Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of December 30, 2019 to January 5, 2020. We're about to enter a new decade, the 2020s (we're in touch, so you be in touch), and why not celebrate with some great old movies? There's no Star of the Month this week because of the change of month and when the December and January Stars of the Month were programmed. But there are a lot of other interesting movies. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We get one more day of remakes on TCM on Monday, and this time out TCM is showing five different movies which have each had multiple remakes, so 15 movies in all, three versions of each movie. The last of these is High Sierra (3:45 AM Tuesday), with the second remake being I Died a Thousand Times at 7:15 AM Tuesday. Jack Palance plays Roy, the man who's just gotten out of prison and is planning to retire, except that his old boss “Big Mac” (Lon Chaney) wants him to do just one more heist…. You know how that goes. Anyhow, the heist in question is of a resort hotel up in the mountains. There's a woman in the gang, singer Marie (Shelley Winters), and she wants Roy, but Roy met nice Velma (Lori Nelson) along the way and wants her, since he's planning to retire. Also in the gang is Red (Earl Holliman) and the nasty Babe (Lee Marvin, who at this point in his career was playing one nasty crook after another). Of course, there are problems after the heist and Roy winds up holed up in the mountains unable to escape. A nice color remake, if not nearly as memorable as the original.
Elsewhere on Monday, StarzEncore Westerns is running an interesting little western, Saddle Tramp, at 10:40 AM. Joel McCrea plays Chuck Conner, who is not a rifleman but a cowboy who rides from one drive to the next. Along the way he runs into old friend Slim, who is now a widower with four young boys. And poor Slim is about to die in an accident himself, leaving Chuck as a foster father to those boys. This is a problem since Chuck's itinerant lifestyle doesn't lend itself to a family. Still, Chuck tries to settle down on the remnants of Slim's ranch, taking a job with neighboring rancher Higgins (John McIntire) to make ends meet – but Higgins doesn't like children and doesn't want his employees having children. And those four are about to become five when Della (Wanda Hendrix) comes into the picture having run away from an incestuous uncle (Ed Begley). Further complicating things is that cattle are going missing in what looks to become a range war between Higgins and Martinez (Antonio Moreno).
Tuesday is New Year's Eve, and after the last of the remakes, TCM is ringing in the new year with a bunch of favorites. Starting at 9:15 AM, you'll get all six of the Thin Man movies, in which William Powell plays detective Nick Charles, solving murder mysteries with a modicum of help from his long-suffering wife Nora (Myrna Loy) and their dog Asta, exchanging a whole bunch of witty one-liners along the way. The second one, After the Thin Man at 11:00 PM, is notable for an early appearance from James Stewart as well as the underrated Elissa Landi (who died in my hometown and has a street named after her which is why I remember her). Once into prime time, TCM is rerunning the entire That's Entertainment! series, with three movies as well as That's Dancing! at 3:00 AM Wednesday. A lot of nice clips and the first was done on the MGM backlot before they tore everything down and sold it off.
Over on FXM, they're showing an amiable musical on New Year's Eve: Mother Wore Tights at 9:20 AM. Betty Grable plays Mother (actual character name Myrtle McKinley), a young woman who graduates high school in Oakland around 1900, and goes off to San Francisco to start her working career. A mix-up with one of her friends gets her and the friends invited to a chorus girl audition, and when she's the only one willing to show her legs to the producer, she's the one who makes it into the show. There she meets Frank Burt (Dan Dailey), and you know the two of them are going to be right for each other although it takes a reel or two for that to happen. They get married, perform all over the country, and have two kids together (Mona Freeman and Connie Marshall), but when Mother wants something more for the children she finds that her older daughter is feeling some shame over having parents performing on the stage while everybody else has nice rich parents. Amiable stuff if nothing spectacular; if you want some undemanding entertainment this is a good one to sit down and watch. Watch also for Señor Wences doing his shtick.
