Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of December 20-26, 2021. Christmas is this week, so TCM is having a marathon of Christmas movies which means no Star of the Month Ingrid Bergman this week. But there’s a lot of interesting stuff out there this week. In fact, there’s more than the usual amount of movies on other movie channels worth mentioning. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM, up through Christmas Day, is running a bunch of movies that are either directly Christmas movies or at least set at Christmastime. An example of the latter is We’re No Angels, at 8:00 PM Monday. Joseph (Humphrey Bogart), Jules (Peter Ustinov), and Albert (Aldo Ray) are three convicts on 1890s Devil’s Island who have escaped from the prison on Christmas Eve and are looking for a way off the island. They wind up hiding on the roof of a store run by Felix Ducotel (Leo G. Carroll), who has a wife Amelie (Joan Bennett) and adult daughter Isabel (Gloria Talbott). The three crooks are planning to break into the house side of the place and rob the Ducotels to get the money to get off the island, but that’s not so easy. Worse, they find out that the family has some personal problems and the three criminals start having sympathy for the family, especially because Albert is enamored with Isabel, not having had the company of a woman for a while. Felix’s cousin Andre (Basil Rathbone) is coming to inspect the books, and his nephew Paul no longer wants to marry Isabel. When the three escapees learn what’s going on, they decide to help in a way that only crooks can.
Somebody like Blair Kiel who is jealous of other people’s hair might enjoy watching Shampoo, which will be on Flix at 1:00 PM Tuesday. Warren Beatty plays George Roundy, a hairdresser to the well-to-do in Beverly Hills who would like to open his own salon but needs money to do that and can’t get a loan from the bank. He can get the women, however; he’s currently got a girlfriend in Jill (Goldie Hawn), a former girlfriend in Jackie (Julie Christie), and a woman on the side in Felicia (Lee Grant). Jackie, not knowing about the sexual relationship between George and Felicia, suggests George see Felicia’s venture capitalist husband Lester (Jack Warden) about the loan. Meanwhile, things are about to get more complicated romantically for George as Jill needs more from him than he’s able or willing to give, while George finds out that Lester is having an affair with Jackie. All of this is set against the backdrop of Election night 1968. Watch also for a young Carrie Fisher at the beginning of her career as Felicia’s teenaged daughter who propositions George.
Liza Minnelli is 75 now and still going strong. If you want to see her movie debut, watch In the Good Old Summertime, at 10:00 PM Tuesday on TCM. A remake of The Shop Around the Corner, the movie stars Van Johnson as Andrew, a clerk at a turn-of-the-century music store. Coming into the store and getting a job is Veronica (Judy Garland), who can obviously put the songs over, leading to an almost immediate dislike between the two, which store owner Otto (S.Z. Sakall) has to mediate. But what really complicates things is that Andrew has been corresponding with someone from the personal ads, only writing letters, and never having seen the woman, with whom he’s fallen in love. Of course, it should be pretty damn obvious that the woman in question is Veronica, and when the two epistolary lovers decide to meet in real life, well, sparks are going to fly. As for Liza, she’s all of three years old when she’s carried by her real-life mother in the film’s closing scene. Watch also for supporting roles from Spring Byington and Buster Keaton.
Our next selection is It Could Happen to You, but somehow I don’t think it could happen to any of you schlubs. The movie will be on StarzEncore at 1:19 PM Wednesday. Nicolas Cage plays Charlie Lang, a good-guy cop who lives in a working-class section of Queens with his nagging wife Muriel (Rosie Perez. He’s perpetually short of money, so when he doesn’t have enough for a tip at the coffee shop one day, he tells the waitress, Yvonne (Bridget Fonda) that either he’ll pay her double tomorrow or else pay off half of the winnings on his lottery ticket. She goes for the latter since she expects not to get paid either way. Surprise surprise, but the lottery ticket has all the right numbers and wins a $4 million share of the grand prize. Charlie fully intends to pay Yvonne her share, which would be $2 million minus gift taxes, but Muriel is unsurprisingly ticked. And when it seems that Charlie and Yvonne start to develop feelings for each other, Muriel tries to get the entire $4 million in the divorce settlement.
One of the great movies of Christmas or any other season is The Apartment. TCM has it at 12:45 AM Thursday. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an insurance clerk working at one of the big companies with a headquarters in Manhattan. As a way of trying to get ahead, he lets his bosses borrow his apartment whenever they’ve got someone in from out of town that they can’t let everybody else see, which is a euphemism for a mistress. The bosses’ boss Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) eventually becomes one of those borrowing the apartment, as he’s having a dalliance with elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) despite having a wife and kids up in Westchester. Things get complicated here, since Baxter kind of likes Kubelik and has been trying to get her to notice him. She’s really going to notice him when Sheldrake basically dumps her and she tries to commit suicide in Baxter’s apartment, which causes big problems for him. Perhaps he’ll take his neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss’ (Jack Kruschen) advice and finally become a mensch.
