Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of August 24-30, 2020. Bayern München is playing in the delayed Champions League final, and we're all going to need a way to come down from the high of their winning the title. SO why not do it by watching some good movies. Or, at least some interesting movies. We've got seven more stars as we near the end of Summer Under the Stars including Paul Henried on Friday and Eva Marie Saint on Saturday. But there's stuff on other channels worth a mention, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The week starts off on TCM with a day of George Raft on Monday. One that I've recommended a couple of times before, but deserves another mention, is Red Light, at 2:30 PM. Raft plays John Torno, head of a trucking compnay and older brother to Jess, a Catholic army chaplain who is about to be demobbed as a hero. Meanwhile, John got one of his former employees, Nick Cherney (Raymond Burr), put in prison for embezzling. While in prison, Nick sees a newsreel about Jess' return to civilian life, and comes up with a plan. His friend Rocky (Harry Morgan) is about to be released from prison, so Nick gets Rocky to kill Jess in Jess' hotel room, with Nick having the perfect alibi: he's still in prison himself. Jess, with his dying breath, tells John that he wrote the clue John seeks in the Bible. So John looks for the Gideon Bible, which has gone missing. He finds somebody else who was in that hotel room, Carla (Virginia Mayo), and together the two go looking for that bible looking to solve Jess' murder. A really interesting cast and a pretty interesting premise really make this noir better than it has any right to be.
British actor Ben Cross died last week. You'd probably remember him best for playing Harold Abraham in Chariots of Fire, but that's not on anywhere this week as far as I could find. So instead, I'll mention his movie First Knight, which you can watch at 8:44 PM Monday on StarzEncore Classics. Cross plays Prince Malagant, one of the knights of the Round Table, which is of course headed by King Arthur (Sean Connery). Arthur wants to bring peace to his lands by marrying the newly-crowned Guinevere (Julia Ormond) of Leonesse, but bad-guy Malagant loves her too and wants her for himself as well as being able to plunder Leonesse. On his first attempt to attack Guinevere, he's thwarted by a peasant who just happens to be in the right place at the right time, Lancelot (Richard Gere). Lancelot falls in love with Guinevere, setting off a love quadrangle. He and Malagant are both in love with Guinevere, while she winds up falling in love with Lancelot too after he keeps saving her from Malagant, this even though she knows her duty to Arthur. Arthur is for quite some time oblivious to what's going on.
On Tuesday, TCM gives us 24 hours of the movies of Anne Shirley. Among the movies TCM is running is A Man to Remember. Obviously Shirley isn't the man; that's Edward Ellis as Dr. John Abbott, a small-town doctor who at the opening of the movie has just died, with a big funeral procession being given for him and a couple of fat-cat bankers going through the meager contents of his safe deposit box (Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay early in his career, hence the blatant propaganda). Abbott came to the town decades back with his son Dick (played as an adult by Lee Bowman), endearing himself to the town's poorer folk by bartering for his services when most of them have little cash. He winds up with an orphan Jean (played as an adult by Anne Shirley), whom he raises as his own daughter under her biological father wants her back. She, meanwhile, grows up to love Dick. Also along the way, Dr. Abbott does some public health work by stopping a polio epidemic – and nobody has to wear masks!
As is usually the case, there's another movie that returned to the FXM rotation a few months back that I haven't mentioned in years, if ever. This week, that movie is The Last Hard Men, which FXM is running at 11:10 AM Tuesday. James Coburn plays Zach Provo, a half-Indian in prison in the Arizona territory a few years before statehood. He's been in prison for years for a bank robbery where he buried the loot, and now plans to break out to get that loot, freeing himself and half a dozen other convicts from the chain gang. Sam Burgade (Charlton Heston) is the sheriff who put Provo behind bars, and is now retired, but he's persuaded out of retirement because he's the one who knows how Provo thinks. Burgade sets a trap involving a shipment of gold into town, but Provo realizes it's a trap and instead decides to kidnap Burgade's daughter Susan (Barbara Hershey), taking her into the mountains with him and the other escapees until he get get that gold. Of course, with a bunch of men who have been in prison for years and haven't had a woman for years, there's jealousy and dissension in the ranks.
