Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of August 28 to September 3, 2017. I know everybody's worrying about the Packers' backup quarterback and the crappy offensive line, but there's not much any of us can do about it. So why not spend the time you'd otherwise worry doing something productive, like watching good movies? Once again, I've used my good taste to select a series of movies I know you'll all enjoy. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Every year in Summer Under the Stars, TCM seems to honor one or two less well-remembered actors who aren't necessarily the star of the movies they're in. This year, that includes Slim Pickens on Monday. A guilty pleasure of mine is Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, at 2:00 AM Tuesday. Michael Caine plays Turner, a tugboat operator in a parlous financial condition. On New Years' Day, he comes across the overturned hull of the Poseidon, after all the rescue crews have apparently left, which is tough to believe since you'd think they'd be there quite a while. But Turner and his crew get the idea of going into the purser's office where the safe is, and robbing the safe. Nobody will know since the ship is going to sink anyway. Ah, but while they're there, another boat shows up, this one captained by Svevo (Telly Savalas). Svevo claims to be a doctor, looking for survivors to help, but it's clear he's up to no good. As it turns out, he knows that there was some secret cargo aboard the Poseidon, and he's here to retrieve that. Complicating matters is the fact that they actually find some survivors (Pickens is one of them; remember that in the original movie the main characters did run across a group of survivors going in the opposite direction).
You may recall there was an eclipse last week. The movie Out to Sea has an eclipse in it, but StarzEncore Classics decided they'd run it this week, at 11:35 AM Monday. Herb (Jack Lemmon) has recently become a widower, and his unctuous brother-in-law Charlie (Walter Matthau) has decided to try to cheer Herb up by taking him on a cruise. Herb knows there has to be a catch, since Charlie always seems to have some half-baked scheme going. Oh, there is: Charlie signed the two up as dance partners for the lonely old ladies who take such cruises, so it's a working vacation for the two. Herb meets widow Vivian (Gloria De Haven), although the dance partners aren't supposed to get close to the people they dance with. Charlie, meanwhile, also signed up because he was looking for a rich woman, and he thinks he's found that in Liz (Dyan Cannon) and her mother Mavis (Elaine Stritch). Unbeknownst to him, they're gold-diggers too, trying to find a rich man, and they don't realize Charlie's being two people on the boat.. Brent Spiner is hilarious as the boss of the dance partners, and Hal Linden and Donald O'Connor get brief appearances as fellow dance partners, Donald showing he could still dance.
Tuesday brings up the movies of Marion Davies on TCM. One that I don't think I've recommended before is When Knighthood Was in Flower, at 8:00 PM. A lavish production at the time, this one stars Davis as Mary Tudor, who is the sister of English King Henry VIII (Lyn Harding). Mary is in love with dashing knight Charles Brandon (Forrest Stanley), but he's not of the right social class for a royal. Indeed, Henry, free-range a**hole that he is, has political designs on his sister, planning to marry her off to creepy old King Louis XII of France. Mary doesn't have much of a choice, especially after Henry trumps up charges against Brandon, but she is able to extract an agreement from her brother: she'll marry the old guy, but only on the grounds that once Louis dies and she becomes a dowager, she's free to marry whomever she chooses. So she goes off to France and marries Louis, and while there, Louis' nephew Francis (a very young William Powell) starts putting the moves on her. Louis eventually dies, and Francis wants Mary for himself. Mary, unsurprisingly, still wants Brandon.
George Sanders gets his day in the sun on Wednesday, and one of his more interesting leading roles is in Death of a Scoundrel, which will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Sanders plays the scoundrel, Clementi Sabourin, who is found murdered at the beginning of the movie. The rest of the story is then told in flashback. Clementi survived the concentration camps only to find that his brother (real life brother Tom Conway), to whom he had given his money for safe-keeping, claims the authorities told him that Clementi had died in the camp. Oh, and the brother also took Clementi's girlfriend! So Clementi trumps up charges against his brother, which gets the brother killed for real and Clementi takes the money and runs off to America. He then uses that money to make his way ruthlessly up the business ladder, eventually becoming a wealthy magnate. Along the way, he also uses and drops one woman after another – Zsa Zsa Gabor, Coleen Gray, and Yvonne De Carlo among others. So when Clementi is killed, there could be hundreds if not thousands of people with a motive to kill him.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns on Wednesday, they're running Black Horse Canyon at 5:51 AM. One of the many westerns Joel McCrea did in the second half of his career, this one has him playing Del, a rancher who, with his foster son Ti (Race Genrty) is trying to breed horses, only for one wild stallion to keep screwing with the herd. The stallion, however, could actually be an asset if they could break him, so they set out to capture him. They do this together with neighboring rancher Alida (Mari Blanchard), who really has more right to the horse since she owned it before it ran away. Along the way, young Ti falls in love with Alida, but Alida feels more attracted to Del if anything. There's further conflict, though, in the form of a third rancher, nasty Jennings (Murvyn Vye, and yes, that was his real name), who also wants the stallion, and he's not going to stop at anything to get what he wants. In real life, McCrea spent a lot of his time on a working ranch when not making movies, which explains why he made so many westerns and why this sort of stuff is right up his alley.
