Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of August 3-9. I'm finding it hard to get into sports with all the coronavirus bullshit, so why not enjoy some good movies instead? Well, you also have the chance to enjoy some really terrible movies too. Summer Under the Stars is in full swing on TCM, with seven stars getting honored, including Charlie Chaplin on Saturday, since I'm not actually profiling any of his movies. There's also a lot of interesting stuff on some of the other movie channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Rita Hayworth, and among the movies that TCM is showing, I'll mention Down to Earth at 4:00 PM Monday. A sort-of remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the movie stars Larry Parks as Danny Miller, a man making a Broadway musical about the Greek muses. Terpsichore (Rita Hayworth), the muse of dance, gets wind of this and is pissed that the Muses are being portrayed so badly. So she convinces Mr. Jordan (Roland Culver) to let her go down to earth with an angel (Edward Everett Horton) to convince Danny to change the musical to be more accurate. She gets Max Corkle (James Gleason) from the original movie as her agent and gets the star role in the musical. But her changes make it more serious – to the point that audiences are utterly turned off by something so avant-garde. This is a problem as Danny is in debt to the gangster Manion (George Macready), and if the musical isn't successful, Manion is going to kill him. Lovely Technicolor, but the songs could be a bit better.
If you like Rita Hayworth in Technicolor musicals, there's one this week that's not on TCM: My Gal Sal, airing at 11:25 AM Monday on FXM. Victor Mature plays Paul Dresser (original surname Dreiser, and yes, the older brother of Theodore Dreiser), who at the start of the movie leaves his family in Indiana in order to make a name for himself. First he joins a medicine show, with his novelty piano playing an amusing actress from the big city, Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth), who invites him to her show. Unfortunately it's a love/hate relationship when first Paul and his friend Mae (Carole Landis) act inappropriately at the show, and then when Sally steals Paul's song for her show. Paul only discovers this when he winds up in New York with music publisher Hawley (James Gleason), but it's agreed to publish the sheet music with his name and her picture, and it becomes a hit. Paul falls in love with Sally and tries to steal her away from her producer Fred (John Sutton) who loves her. You know Sally is going to wind up with Paul, but it sure takes a while. As for the real-life Paul Dresser, he's probably most famous for “On the Banks of the Wabash”, which is now the state song of Indiana.
Tuesday's “star” on TCM is actually a character actor, S.Z. Sakall, affectionately nicknamed “Cuddles”. One of his movies that I don't think I've recommended in quite some time is In the Good Old Summertime, which will be on at 8:00 PM. Sakall plays Oberkugen, owner of a music store in turn of the century Chicago. Among his employees are Andrew (Van Johnson) and Vernoica (Judy Garland). The two of them already had a history together before working at the store together, and they didn't really like each other before that. And, they still don't. But each of them has a secret. Andrew has a lady friend by correspondence that he's never met but is falling in love with her, and he's planning to meet her in person to tell her the truth. Veronica has also been doing the pen pal thing and is going to be meeting her man soon, too. Of course, you know that what's really happening is that Andrew and Veronica have been writing to each other so when they meet as pen pals, the sparks are going to fly. Nice period music, and Judy holds real-life daughter Liza Minnelli at the end.
If you like talky movies, then you'll love Metropolitan, which you can see at 10:15 AM Tuesday on Flix. Edward Clements heads a cast of mostly unknowns at Tom Townsend, a middle-class young man living on Manhattan's west side who gets invited to a party hosted by a bunch of much wealthier young people, a group led by Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman). This is part of the “debutante” ball season over the Christmas and New Year's season, sometime around 1980. Tom claims to be a committed socialist who doesn't even like the idea of debutante parties and spouts a bunch of pretentious nonsense of the sort that only college-age students do, thinking it's profound. Even though by all rights he shouldn't fit in, the others in the social circle seem to like him, especially shy Audrey (Carolyn Farina). But Nick's dickishness over alleged cad Von Sloneker drives a wedge into this group, and eventually Tom, with the help of bespectacled Chris, comes to his senses over Audrey. It's an interesting portrait of a certain place and time, although the lact of action may be off-putting to some.
Wednesday on TCM brings us the films of dancing actress Ann Miller. One I don't think I've mentioned before is Hit the Deck, at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Jane Powell is the star here, as Susan Smith, sister of Danny Smith (Russ Tamblyn). Danny is in the navy and an admiral's (Walter Pidgeon) son; he and his two friends Rico (Vic Damone) and Bill (Tony Martin) get 48 hours' shore leave in San Francisco. However, they don't get to have an On the Town-like experience as they all have personal problems to deal with. Bill has been kinda-sorta engaged to Ginger (Ann Miller), but she thinks he's never going to marry her as his life has been the sea, so she's set to leave for another man. Rico has a mother who's thinking of marrying, and as for Danny, he's got to deal with the difficulties of having an admiral for a father as well as his sister's wanting to get in a show together with her boyfriend Wendell (Gene Raymond). Along the way, the sailors try to stay out of trouble while everybody sings a bunch of lesser-known songs.
