Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of August 16-22, 2021. The Packers played their first exhibition game yesterday, giving all of you ample opportunity to bicker about the Packer backups for the next week. But if you’re tired of the bickering, there are a lot of interesting movies out there. There are seven new stars in TCM’s Summer Under the Stars, including Katharine Hepburn on Saturday. Also, there’s interesting stuff on some of the other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
I can’t remember the last time I mentioned Like Water for Chocolate. It’s got a showing this week, at 2:30 AM Monday on MovieMax. In a rural Mexican village circa 1910, one of the local families follows the tradition that it’s the duty of the youngest daughter to put off getting married until after Mom dies so that she can help take care of Mom. Obviously, Tita (Lumi Cavazos) is pissed at having to follow this tradition to take care of Mama Elena (Regina Torné) on the ranch. This even more so when she falls in love with Pedro (Marco Leonardi) and can’t marry him. Pedro comes up with the solution of asking to marry eldest sister Rosaura, whom he doesn’t particularly love, just so he can be closer to Tita. Rosauro is oblivious to all this, but Mom sees what’s going on, and takes actions which have serious consequences for the entire family. Tita, meanwhile, channels as much of her passion as she can into her cooking. Oh, and there’s a revolution going on in the big world outside….
Monday’s star on TCM is Robert Young, whom some of you may remember from your childhoods for playing Marcus Welby, MD on TV. 35 years before that, however, he was starring in light comedies such as Married Before Breakfast, which airs at 7:15 AM Monday. Young plays inventor Tom Wakefield, who would like to marry his rich girlfriend June (June Clayworth) if he could get the money to support her himself. He comes up with a shaving cream that a company is willing to pay him a quarter million to keep off the market. Tom uses that money to make a bunch of people’s lives better. One of those is Kitty Brent (Florence Rice), the agent at the ticket counter for the honeymoon cruise Tom buys. She’s got a boyfriend Kenneth (Hugh Marlowe), an insurance salesman who would marry her if he could get the money, so Tom decides to help the young couple by getting somebody to buy a specific insurance policy. The oh-so-typical plot twist of Tom falling in love with Kitty happens here.
You may recall Robert Blake going on trial for the murder of his wife a good 15 years ago now. I couldn’t help but think about that as I watched Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. It’ll be on StarzEncore Westerns a number of times this week, starting at 12:21 PM Monday. Blake plays Willie Boy, a Paiute Indian who returns to the reservation in southern California in 1909 in order to try to win the hand of the woman he loves, Lola (Katharine Ross) in marriage. The problem is that Lola’s father hates Willie doesn’t want him around Lola at all. It results in a heated argument in which Willie kills Lola’s dad, possibly in self-defense, and kidnaps Lola, running off into the desert with her. Sheriff Wilson (Charles McGraw) sends his deputy Cooper (Robert Redford) to lead a posse to try to find Willie, who is no dummy and knows the land like the back of his hand. Meanwhile, President Taft is supposed to visit the area and the authorities are concerned that a gunman on the loose is a big problem. Dr. Elizabeth Arnold (Susan Clark) is the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ representative who is at odds with everybody else’s willingness to kill Willie.
Tuesday brings a day of Gloria Grahame’s movies to TCM. She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful (on at 1:45 AM Wednesday), but I’ll mention The Cobweb instead, at noon Tuesday. Graham plays Karen McIver, wife of Dr. Stuart McIver (Richard Widmark). Dr. McIVer works at a mental sanatorium, where he tries to institute more progressive policies, such as letting the patients design the new curtains that they’re going to have to look at for the rest of their stay. The curtains, however, are a Macguffin for all the drama going on behind the scenes. Business manager Miss Inch (Lillian Gish) wants to save money and order cheap drapes; Karen wants to be part of her husband’s life and thinks she’s doing a good turn by ordering expensive drapes for the place and paying for them herself; Dr. Devanal (Charles Boyer) is the head of the place with older attitudes who consistently butts heads with Dr. McIver; Lauren Bacall plays another doctor at the place who is mighty tempting to Dr. McIver. Among the patients are Oscar Levant, John Kerr, and Susan Strasberg.
A movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation recently is The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox. This week, it has another airing, at 11:25 AM Wednesday. Goldie Hawn plays Amanda, a dance-hall singer in 1882 San Francisco who makes money on the side rolling men who think she’s a prostitute. One of those men is Malloy (George Segal), a gambler who keeps an ace up his sleeve. One of those cheats resulted in his being forced to participate in a bank heist, but he cheated the gang led by Bloodworth (Roy Jenson) and left with the $40,000, hoping to get boat passage to Australia from San Francisco. The Bloodworth gang discovers the ruse and follows Malloy to Frisco, where he’s already met and been rolled by Amanda, who’s got a scam of her own involving a prominent Mormon needing a governess. She and Malloy have to team up to stay ahead of the Bloodworth gang and try to walk off with the money and their lives. Of course they fall in love along the way.
