Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of August 5-11, 2019. The lazy summer days are still here but beginning to get noticeably shorter. Meanwhile, the gridiron players are suffering through training camp while some of the European football leagues kick off this weekend. Still, there's a lot of time available for watching interesting movies, and I've used my good taste to select several that I know you'll all enjoy. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Summer Under the Stars continues on Monday with the films of Melvyn Douglas, whose career spanned from the 1930s to the 1970s. A movie from the earlier part of his career is There's Always a Woman, which will be on TCM at 10:30 AM Monday. Douglas plays Bill Reardon, a former detective for the DA's office who, at the insistence of his wife Sally (Joan Blondell), struck out on his own. He was right to think he shouldn't, because the business is failing and he's going to go back to the DA. Before they can wind up the business, Lola Fraser (Mary Astor) shows up, saying she suspects her husband of cheating on her. Sally happens to be the one there at the time, so she decides to take the case despite knowing nothing about being a detective. And wouldn't you know it, but the case turns much more complicated when the husband shows up dead, an obvious murder victim. Sally keeps investigating, and you can probably guess that the DA's office puts Bill on the case, leading to a friendly spousal rivalry full of wisecracks.
If you want one of those wonderfully cheesy 80s movies, you could do a lot worse than to catch Q, which will be on Flix at 10:00 AM Tuesday (I think they may have a west coast feed too, in which case it would be on three hours later). Q stands for Quetzlcoatl, the Aztec god that manifests in the form of a serpent. Only it's not in Mexico anymore, having taken up residence in the spire of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. From there, it swoops down and kills people on rooftops or high up on buildings, basically terrifying all of the people down at street level who don't quite get a good view of the killer, but only the results. Police detectives Shepard (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) are put on the case, but it's really cracked by struggling lounge pianist turned small-time criminal Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty). He finds Quetzlcoatl's nest -- and the fact that she's laid an egg! But being a criminal, he decides to hold out for a big payday before revealing where the nest is. Can New York be saved?
Tuesday brings us a full day of films with Lena Horne to TCM. Thanks to segregation, Horne didn't get much opportunity to show just how talented she really was during the studio era; she and a lot of the other black musical stars would generally be put into numbers that had an obvious starting and ending point that southern exhibitors could edit out so that their white audiences didn't have to have their precious sensibilities bothered by the presence of a black musical act in the movie. So a lot of the movies on Tuesday have Horne relegated to singing a song or two, although at least they put her biggest roles in prime time. There's Stormy Weather at 8:00 PM, a formulaic (but good) picture about performers who meet during World War I and go their separate ways as each of them rise at different rates. A similar story is told in the race picture The Duke Is Tops at 9:30 PM, with Horne playing a woman discovered by a traveling producer who falls in love with her, only to have to give her up because she's got the talent to make it big. The other Hollywood film is Cabin in the Sky, an everyman film in which God and Satan fight for the soul of Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, with Satan using Horne as a temptress.
It's been a good three years since I've mentioned The Rains of Ranchipur. It's back on FXM this week, at 11:30 AM Wednesday. Lana Turner plays Lady Edwina, the American wife of Lord Albert who married him for his title. The two are in India under the late stages of the Raj because Albert is looking to do some business with one of the Maharanis. It's there that Edwina meets Dr. Safti (Richard Burton), one of the locals who is trying to bring modern medicine to this part of the world. The two immediately fall in love even though they know their relationship can't last. Edwina also meets Tom Ransome (Fred MacMurray), with whom she had an affair years before. He could divulge her secret, but of course he's got a bad reputation thanks to his being a ladies' man, with a girl barely of legal age currently being interested in him. Into all of this comes a plague which threatens to kill a lot of people – even Edwina – followed shortly by a massive flood. This is a remake of the 1939 classic The Rains Came; both versions are worth a watch.
Wednesday on TCM brings us 24 hours of the films of James Stewart. He's got a lot of famous roles, so this week I'll mention one that doesn't seem to show up so often, that being in the movie Harvey, at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Stewart plays Elwood Dowd, an endlessly pleasant man who is also a bit odd. One day , he claims he can see a manifestation of what the Irish call a "Pooka", a mischievous spirit. This Pooka takes the form of a six-foot rabbit that is invisible to seemingly everybody else other than Elwood. So of course people, especially his sister Veta (Josephine Hull in her Oscar-winning role) don't believe him, and Josephine tries to have Elwood committed. Due to a mix-up the doctor (Cecil Kellaway) has Veta committed, freeing Elwood. When the error is realized, everybody starts searching for Elwood. Elwood and Harvey start to have an effect on the people in townsfolk, who learn that perhaps changing Elwood from overly pleasant to "normal" might not be such a good idea.