For those of you who like the more recent movies, I've actually got an extremely recent selection this week: At Eternity's Gate, on TMC Xtra at 8:00 AM Thursday. Willem Dafoe stars as Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch-born artist who painted a ton of pictures while living in an asylum in the south of France, as well as famously cutting off his ear. Since van Gogh's life and work are fairly well known, the movie has to have a bit of a gimmick, which it does in trying to get inside the artist's head much more than, say, Lust for Life did. Dafoe's van Gogh is a man with ideas who knows nothing but to paint, which has left him maladapted to fitting into the real world. He's basically got two friends in his brother Theo (Rupert Friend), and fellow artist Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac). It's Gauguin's gaining a modicum of success and leaving van Gogh in Arles that leads to van Gogh's insanity, at least as this movie posits. The narrative might be a bit of a slog at times, but this is a movie to watch for the visuals, and it's mostly a pretty movie to watch.
Back on TCM, Thursday means a day of the films of Burt Lancaster. Lancaster won the Best Actor Oscar for Elmer Gantry, which is on at 8:00 PM, but I'll recommend a different movie this week, Brute Force at 1:15 PM Thursday. Lancaster plays Joe Collins, an unrepentant prisoner at Westgate, one of the toughest penitentiaries in the state. The warden (Roman Bohnen) is powerless to effect change, with the prison more or less being run by Munsey (Hume Cronyn in a villainous role), who is absolutely brutal on the prisoners, as when he's beating the crap out of Louie (Sam Levene) to get information about an escape. Make no mistake; Joe and partner in crime on the outside Gallagher (Charles Bickford) are thinking about escape. Eventually Joe and his friends get stuck with the drainpipe detail, but it gives them an idea about how to actually carry out that escape after all. Of course, with the Production Code and them being prisoners, success seems rather unlikely.
Friday brings us 24 hours of Silvia Sidney, and the day starts with a movie that is hilariously awful: One Third of a Nation, at 6:00 AM. Based on a play funded by the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal agency tasked with turning out lots of bad but propagandistic art, the movie is set in the tenements of New York, where Mary (Sylvia Sidney) lives with her kid brother Joey (Sidney Lumet aged about 14; yes, that Sidney Lumet). The tenement catches fire, and Mary and Joey are saved by Peter Cortlant (Leif Erickson), who immediately falls in love with Mary and offers to pay for Joey's hospital care. And the feeling is somewhat mutual, at least until Mary learns that Peter's family owns the tenement. The movie was made in service of advancing the cause of slum clearance, with no thought given to where these people would live while the slums were being cleared and positing that the new public housing wouldn't quickly become the new slums. It's laughably bad propaganda, although the best (and most laughable) bit is when Lumet has a fever dream during which the tenement building talks to him.
I mentioned van Gogh above; if you want to see a notorious bomb set in part among the art world, tune in to Hudson Hawk, at 10:43 PM Saturday on StarzEncore Classics. Bruce Willis plays Hawk, a notorious burglar who has just been released from Sing Sing after 10 years, with a prison guard trying to rope him into another heist as he's being paroled. When he and his friend Tommy (Danny Aiello) go to their old hangout bar, a couple of gangsters (including Frank Stallone) reveal they're behind the art heist. But it turns out that there are some other people interested in this fine art, notably the billionaire Mayflowers (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard). In what has to be one of the nuttier plot twists out there, it turns out that Leonardo da Vinci came up with the mythical process for turning lead into gold, but his machine needed a couple of gemstones that he hid inside various of his sculptures. Add to this a whole lot of stuntwork and explosions, and you can see why this overhyped movie might have been a failure at the box office.
We have a lot of movies set in New York this week, including our final selection, Cactus Flower, on TCM at 2:00 PM Sunday as part of Goldie Hawn's day in Summer Under the Stars. Hawn won a Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Toni, a young woman who at the start of the movie is trying to kill herself, saved by the guy in the apartment across the way, Igor (Rick Lenz). It turns out that Toni was having a relationship with Dr. Julian Winston (Walter Matthau), a notoriously womanizing dentist who strings young women along until they want to commit, at which point he tells them he's married to get out of the relationship. Of course, Dr. Winston isn't married, and Toni comes up with the bright idea of wanting to see Mrs. Winston to see if she's really willing to divorce Julian. Julian, not wanting to be found out, convinces his spinster secretary/nurse Stephanie (Ingrid Bergman) to play the part of Mrs. Winston. It should be obvious fairly early on that Stephanie is right for Julian and that Toni and Igor ought to wind up together, but getting there is what makes this movie so much fun as Ingrid Bergman shows she could really do comedy.