Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of August 2-8, 2021. NFL training camps have opened and Aaron Rodgers showed up without controversy, so there’s little to talk about regarding football. So instead, watch some good movies. Summer Under the Stars has kicked off on TCM, and we’ve got seven (well, eight) stars to honor this week, including Esther Williams on Sunday. But there’s interesting stuff on some of the other movie channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM’s star for Monday is Richard Burton, with the films they’re showing including a rare airing of Anne of the Thousand Days at 8:00 PM Burton obviously doesn’t play Anne, the Anne here being Anne Boleyn (Geneviève Bujold). So as you can guess, Burton plays Henry VIII of England. At the start of the movie, Henry is married to Catherine of Aragon (Irene Papas), but cavorting with Anne’s older sister because their dad was basically pimping his daughters out to try to curry favor with the king. (Or, at least, that’s the way this movie presents it.) Henry falls for Anne and wants to marry her in the hopes that she can bear him a son who will survive, something Catherine hasn’t been able to do. Eventually, Henry gets his annulment to marry Anne and knocks her up, but she has… a daughter! And then a stillborn child. The Boleyns are getting panicky, especially once Henry starts to notice Jane Seymour. We know how that ended up. Anthony Quayle plays Cardinal Wolsey, who helps Henry get that annulment from Catherine.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned Silverado recently. It’s got multiple airings this week, starting with 1:31 PM Tuesday on StarzEncore (or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). Four men are on their way to the town of Silverado. First is Emmett (Scott Glenn), who is ambushed by a gang of assassins, but who gets away, killing all the men. Emmett meets Paden (Kevin Kline), who is down to his skivvies after he was robbed and his horse stolen, Paden being left to die. They get to a town called Turley where Emmett was hoping to meet his brother Jake. But Jake was put in jail by corrupt sheriff Langston (John Cleese) for shooting a man in self defense. Paden gets put in jail too, but he and Jake escape with the help of Mal (Danny Glover), a cowboy who is also on Langston’s enemies list. Eventually the four men reach Silverado and go their separate ways, but it turns out they’ve got an enemy in common in the form of McKendrick, a rancher who wants to keep the range open and stop the encroaching settlers (there’s a western trope we haven’t seen before), by any means necessary, even employing hired guns and corrupting Silverado’s sheriff Cobb (Brian Dennehy).
Kim Novak is the star getting honored on TCM on Tuesday, which gives TCM the chance to run the interview she did at the TCM Film Festival quite a few years back; that will be on at 10:00 PM Tuesday. As for her films, there’s Pushover, at 1:45 AM Wednesday. Novak plays Lona, the girlfriend of a man who’s just robbed a bank to the tune of some $200,000. As the robbery is going on, Lona is in a movie theater, and when she gets out, she finds her car won’t start. She’s helped by kindly Paul Sheridan (Fred MacMurray), not realizing that Paul is actually a police detective assigned to do surveillance on her to find out where the robber and the bank’s money are. The two fall in love, although it may not be authentic on Lona’s part as she realizes that the only way she can save her own hide is to try to turn Paul into a corrupt cop. Perhaps the two of them can kill her old boyfriend and run off with the money together. Yeah right. If you have flashbacks to Double Indemnity, you’re not alone.
You may remember Kevin McCarthy from the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. McCarthy got the chance to be the bad guy in UHF, which will be on Flix at 8:00 AM Wednesday. The star here is Weird Al Yankovic, playing George Newman, a Walter Mitty type who, as a result of his daydreams, can’t hold down a steady job. His uncle Harvey (Stanley Block) wins the deed to a failing independent local TV station in a poker game, this being the era when such stations were all the way at the end of the dial (channel 62) in places that aren’t even part of the TV broadcast spectrum any longer. Uncle Harvey puts George in charge of the station, which continues to flail until George loses his girlfriend Teri (Victoria Jackson) and leaves the station’s children’s show to get drunk and turn’s over the station’s kids show (this being the days before E/I programming) to janitor Stanley (Michael Richards), who immediately turns the show into a ratings hit. This enrages RJ Fletcher (Kevin McCarthy), who owns the other station in town and wants to put Channel 62 out of business. Thankfully, Harvey is in debt and may have to sell off the Channel 62 license to pay for it. George decides to hold a telethon to save Channel 62. David Bowie costars as George’s best friend Bob.