A movie running this week on StarzEncore Westerns that I think I haven't recommended before is The Dalton Girls. It'll be on at 1:01 AM Wednesday. The Dalton Gang was a gang of bank robbers led by four of the Dalton brothers in the early 1890s, until a botched bank robbery resulted in two of the brothers getting killed. So sisters Holly (Merry Anders) and Rose (Lisa Davis) go to claim their brothers' bodies. The undertaker tries to put the movies on Holly and when he won't stop and gets violent with her, she kills him in self-defense. This is the start of turning the Dalton sisters into a gang of their own (something that didn't actually happen in real life), with Holly and Rose being joined by Marigold (Sue George) and Columbine (Penny Edwards). They have some success at first, but you know that thanks to the Production Code, they're going to get what's coming to them eventually.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. As you probably know, this is the opening line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The 1940 film version of the novel will be on TCM at 12:45 PM Wednesday. Laurence Olivier plays Darcy, the wealthy single man who shows up in a small English village where there are any number of families with marriageable daughters. One of these families is the Bennets, who have five daughters all seeking a better-off husband. Among them are Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) and Elizabeth (Greer Garson). Mom (Mary Boland) having seen Darcy and the equally wealthy and single Bingley, immediately sets out to try to get them to marry her daughters. Complicating things is that the Bennets have a cousin Collins (Melville Cooper) who stands to inherit the Bennets' properties following Dad's death, there being no other male heirs. He wants to marry Elizabeth, but she doesn't want to marry him at all.
A movie that's often considered one of the all-time greats is A Clockwork Orange. It's going to be on again this week, at 2:30 AM Thursday on The Movie Channel Xtra. Malcolm McDowell plays Alex DeLarge, leader of a gang known as the “droogs” who spend their time doing drugs as well as committing acts of extreme violence, such as visiting an isolated country home and beating the man of the house and raping the wife. The police are able to capture Alex after he tries to commit another crime, and it's off to prison for him. But the winds of politics are changing, and there's a scientist who's come up with something called the “Ludovico” technique that will supposedly reform prisoners with much less of the traditional punishment. Alex agrees to undergo it in exchange for an early release. It's a form of extreme aversion therapy subjecting Alex to drugging and being shown grotesque imagery, and at the end of the treatment, it seems to have worked. But after his release, he finds that life on the outside isn't so easy.
If you want an all-time great that's not quite so violent, you could always try It Happened One Night, at 8:00 PM Thursday as part of Claudette Colbert's day in Summer Under the Stars. Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who eloped with aviator King Westley. Dad (Walter Connolly) annuls the marriage, so Ellie jumps off her yacht to go back to King. Meanwhile, Peter Warne (Clark Gable) is a reporter constantly getting fired and re-hired, currently on the outs with his editor. But he winds up on the night bus back north, and realizes the woman seated next to him is Ellie Andrews. Realizing he's got a huge story on his hands, Peter tries to protect her and string her along. Of course, it's all just a ruse, and Ellie is going to be none too pleased when she finds out. But Peter realizes he's falling in love with Ellie, while Ellie starts to have second thoughts about going through with a big wedding to King. In addition to the classic hitchhiking scene (watch for Alan Hale), there's Roscoe Karns in a great role as an obnoxious bus passenger.
For those of you who like the more recent movies, I've got one from the 1990s this week: Reality Bites, which will be on MoreMax at 5:50 PM Friday. Winona Ryder plays recent college graduate Lelaina, who dreams of becoming a documentarian and films her best friends: Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), a manager at The Gap; token gay friend Sammy (Steve Zahn); and Troy (Ethan Hawke), a slacker musician. One day she gets in a minor car accident with Michael (Ben Stiller, who also directed), who is a producer for a cable TV channel that would probably be the equivalent of today's Quibi or somesuch. Michael falls in love with Lelaina, while she and her friends commiserate and bicker over the various problems facing new graduates in the early 1990s. Troy finds that he too is in love with Lelaina, and she finds that she has trouble deciding which of the two men to be with as they both have serious problems. John Mahoney shines in the first half of the movie as a completely phony morning talk show host.
I mentioned Charlton Heston earlier in The Last Hard Men. But he also gets a full day of his movies on TCM on Sunday, starting at 6:00 AM with Skyjacked. Heston plays Henry O'Hara, pilot of a plane that's got some Hollywood legends on it (Walter Pidgeon and Jeanne Crain) as well as a bunch of up-and-comers (John Hillerman, Susan Dey, and Rosie Grier among them), all with their own stock backstories. Yvette Mimieux (remember her?) plays Angela, the flight attendant who was once in love with O'Hara but is now in a relationship with co-pilot Sam Allen (Mike Henry). One passenger I didn't mention is Jerome Weber (James Brolin). He's a Vietnam vet who was discharged for mental health issues, and has gone off the deep end for it. So he takes this flight, claiming to have a bunch of hand grenades, and demands that the plane be taken to Moscow. O'Hara has to land the plane in an ice storm in Anchorage and otherwise figure out a way to deal with Weber. Full of stock disaster movie characters and tropes, but still worth a watch.