Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of August 13-19, 2018. We're well into the football pre-season, but the games aren't meaningful yet. So why not watch something you don't have to find a possibly sketchy stream to watch? Once again I've used my good taste to select a bunch of movies I know you'll all find interesting, and one that's not quite as good, but more recent for those of you who are allergic to black-and-white movies. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
On Monday, TCM is giving us 24 hours of the movies of George Brent, who was nominally a leading man but generally was playing second fiddle to the leading lady. An example of this is the pre-Code They Call It Sin at 7:30 AM Monday. (Warning: there's not as much sin as you might hope for.) Loretta Young plays midwest girl Marion, who one day meets traveling businessman Jimmy Decker. She falls in love with him, not realizing he's engaged to the boss' daughter Enid (Helen Vinson). Things get bad with Marion's family, and she decides that she's got musical talent, she's going to run away to New York City to try to make it big, as well as to look up Jimmy. It's now that she finds out that Jimmy's gotten married. So she turns to theater producer Ford Humphries (Louis Calhern), who as it turns out really wants Marion for things other than her musical talent. George Brent plays the third man, Jimmy's doctor friend Travers, who also finds himself falling in love with Marion. Una Merkel shines as Marion's best friend in the big city, chorus girl Dixie Dare.
It's been a while since I've recommended Hondo, which is going to be on StarzEncore Westerns this week at 2:15 AM Monday and 8:404 PM Wednesday. John Wayne plays Hondo Lane, a rider for the Cavalry who is looking for isolated homesteaders who are going to need to be evacuated if the Apaches start attacking again. Indeed, his horse has been shot out from under him, which is how he winds up at the ranch of Angie (Geraldine Page) and her son Johnny (Lee Aaker). Angie begins to fall in love with Hondo as he helps the ranch get back on its feet again, and when the Apaches led by Vittorio (Michael Pate) capture Hondo she claims that Hondo is her husband. This, although Hondo already knows the truth about Angie's husband who, as it turns out, wasn't a particularly good man. But it's only going to buy time until the Apaches try a more decisive attack to get all the homesteaders out of the territory. Can the cavalry save them? The movie was originally filmed in 3-D, although it's not as egregious as other 50s 3-D movies.
Moving forward to Tuesday, there's a full day of the films of Lupe Velez on TCM. Velez appeared in a bunch of B movies, such as The Half-Naked Truth, which TCM is showing at 12:30 AM Wednesday (obviously still late Tuesday evening in LFT and points further west). Velez plays Teresita, a dancer at one of those traveling carnivals that fleeced people back in the day (the carnivals, that it). Teresita is the girlfriend of carnival barker Jimmy Bates (Lee Tracy), who is the real con here, at least at first. He comes up with the idea of passing Teresita off as a Turkish princess and getting her a role in a Broadway show out of that. Frank Morgan plays Farrell, the producer Jimmy is trying to con, and Farrell falls for it, but he also falls for Teresita and the possibility of that romance starts to drive Jimmy and Teresita apart (sounds familiar, doesn't it). Also in the cast of this wild comedy are Eugene Pallette as Jimmy's buddy who helps drive the action on at key points, and poor put-upon Franklin Pangborn playing another hotel concierge.
Wednesday's star on TCM is Peter Finch, an actor you'll most likely remember for playing Howard Beale in Network (11:45 PM Wednesday). The movie I'll mention instead this week is Far From the Madding Crowd, at 5:00 PM Wednesday. Based on the novel by Thomas Hardy, the movie stars Julie Christie as Bathsheba, a young woman in rural Victorian England who inherits her uncle's farm. She decides to run the place herself, but she could really use a man to help. The obvious choice ought to be Gabriel (Alan Bates), a shepherd she hires as a farmhand, but it seems Bathsheba would rather have wealthy and higher-class William (that's Finch). He even proposes her, but she ultimately decides to marry a third man, army officer Frank (Terence Stamp). Frank has a past involving having knocked up another woman, and when that past catches up with him, he fakes his death, seemingly leaving William free again to marry Bathsheba. But things don't quite work out that way…. A lot of sprawling movies based on old-fashioned British novels got made in the 1960s, and this is one of them, with nice cinematography filmed largely on location.
I actually have a pair of more recent movies to recommend this week. First up is F/X, at 9:09 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Roland Tyler (Bryan Brown) plays a successful special-effects artist who gets approached by a pair of FBI agents (Cliff DeYoung and Mason Adams) with a unique proposal. Apparently the mobster De Franco (Jerry Orbach) is going into the witness protection program, and the FBI needs someone to help stage the guy's death. Now, you'd think the Bureau has its own people to do that, and they'd want to keep these things secret, but Tyler accepts anyway. Sure enough things soon go wrong, and that it seems as the two two agents were really trying to frame him. But since Tyler is an effects man, he can use his skill to disguise himself and stay one step ahead of the investigators. Meanwhile, a detective with local jurisdiction, Lt. McCarthy (Brian Dennehy), is also on the case, and having trouble figuring out why he's getting no help from the FBI.