On Wednesday, TCM is giving us 24 hours of Louis Armstrong. One of his movies that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before is Pennies from Heaven, on at 1:30 PM. Of course, Armstrong never got the chance to be a lead, usually playing either himself or small supporting parts. Here, the lead is Bing Crosby, as Larry Poole, a wrongly convicted man. He learns from a death row inmate that that inmate would like to atone for his sins and give his inheritance to the family of the man he murdered, the Smiths of Middletown, NJ, and would Larry do it since he’s about to be let out of prison. Larry eventually finds the Smiths in question, out-of-work Gramp (Donald Meek) and granddaughter Patsy (Edith Fellowes). The inheritance turns out to be a country house, and the Smiths, along with Larry and hired hand Henry (that’s Louis Armstrong), set about turning it into a road house with Larry and Henry providing the entertainment since they can both sing and play jazz. But social worker Susan (Madge Evans) finds out about all this and thinks that an itinerant ex-con and a jobless old man might not be the best environment for little Patsy. So she threatens to have the kid placed with “good” parents. Of course, as a Bing Crosby musical, you know it’s going to have a happy ending.
It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned Dead Again. It’s got a couple of airings this week, including at 2:46 AM Thursday on ThrillerMax. Grace (Emma Thompson) is an amnesiac whose case comes to the attention of Los Angeles police detective Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh, Thompson’s real-life husband at the time). Grace has been having nightmares that deal with an odd bit of Hollywood history. Roman Strauss (also played by Branagh in the flashbacks) was a movie composer married to Margaret (Thompson again). But Margaret was murdered and Roman went to the chair for it, and somehow, Grace, doing past life regression under hypnosis, knows all of this. Worse, Mike is falling in love with Grace, and their lives and relationship in the present day is beginning to bear a striking resemblance to that of Roman and Margaret back in the 1940s. And is there anybody else in the present day who might have been around back in the 1940s? Sure the plot strains credulity, but the movie is stylish and entertaining enough to overcome that.
Later on Thursday, TCM starts its day full of movies of Margaret Rutherford. Among them is Blithe Spirit, at 9:30 AM. Rex Harrison is the star here, as Charles Condomine, an author living in one of those English manor houses together with second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings). But Charles starts to see the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond), which understandably alarms him. Eventually Charles is able to convince Ruth that there actually is a ghost, which sends the couple to medium Madame Arcati (that’s Rutherford if you couldn’t tell) to help summon Elvira to figure out what’s going on. The shocking discovery is that Elvira is insanely jealous of Ruth, and she’s trying to figure out a way to get rid of Ruth so she can have Charles all for herself, something that Charles decidedly doesn’t want. It’s all based on a play by Noël Coward, which may be an acquired taste for some people. But the Technicolor cinematography is lovely, and Rutherford is a lot of fun here.
TCM has a full day of Robert Mitchum’s work on Friday. This gives me another chance to mention the fun little movie The Big Steal, which will be on at 7:30 AM Friday. Mitchum plays Duke Halliday, an army lieutenant who’s on a boat to Mexico being pursued by Capt. Blake (William Bendix). Blake is chasing him because Halliday is accused of having stolen a large Army payroll. On arriving in Veracruz, Halliday meets Joan Graham (Jane Greer), an American woman who is looking for a man who stole a couple thousand bucks from her. It turns out, as you can probably guess, that Halliday and Graham are both looking for the same person, one Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles). They start off not liking each other but you just know that they’re going to fall in love along the way. Fiske, for his part, is looking for the guy who will be able to launder the money for him. Will Blake finally be able to figure out that is wasn’t Halliday who took the payroll? Thanks to the Production Code, you can probably guess the ending.
A movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation recently is Max Dugan Returns. It’s got another airing this week, at 11:35 AM Friday. Jason Robards plays Max Dugan, and as you can guess he returns, to the daughter he more or less abandoned years ago. That daughter, Nora (Marsha Mason), is a single mother to Michael (Matthew Broderick) struggling to pay the bills. She’s understandably displeased with the way her father treated her and how he thinks he can just waltz back into her life, but it turns out that he’s terminally ill and wants to spend some time with the grandson he never knew, as well as trying to make their lives a little easier now that he’s come into some money. That’s the other catch. Max is a conman who didn’t exactly get all this money honestly, and unsurprisingly the police are on his trail. That comes n the form of detective Brian Costello (Donald Sutherland), whose job it is to bring Max in but who finds himself falling for Nora as the movie goes on and doesn’t want to hurt her or the kid.
There are two stars for Summer Under the Stars on Saturday: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, who as a comedy team starred in their movies together. One of those is Rio Rita, at 11:00 AM Saturday. You might recognize the title, as this is a remake of the movie that brought Wheeler and Woolsey to Hollywood a decade earlier, updated to reflect current events. Doc (Abbott) and Wishy (Costello) are a pair of incompetents who get fired from their job at a pet store and stow away in the trunk of a car to try to get to New York. Instead, the car’s owner, Ricardo Montera (John Carroll) is heading for a resort hotel near the Texas-Mexico border to try to make up with his old girlfriend Rita (Kathryn Grayson in an early role). Rita hires Doc and Wishy on as hotel detectives, and they discover that there are strange goings on which ultimately involve fifth columnists trying to smuggle in radio equipment across the border to help the Nazis. As bumbling as they are, you know Bud and Lou are going to save the day.