A search of x4 claims that I haven’t mentioned Diplomatic Courier in a while. It’s in the FXM rotation, airing this week at 9:50 AM Thursday. Tyrone Power plays the titular courier, a man named Mike Kells who is supposed to pick up a package in Salzburg. However, the man he was supposed to meet was killed. So American intelligence in the form of Col. Cagle (Stephen McNally) offers Kells some nominal help, when what they really want is to flesh out the enemy agents. The evidence leads to Trieste, a city on the border of Italy and Yugoslavia, which at the time the movie was made was nominally independent and therefore a good place for both sides of the Iron Curtain to meet. Sgt. Guevalda (Karl Malden) is supposed to help Kells in Trieste, where meets two women, European Janine Betki (Hildegarde Knef although she’s credited as “Neff”), and diplomatic widow Joan Ross (Patricia Neal). Is one or both of these women working for the other side? The movie isn’t bad, but really more interesting because of the Trieste setting since that portion of the history of Trieste is little remembered these days.
For a movie with truth-in-advertising, try My Stepmother is an Alien, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 11:51 PM Thursday. Dan Aykroyd plays Steven Mills, a scientist who is working an sending radio signals into outer space, to try to determine if there’s any intelligent life out there. Due to a freak accident, a particularly strong signal gets sent out, reaching a planet where the power of the signal is actually considered a threat because the energy could literally kill them. So the lifeforms on that planet decide to send one of their number disguised as a sexy Earth human female, named Celeste Martin (Kim Basinger) to go to earth and investigate what’s going on. Obviously, Celeste doesn’t know enough about Earth culture, but she’s just so darn good-looking that of course the men go for her. Not just Steven, who’s a widow with a daughter, but also his brother Ron (Jon Lovitz). Things get complicated when Celeste finds herself having some sympathy for Steven’s daughter.
If you want ghosts on Christmas other than the ones bedeviling Ebenezer Scrooge, try watching Beyond Tomorrow, at 6:00 AM Saturday on TCM. Three old business partners, George (Harry Carey), Allan (C. Aubrey Smith), and Michael (Charles Winninger), are going to be alone on Christmas, so they try an experiment, throwing three wallets on the sidewalk with some cash and a business card with their address. Anyone who returns the cash is welcome to a big Christmas dinner. Only two of the wallets get returned, those by Jean (Jean Parker), a pediatric nurse; and cowboy singer James (Richard Carlson), trying to make it in the big city. Since Jean and James are otherwise alone, they take up the offer, and eventually fall in love. But then the three businessmen get killed in a plane crash, and fame goes to James’ head, meeting producer Arlene (Helen Vinson) who plans to get James for herself. It’s up to the ghosts of the three businessmen to try to bring Jean and James back together before they’re called off to Heaven.
If you want a different sort of Christmas movie, then you might want to try watching the 1976 version of King Kong, which will be on Epix2 at 3:20 PM Saturday. You presumably know the basic plot from the 1933 film, but a few smaller plot points are changed. In this one, an oil company executive named Wilson (Charles Grodin) has heard of an island southwest of Indonesia that supposedly has a large unexplored oil deposit, but for whatever reason the island has been heretofore unaccessable. Paleontologist Prescott (Jeff Bridges) has also heard of the island, but for different reasons, and stows away on Wilson’s ship, which along the way picks up a passenger from a shipwrecked yacht, Dwan (Jessica Lange). Of course, when they get to the island they find that big ape, and Wilson wants to bring it back to New York because he sees the dollar signs in making it an attraction. He can’t see that the ape is going to hate being shackled, and decide to wreak havoc on the city if Dwan can’t keep the ape calm. In case you’re wondering, the 2005 version of King Kong also shows up on Christmas night, at 11:51 PM on HBO Zone.
We’ll conclude this week with a movie I haven’t mentioned in a while, A Millionaire for Christy, at 10:00 PM Sunday on TCM. Fred MacMurray plays Los Angeles radio host, Peter Lockwood, about to get married to June (Kay Buckley). What Peter doesn’t know is that he had an extremely wealthy distant relative who recently died, and left him a cool $2 million in the will (well, before the extortionate inheritance taxes). The law firm probating the will sends one of its secretaries, Christy Sloane (Eleanor Parker), to find Peter and inform him of the inheritance. Except that Christy has ideas in her head, thanks to one of her friends, that she should try to pursue the new millionaire for herself in what would be a serious ethical violation if lawyers had ethics. Meanwhile, Peter’s best man Roland (Richard Carlson) is a psychiatrist who used to be involved with June, suggests putting off the wedding for a few hours at least to give them time to get Christy to a mental hospital. Of course, one thing leads to another and the wedding keeps getting pushed further and further back….