Back on TCM, Thursday is the day for Miriam Hopkins, who was a lead in the 1930s and eventually became an excellent character actress. It's easy to forget that she was the female lead opposite Errol Flynn in Virginia City, which will be on TCM at 1:45 PM Thursday. Flynn plays Kerry Bradford, an intelligence officer in the Union Army during the Civil War. He escaped from a Confederate prison camp, and got sent west to Nevada, which was mining a fair amount of gold and silver in those days. Apparently there is a substantial number of Confederate sympathizers out there, and they plan to rob one of the shipments of gold bullion and divert it to the South the keep the Confederate cause going. It's Kerry's job to find out more about the plot and foil it. Hopkins plays saloon singer Julia Hayne, whom Kerry meets on the stagecoach west and who may or may not know anything about the Civil War plots. Randolph Scott, who was playing a lot of bad guys, probably does know about the plot. But it could be scuppered anyway by Mexican bandits, led by Murrell (Humphrey Bogart).
For those of you who want something more recent, I'll oblige you, but don't blame me if you think the movie is no good: Cop and a Half, at 8:10 AM Friday on StarzEncore Family. Burt Reynolds (there's your first warning) plays a Florida cop who's always in trouble with his superiors. Devon (Norman Golden II) is an eight-year-old kid living with his grandmother Rachel (Ruby Dee). Poor Devon is constantly picked on at school, and gettin in trouble because all he can think about is becoming a cop based on what he's seen on TV cop shows. Then one day Devon goes off and witnesses a murder (well, it wasn't his intent). But he also decides that he doesn't want to help the cops unless they treat him like a real cop. So Nick is assigned to take on Devon for a "partner" as a sort of punishment. Meanwhile, the bad guys figure out that there was a witness to their crime, which puts little Devon's life in danger. Ray Sharkey plays the bad guy.
On Saturday we get 24 hours of Clark Gable, which gives me a chance to mention a movie I don't think I've recommended before: The King and Four Queens, at 4:00 PM Saturday on TCM. Gable plays Dan Kehoe, a conman in the old west who's learned about the notorious McDade brothers. The four brothers robbed a bank and made off with $50,000 in gold. Three of them were killed; nobody knows what happened to the fourth. But the gold was supposedly buried on the ranch run by Ma McDade (Jo Van Fleet) and her four daughters-in-law (Eleanor Parker, Jean Willes, Barbara Nichols, and Sara Shane), and Dan is now in the town where the ranch is located. Dan decides he's going to approach the old lady with a story about having met that fourth brother in jail, using it as a way to get on the ranch and try to find where all that gold is buried. But will Ma just shoot Dan? It's not as if the McDades are very welcoming of outsiders.
There's not much on FXM Retro that I haven't recommended recently, with the exception of The Neptune Factor, which will be on at 3:00 AM Sunday. There's deep-sea research going on, led in the underwater research station by Dr. Hamilton (Michael J. Reynolds) and on the surface by Dr. Andrews (Walter Pidgeon). One day there's an earthquake, and it sends the research station into a trench where the regular divers won't be able to get at it, thus dooming the scientists in the station. Except that the Navy has a new research sub that might be able to rescue the scientists. Cmdr. Blake (Ben Gazzara) plays the captain of the sub, and his crew includes the diving instructor MacKay (Ernest Borgnine) and Dr. Jansen (Yvette Mimieux). Oh, Dr. Jansen just happens to be the fiancée of Dr. Hamilton. Finding the station itself is going to be tough, but wait until you see what's on the ocean floor!
Finally, on Sunday on TCM, it's a day for the movies of Judy Garland. I don't like her singing, so I'll mention a non-singing role in The Clock, at 10:00 AM Sunday. Garland plays Alice, a working girl in New York. One day at Penn Station, she runs into Cpl. Joe Allen (Robert Walker), a man on leave from the Army during World War II (the movie was released in 1945). Literally they run into each other, as the interaction breaks off the heel of Alice's shoe. Cpl. Allen tries to make it up to her, and she responds by showing him around the city. They plan to meet again, and it leads to an adventure after also meeting milkman Al (James Gleason) and save him from a predicament with a drunk. Ultimately Alice and Joe fall in love, but will they be able to do anything about it in the short 48 hours they have together? Even if you don't like Garland's singing, a movie like The Clock shows that she was an extremely capable actress. And playing the part of Al's wife is James Gleason's real-life wife of 40 years Lucille.