Robert Redford is the star on TCM for Wednesday, and a movie of his that I’ve never mentioned before is The Chase. It concludes Redford’s day at 3:30 AM Thursday. Redford plays Bubber Reeves, who hs just broken out of prison in rural Texas with another man, who shafts Bubber by killing a carjack victim and leaving Bubber holding the bag. In Bubber’s home town of Tarl, his wife Anna (Jane Fonda) is waiting for him, more or less, considering that she’s been seeing Jason Rogers (Edward Fox), son of the town’s wealthiest citizen Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall) while Bubber has been locked up. Meanwhile, pretty much everybody else in town has all sorts of lurid secrets and/or wants to lynch Bubber more or less just because. They all expect Bubber to come back looking for his wife. Meanwhile, it’s up to the sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando), seen by many as a pawn of Rogers, to make certain Bubber gets sent back to prison safe and sound, helped by his wife (Angie Dickinson). Watch for a young Robert Duvall as one of Rogers’ bank employees.
Summer Under the Stars usually brings one foreign star each year. This time out, that star is Setsuko Hara, who appeared in some of the prominent movies of the early post-war era in Japan. Among those is No Regrets for Our Youth, at 7:45 AM Thursday. Hara plays Yukie Yagihara, daughter of a college professor (Denjiro Okochi) in the early 1930s who is strongly opposed to the growing oppressive political climate in Japan. Yukie meets one of Dad’s students, Ryukichi Noge and the two fall in love until Dad is fired for his political views and everybody splits up. Fast forward to 1941, when Japan is firmly at war, although not yet with the US. Yukie meets Ryukichi again in Tokyo, but he is accused of being a spy and sent to prison where he ultimately dies. Yukie tries to survive the oppression by going to live with Ryukichi’s peasant parents to work the land and live out the war if possible.
With there being no TCM Underground this month, there’s not much place to mention cult classics. However, one is airing elsewhere this week: Big Trouble in Little China, at 10:35 AM Friday on StarzEncore Classics. Kurt Russell plays Jack Burton, a truck driver who has a Chinese-American friend in Wang Chi (Dennis Dun). The two go to San Francisco International Airport to pick up Wang’s fiancée Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), but she gets kidnapped at the airport! The two men follow the kidnappers to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where there’s a war going on between two Chinese gangs. Worse, the gangs seem to know Chinese sorcerers with supernatural powers. Indeed, Lo Pan, one of the men directing the sorcerers, is part of a magical curse of having been turned into an incorporeal being who has to marry and sacrifice women to take on human form. Together with Gracie (Kim Cattrall), who was at the airport to meet her friend who is also in danger, they try to defeat the ancient Chinese magic and get their friends back.
Van Heflin gets the Friday slot on TCM, which gives them a chance to show a movie that I don’t think has been on in a while: Patterns, at 10:00 PM. Heflin plays Fred Staples, a manager at a plant in Pennsylvania owned by a big conglomerate headquartered in New York and run by Walter Ramsey (Everett Sloane), descendant of the company’s founder. Staples gets brought to New York to become one of the company’s new executives, where he’ll be working closely with Bill Briggs (Ed Begley), who’s getting on in years and has health issues. Adjusting to the new lifestyle of corporate entertaining isn’t easy for Fred and his wife Nancy (Beatrice Straight), and being an executive is a major time commitment as Fred learns from Bill. But even worse is the way that Ramsey treats Briggs in executive meetings, and when Fred starts talking about new ideas with Ramsey, he learns that the real reason he was brought to New York was to take over Bill’s position and force Bill into retirement, a proposition that Fred decidedly doesn’t care for since he doesn’t want to do this to Bill.
Finally, on Sunday, we have 24 hours of Tyrone Power on TCM. A movie he’s in that has a really good cast working together is Witness for the Prosecution, airing at 12:45 PM. Charles Laughton plays Sir Wilfrid Roberts, a barrister who’s getting ready to leave England for Bermuda because of a heart condition. But there’s a murder of a wealthy old widow, and Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) stands accused for it. Vole is a profoundly unsypmathetic defendant, as he’s got a German refugee wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich); he’s constantly in need of money, which led to his dalliance with the murdered woman; and he possibly has a girlfriend in Diana (Ruta Lee). Still, Sir Wilfrid is willing to take on the case, insisting to his nurse, Miss Plimsoll (Laughton’s real-life wife Elsa Lanchester) that this will be the very last case. As the trial goes on and looks bad for Leonard, a mysterious woman come out of the woodwork who may know something about the case. If you already know how this one ends, don’t tell anyone else.