This week's 1950s B western is The Saga of Hemp Brown, which you can catch on StarzEncore Westerns at 5:29 AM Thursday. Rory Calhoun stars at Lt. Hemp Brown, a cavalry commander who is escorting a payroll wagon west with a patrol of several soldiers. However, another soldier who was presumed dead, Jed Givens (John Larch), comes along with a gang of his own and robs the payroll, shooting the men and leaving everybody for dead except Hemp. Hemp survives, but his commanders in the cavalry are none too happy, accusing the lieutenant of cowardice and drumming him out of the Army for it. Hemp realizes that the only way he can redeem his honor is to find Givens and bring him back alive to prove to the Army that he really wasn't dead. Along the way, Hemp meets the lovely Mona (Beverly Garland), and the two fall in love, which as always brings about all sorts of complications that are typical for these B westerns.
On Thursday you can see 24 hours of movies with Ava Gardner. Well, except for a documentary about Gardner at 8:00 PM? As for the feature films, I'll mention The Barefoot Contessa, at 1:30 AM Friday. Gardner plays the contessa, and the movie starts off at the funeral of her character. She was only a countess by marriage, and she had quite the past. She started off as the Spaniard Maria Vargas, and several men in her life recall that past. Humphrey Bogart plays Harry Dawes, a struggling writer in Spain who, together with public relations man Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O'Brien in his Oscar-winning role), sees Vargas as a flamenco dancer in a hole-in-the-wall joint in Spain. They convince her to come to Hollywood. She becomes a star, but it's not to be a happy life for her. First, her father kills her mother and she has to testify at the trial. As for her love life, she has dalliances with a producer (Warren Stevens), a South American businessman (Markus Voting), and then the Italian count who made her a contessa (Rossano Brazzi). But none of that makes her happy.
Friday's star is Red Skelton, whose brand of humor may not be to everybody's liking. Things get even more bizarre thanks to the odd plot of Ship Ahoy, on TCM at 1:15 PM Friday. Skelton plays Merton Kibble, a pulp fiction writer taking a cruise to Puerto Rico for his health together with writing partner Skip (Bert Lahr). Also on this ship is the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, with a young singer in Frank Sinatra and dancer Tallulah Winters (Eleanor Powell). Tallulah has been approached by American agents who have asked her to take a new type of magnetic mine to Puerto Rico since nobody will suspect her. Of course these are bogus agents actually working for Japan, this being 1942. Oh, and these agents got the plot from one of Kibble's books, which is going to make things awkward when he and Tallulah meet, and she thinks his conversation about his next book is actually about her. They're going to get more connected when Kibble accidentally winds up with the mine. It's all just a thin plot for Powell's dancing and the musical numbers.
An 80s movie that a search of the site suggests I haven't recommended yet is Shakedown. It's going to be on this week, at 2:19 AM Saturday on StarzEncore Classics. Richard Brooks plays Michael Jones, a drug dealer who is arrested for shooting a NYPD cop. His novel defense is that this was actually self defense, good luck with that one in any court of law. Michael is assigned a public defender, Roland Dalton (Peter Weller), who begins to investigate. Of course the cops protect their own, but there turns out to be one good too in the entire city, Richie Marks (Sam Elliott), who decides to help Roland. It turns out that there's' an entire cabal of corrupt cops working with drug dealer Nicky Carr (Antonio Fargas) for their own benefit and to hurt Carr's rivals. Also, is transpires that Jones was able to record the incident with the cop, in a very 80s way. The movie also has a ridiculous subplot involving Dalton and the prosecutor, who used to date. Relatively mindless, but entertaining enough. Not to be confused with the Bob Seger song, which was from a different movie, Beverly Hills Cop II (not on this week):
(Seger earned an Oscar nomination for writing the song.)
Saturday on TCM will be given over to the movies of Rita Moreno. One of her movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Popi, which comes on at 8:00 PM. Alan Arkin plays Popi, a Puerto Rican widower living in Spanish Harlem with his two sons. It's a tough living, since we're getting into the era when crime was getting rampant and a few years from President Ford telling the city to drop dead. Even getting married to his girlfriend Lupe (that's Rita Moreno) and combining two households isn't going to help out that much. And then Popi gets a bizarre idea that could never succeed. He sees that the exiles fleeing Cuba are given much better treatment than Puerto Rican immigrants. So Popi plans to take his two kids down to Florida, and strand them at sea on a rowboat that they're supposed to be able to row back to shore and get claimed as Cuban refugees! Really, doesn't this guy think that his kids want their father? And the ruse is going to be found out anyway.
Finally, I'll briefly mention that on Sunday you can watch Humphrey Bogart all day and All Through the Night (which is actually on at 7:30 AM and not at night) on TCM. There are some very famous movies, such as him and Katharine Hepburn going down the river on The African Queen (8:00 PM), and some lesser-known movies like the war film Action in the North Atlantic at 9:30 AM.