Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of August 27-September 2, 2018. We're at the end of August, which means the end of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, so there are only five stars left to get through. But there's going to be interesting stuff over the weekend, and interesting movies on the other channels. And if you're waiting for the NFL season to get here, well, you still have another week to get through, so siting back with some good movies to deal with the wait is a good idea. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Agnes Moorehead is the “star” on TCM on Monday, although most of her performances were supporting performances, albeit quite good one. An excellent example of this is Caged, which will be on at 2:15 PM. Eleanor Parker is the star here, playing Marie, a young woman who got caught up in a robbery with her husband who got shot and killed in the incident. She gets sent to prison, where it's discovered she's pregnant Current queen of the cell block Kitty (Betty Garde) offers Marie an opportunity on the outside after her sentence, but Marie vows she's going to stay clean. Of course, it's not going to work out that way. Under the presence of the brutal matron Evelyn (Hope Emerson), harsh discipline is meted out and Marie slowly hardens up. And then vice queen Emma (Ellen Corby) gets sent to prison, where she's going to show Kitty who's really boss. There are some difficult scenes (cat lovers beware) and although it's in some ways exploitative, it's nowhere near what later women-in-prison films would become. Moorehead plays the warden, who gets the movie's memorable finale.
On Tuesday we get 24 hours of Lew Ayres. Among the movies TCM is showing 0n Tuesday is Doorway to Hell, at 7:30 AM. Ayres plays Louie, a gangster in Chicago who is worried by the fact that there are a bunch of gangs fighting with each other. His thought is that if the gangs cooperate, they can ultimately make more money and not worry so much about gang violence. So Louie consolidates the gangs, and soon enough they're extremely successful. So much so, in fact, that Louie can marry his girlfriend Doris (Dorothy Matthews) and retire to Florida where he can Viber her a Mob-free life and write his memoirs(!). However, once he leaves, the various gangs go right back to fighting each other, which gives some of the man idea to convince Louie to come back. Except that the plan goes badly wrong. James Carney has a very early role as Louie's second-in-command Mileaway, who also takes a liking to Doris.
Apparently it's only been a year and a half since I recommended Hell Bent for Leather, but it's going to be back on this week, at 9:24 AM Tuesday on StarzEncore Westerns. Audie Murphy plays Clay Santell, a man who helps out a horseless stranger and gets repaid for the kindness by having the stranger steal his horse. At least he gets the stranger's gun. That turns out not to be a very good exchange, because the stranger is Travers, a notorious outlaw, and everybody knows him by his distinctive gun and not what he looks like. So now that Santell has the gun, everybody thinks he's actually the outlaw. The local marshal Deckett (Stephen McNally) knows this isn't actually Travers, but he's never been able to find Travers, so why not put the people's minds at ease by arresting this guy as Travers? Santell escapes, knowing that not todo so means certain death, and takes a woman Janet (Felicia Farr) along as a hostage, and tries to prove his identity. Janet eventually begins to think that Clay really is innocent.
Lauren Bacall isn't my favorite actress, but there she is with a day of her movies on TCM on Wednesday. One of the more famous is Key Largo, at 10:00 PM Wednesday. Humphrey Bogart plays Frank, a man who's just gotten out of the army. One of his army buddies died in World War II, so Frank is travelling down to the Florida Keys where the friend ran a hotel to see the man's widow Nora (Bacall) and father James (Lionel Barrymore). Things take a turn for the worse with an impending hurricane, but even more when gangster Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) shows up with his entourage to wait out the hurricane before he can make his escape. Rocco proceeds to terrorize everybody, and Dad being confined to a wheelchair can't do anything to stop it. Frank wants to avoid violence if he can, but when Rocco's actions cause the deaths of innocent people, Frank just might be stirred into action. Claire Trevor would win an Oscar for her role of Gaye Dawn, the nightclub singer/mill who gets treated as badly as anyone by Rocco.
For those who want relatively recent movies, I can recommend one that's only 30 years old: The Living Daylights, at 12:02 PM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Timothy Dalton makes his début as James Bond, in a movie with a convoluted plot. First Bond tries to assist in the defection of Soviet General Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé) which brings him to the Bond Girl in this movie, Kara Milovy (Maryam D'Abo). But it turns out that the defection was a ruse, and that there's a new Soviet spymaster out there who's allegely trying to kill off a bunch of double-0 agents. Investigating that in Morocco winds up revealing that Koskov is in cahoots with an American arms dealer Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker) and that the money for this is coming from Koskov's involvement in the opium trade in Afghanistan! In addition to Roger Moore being out as Bond, Lois Maxwell was no longer along for the ride as Miss Moneypenny. At least Desmond Llewellyn was around to reprise his role as Q.
