in prime time. One of the more common substances abused is alcohol, which is the chemical of choice in the groundbreaking movie The Lost Weekend, kicking the spotlight off at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Ray Milland plays Don Birnam, a writer who has not been particularly successful, and worse, now has a case of writer's block. He's dealt with that by turning to the bottle, which has led to his becoming an alcoholic and reduced to living in an apartment with his brother Wick (Phillip Terry). Wick invited Don and Don's girlfriend Helen (Jane Wyman) out to the country for the weekend where Don can bring his typewriter and start writing again since he's supposedly been sober for a whole week or so. Don can't handle the pressure, and decides to stay home for the weekend where he's going to go on the bender to end all benders (or at least until the bender in Leaving Las Vegas which airs next week as part of the spotlight).
After a quarter century in the movie business, Sean Connery finally picked up an Oscar for his role in The Untouchables. You can see it this week at 4:12 AM Thursday on Cinemax. It's 1930 and Chicago, which of course means the era of Prohibition and gangsters like Al Capone (Robert De Niro) profiting off the government's folly in believing it can control people's brain chemistry. But there have always been people who support the war on drugs, so federal agents like Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) come in to try to take Capone down. This isn't going to be easy, as Capone has the support of a fair amount of the local police. There are, however, "honest" cops in the sense of honesty doing what their government-sector bosses tell them to do. Among those are Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery), who starts working with Ness. Ness and the feds are able to get a modicum of success, but Capone still wields a lot of power and wields it violently. Of course, it's only when the feds start using tax law that they're finally able to get an arrest and conviction of Capone.
TCM's Thursday morning and afternoon lineup includes movies set in southern swamps and bayous. It's been a while since the last time A Lion Is in the Streets aired, so I'll point out it's in the lineup at 10:00 AM Thursday. James Cagney stars as Hank Martin, a peddler in rural Louisiana who meets and quickly marries teacher Verity Wade (Barbara Hale). She's taken aback by the way that Hank treats the couple's supposed friends after their wedding, but in fact Hank has always been good at working a crowd and has these friends because of the way he influences (or manipulates if you want to be impolite) people. A lot of these rural folk are getting screwed over by the local mill owner (Larry Keating), and when one of the sharecropper's wives (Jeanne Cagney, James' real-life sister) gets killed, it spurs Hank to enter politics. Complicating things is the presence of Flamingo (Anne Francis), who expected Hank to marry her and is none too happy about Verity. Politics, however, is brutal, and Hank may just be turning into a demagogue.
If you want one of those feel-good World War II movies, you could do worse than to watch Two Girls and a Sailor, on TCM at 3:45 PM Friday. The two girls are sisters, Patsy and Jean Deyo (June Allyson and Gloria de Haven respectively), who are the daughters of ex-vaudevilleans. They start an act, which leads to them meeting a group of sailors. Patsy and Jean both fall for handsome Johnny (Van Johnson). Then, with the war on, the sisters want to do their part for the war effort. Having found an abandoned warehouse, with the exception of squatter Billy (Jimmy Durante), the two decide they'd like to clean the place up and turn it into a canteen for all those servicemen who are about to go off to fight. A mysterious benefactor begins to pave the way for them to achieve their dream. Once the canteen is opened, a whole bunch of famous people show up to perform, from Lena Horne to bandleaders Xavier Cugat and Harry James. But there's also that love triangle between the sisters and Johnny....
Another movie that I don't think I've mentioned in a while is Days of Heaven. This week, you can see it at 1:05 AM Saturday on Flix. Richard Gere plays Bill, a hot-headed steelworker in Chicago in 1916. He gets in an argument with one of the foremen at the mill, and the foreman gets killed. Bill, needing to escape, flees with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and young sister Linda (Linda Manz) south, eventually winding up in the panhandle of Texas. There, Bill and Abby pass themselves off as siblings, and are able to get work as farm laborers (Sam Shepard plays the unnamed farmer). One day, Bill overhears a conversation that makes it sound as though the farmer is terminally ill, so he hatches a plan to have Abby marry the farmer so that when the farmer dies, Abby can inherit the farm and the farmer's wealth and be free to marry Bill. Needless to say, things don't quite go as planned, and the farm foreman suspects something might be amiss in the relationship, leading to more violence.
TCM is spending the weekend with a "Weekend in Paris" theme, pre-empting the Saturday matinee block. But the movie I'm recommending isn't part of the Saturday matinee. Instead, it's Zazie dans le Métro, at 2:30 AM Sunday. Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) is a bratty little girl from provincial France living with her single mother. However, Mom needs a weekend alone with her new boyfriend, so she dumps Zazie off in Paris with uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret), a nightclub performer. Zazie is excited to go to Paris because it will give her the chance to do something she's always wanted, which is to ride the subway. However, the day she gets to Paris, she finds: the subway workers have gone on strike! Zazie is unhappy about this, and basically takes it out on the entire city by running off and have a series of slapstick adventures that take no regard of the trail of damage she's leaving behind. If you like Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle that I recommended a few weeks back, you'll like this one too.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns there's the fun John Wayne western The War Wagon, at 8:07 AM Sunday. Wayne plays Taw Jackson, a man who's just gotten out of prison and shows up in a town in the New Mexico Territory because he has to have someplace to live, after all. Like a lot of towns in old Hollywood westerns, this one seems to be owned by one man, that guy being Pierce (Bruce Cabot). Pierce wound up owning the town while Taw was in prison, Taw having owned a nice spread before but getting framed by Pierce. Worse, Pierce discovered gold on Taw's land while Taw was in prison, and is now making a fortune transporting it in the titular "war wagon", a sort of primitive armored vehicle with a machine gun for protection. Taw decides that he's going to take down the "War Wagon" and get what he thinks is rightfully his, but he's going to need help, so he gets transport man Fletcher (Keenan Wynn); hired gun Lomax (Kirk Douglas); and hard-drinking explosives man Billy (Robert Walker Jr.).