Thursday brings 24 hours of Elizabeth Taylor movies to TCM. I was at my niece's wedding last weekend, and thought about the Spencer Tracy/Elizabeth Taylor version of Father of the Bride, which will be on TCM at 8:15 AM Thursday. Elizabeth Taylor plays the bride, Kay Banks, who tells her parents Stanley and Ellie (Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett) one day that she's gotten engaged to Buckley (Don Taylor). This sets off a series of trials and tribulations for poor Mr. Banks. First, he's worried because the groom's family (parents played by Moroni Olsen and Billie Burke) are of a higher social class than the middle-class Banks family, and he wants them to like his family. Mrs. Banks wants a big wedding and party, but that's gonna cost Mr. Banks a lot of money. Stanley has nightmares about everything that could go wrong at the wedding, and that's even before having to deal with the caterer (Leo G. Carroll). And then the two young lovers have a lovers' quarrel. After the wedding and reception, of course, all of that is going to seem trivial. Father of the Bride is a fairly gentle comedy, but also timeless.
Summer Under the Stars ends on Thursday, but we still get a theme to the TCM programming on Friday morning: submarines. The day starts off at 6:15 AM with Run Silent, Run Deep. Clark Gable plays Cmdr. Richardson, who has been stuck at a desk job in Pearl Harbor since losing his last command to a Japanese attack. One of the subs that comes back into port has a commander who is going to have to take time off on medical leave, so Richardson uses his pull to get this sub as a new command. This much to the chagrin of Lt. Bledsoe (Burt Lancaster), the ship's executive officer, who thought he should have been up for a promotion. And of course, Bledsoe's crew isn't so sure about their new commander since they liked the old guy. And Richardson seems really intent on drilling his men. And then they go off to fight and it turns out that Richardson wants to find the Japanese ship that destroyed his last command and sink it, even if that's not part of his orders, something which only increases the tension between him and the crew he inherited.
A movie coming up on FXM Retro this week that I don't think I've recommended here before is Back Door to Hell, which will be on multiple times, including 4:50 AM Thursday. Casting singers in the lead after the success of Elvis Presley wasn't uncommon; look at the fact that Frankie Avalon, Pat Boone, and Fabian among others all had acting careers. This time, the singer in question is Jimmie Rodgers, who plays Lt. Craig. Craig is leading a secret mission to the Phillippines in 1944, a time when the islands were still occupied by the Japanese during World War II. Craig is accompanied by Jersey (John Hackett), and junior member Burnett (a very young Jack Nicholson) to do reconnaissance and figure out where the Japanese are planning to mass their defenses against any possible future US invasion. They have some disagreements with the rebels, who would love to be able to use the Americans' radio that they plan to use when they get the information they seek. The result is that the Americans' radio gets destroyed and the Americans and Filipino rebels have to cooperate to infiltrate a Japanese radio installation to broadcast their message to the Americans. There's not much plot here, but it's really not a bad little movie.
And then there was the experience of soldiers who had returned from the war, told in movies such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which TCM will be showing at 3:30 PM Saturday. Gregory Peck plays that man Tom Rath, who fought in Italy in the war and is now living the suburban life with his wife Betsy (Jennifer Jones) and three children. He's not earning so much, so he jumps at the chance to make more money when he's offered a job in public relations by TV executive Ralph Hopkins (Fredric March). Rath rises in wealth and social status, but he's still got all sorts of problems. Does he want to be married to his job or his wife? Doe he want to blow smoke up his bosses' asses, or does he want to have principles? And then there are all the memories of his war experiences, which include those people he killed, as well as Maria (Marisa Pavan), a young woman he met in Italy. It turns out Rath wasn't quite faithful with his wife during the war, and never told his wife about Maria. And you can probably guess the consequences of that.
Finally, I'll mention another airing of the 1931 version of The Front Page, at noon Sunday on TCM. Walter Burns (Adolphe Menjou) is the editor of a big-city newspaper, trying desperately to keep his star reporter Hildy (Pat O'Brien) on staff, as he's about to get married and leave for New York. And Walter thinks he's got just the story, when Earl Williams (George Stone), a communist sympathizer quite possibly framed for murder, escapes on the night that he's supposed to be executed. Walter and Hildy find him, and they try to keep him hidden from everybody else so that they can get the story. Not just an interview with him; no, it turns out that they might be able to prove Williams' innocence and the political shenanigans that led not only to his framing, but to the desperate desire to have him executed before the governor can pardon him. And then there's Hildy's suffering fiancée.... The story is well-known, having been remade with a gender reversal as His Girl Friday a decade later.