Back on TCM, Thursday brings us a bunch of foreign movies as the star for the day is Marcello Mastroianni. One of his movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Le notti bianche (White Nights), which will be on at 6:00 AM Thursday. Mastroianni plays Mario, who is returning home one night. On the way, he crosses a bridge where Natalia (Maria Schell) is standing. Mario fears Natalia is going to jump, so he talks to her. He meets up with her again the next several nights, and over time he begins to fall in love with her. There's a problem, though, which is that she's already in love with a man known as "the tenant" (Jean Marais). About a year ago, the tenant said that he had to leave town, and that if Natalia truly loved him, he'd be back for her in a year. So she spent the year waiting for him to return, and now that the year is up, he should be back -- but he hasn't shown up. Can anybody in this movie find happiness? Based on a short story by Dostoyevsky, this is not to be confused with the other movie White Nights that won Lionel Richie an Oscar:
Over in Goldie's thread where we were talking about great movies, somebody mentioned Road House. I'll assume that the poster was talking about the Patrick Swayze movie from the late 1980s, and not the Richard Widmark movie of the 40s, the latter being an underrated movie that really does deserve to be on TV more. Unsurprisingly, it's more recent stuff that tends to get run on TV, so the 80s Road House is going to be on TV a bunch of times this week, most notably at 3:04 AM and 1:17 PM Friday on StarzEncore (and three hours later for those who have the west coast feed).
Friday being the last day of August, we have one star left in Summer Under the Stars, and that's Joan Crawford. I think it's been quite some time since TCM ran Harriet Craig, but it's going to be on this week, at 10:00 PM Friday. Crawford plays the title character, married to Walter (Wendell Corey) and living in a nice house. At least, she's the one trying to make it nice. Harriet wants everything in her life to be just perfect, to the point that she's going to be a manipulative harridan if she can't have things be her definition of perfect. To that end, she henpecks Walter, treats her cousin like the hired help, and treats the hired help worse! Walter is up for a promotion at work, and you'd think the bump in status would be good for Harriet, but she sees it means Walter would have to travel, so she spreads lies about her own husband so he won't get the promotion! And she seems to want to ensure her cousin will wind up a spinster. If Walter can ever realize what's going on, the results aren't going to be pretty.
A movie that's back on FXM Retro is In Like Flint, at 1:00 PM Saturday and 9:35 AM Sunday. With the success of the James Bond movies in the 1960s, other studios started coming up with parodies of the spy movie genre. Fox hired James Coburn to play super-spy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint, and when that was successful, they made the sequel In Like Flint. Coburn returns to play Derek Flint, this time called out of retirement to face a supervillainess. Elisabeth (Anna Lee) runs the Fabulous Face spa in the Virgin Islands, but it's really a front for her attempt to use her beauticians to mind control people to install a matriarchy on Earth. To this end, they kidnap the US President and replace him with an actor, and try to commandeer a US space platform that has been infiltrated with Soviet cosmonauts. Of course, in a spoof like this, it's not the plot atht's the important thing. Lee J. Cobb returns as the now-disgraced head of the spy agency ZOWIE, and Andrew Duggan plays the president who gets replaced by a lookalike actor (obviously also played by Duggan).
Most of you will probably remember the recent ballet movie Black Swan. 75 years ago, there was a completely different movie called The Black Swan, and that's going to be on TCM at 8:00 PM Saturday. Tyrone Power plays Jamie Waring, a pirate in the days of Captain Morgan (Laird Cregar) who has now been named colonial governor of Jamaica. There's a tenuous peace with Spain, so Morgan and the British want English privateers to stop their activities. Of course, a lot of the pirates know nothing else in their lives, so they keep up with their way of life. Waring has met the respectable Lady Margaret (Maureen O'Hara) and fallen in love with her, so he turns honest and tries to root out those pirates who are still operating, led by Capt. Leech (George Sanders). Lady Margaret, for her part, has a boyfriend already, but what she doesn't realize is that he's in cahoots with the pirates. And of course this boyfriend could never compete with Tyrone Power. Fun movie filmed in lovely Technicolor.