Wednesday is the first day of a new decade (sorry if that makes you feel old), and TCM has scheduled some interesting movies set in the future. One of those is World Without End, which you'll be able to see at 10:00 AM Wednesday. Four astronauts on the first Mars mission, including John Borden (Hugh Marlowe) and Herbert Ellis (a young Rod Taylor) suffer an accident in their spacecraft that crashes them on earth after experiencing relativity-related time dilation. So when they wake up from the accident, they're actually a couple of centuries in the future. They see from the gravestones that most of mankind died in a nuclear war, and eventually escape from the mutants into a cave, which is where they find the survivors. The survivors, now led by Timmek (Everett Glass), realize that their society is dying because the radiation made the men less sexually potent. Ah, but there are these four virile men now in the society! Some of the ladyfolk like these guys, but the men of the governing council are jealous for fairly obvious reasons. Can society learn to survive?
A movie that's often considered one of the all-time greats, but which I don't really care for, is Taxi Driver. Epix2 is showing it at 11:20 PM Wednesday. Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a cab driver in New York who is a mental nutcase thanks to his service in Vietnam, which somehow left him unable to have normal relationships with women. He finally meets what seems like a nice woman, Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), who is working as a campaign aide for a Senator running for president, and shows her how much he loves her by taking her to a porno movie (well, this was the era when you still had seedy peep shows in Times Square). He has fantasies about making the world a better place through vigilante justice, and when he runs across the young runaway Iris (Jodie Foster) who is now turning tricks and has a pimp who treats her very badly, Travis realizes this might be his chance to become a hero. Slow, with unlikeable characters and a thoroughly unrealistic climax, but everybody else seems to love this one.
It's been a while since I've pointed out Adam's Rib. It's going to be on again this week, at 4:00 PM Thursday on TCM. Spencer Tracy plays Adam Bonner, an assistant DA in Manhattan married to fellow attorney Amanda (Katharine Hepburn). One day, a case gets assigned to Adam: a young woman named Doris (Judy Holliday) is on trial for attempted murder of her husband after she found him with another woman and shot him. To Adam, this is an open-and-shut case. After all, Doris pretty much admits to having done it, and none of the other facts are in dispute. But then things get complicated when Amanda decides to take up the case as Doris' defense attorney, arguing gender bias in how adulterous husbands and wives are treated, and generally threatening to turn the trial into a Gloria Allred-style circus. (You'd think Adam would recuse himself once his wife was on the defense team.) And the adversarial atmosphere in the courtroom threatens to spill over into the couple's home life. A good comedy, even if once again Hepburn comes across as a self-interest brat.
I mentioned Marnie a couple of weeks back, so now it's time to mention Tippi Hedren's other Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds, which airs at 1:23 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Hedren plays Melanie, a San Francisco socialite who runs into lawyer Mitch (Rod Taylor) in a pet store one day. She decides to play a practical joke on him, which involves buying a pair of lovebirds and taking them to Mitch's weekend home up in Bodega Bay. However, when Melanie gets there, something's not quite right, as a bird attacks her while she's rowing across the bay. And that's just a start. While Melanie tries to deal with Mitch's mother (Jessica Tandy) and ex-girlfriend and local schoolteacher (Suzanne Pleshette), the attacks from the birds increase for no apparent reason until it becomes clear that the lives of the townsfolk are in danger. Eventually Mitch and his family are going to have to make a break for it, but there are a whole bunch of birds right outside his home.
It's been a while since TCM has run the hilariously interesting The Whip Hand. It's going to be on again this week, at 4:45 PM Friday. This thoroughly accurate look at life in a small Wisconsin town called Winnoga stars Elliott Reid as Matt Corbin, a journalist who's decided to go there for a fishing trip. However, all the fish have died, and the few locals who remain, especially people like shopkeeper Loomis (Raymond Burr well before Perry Mason, so you know he's a bad guy here) tell him to get out of town. Matt, being a journalist, is only more intrigued, and decides to investigate further, with a little help from Janet (Carla Balenda), a doctor's sister. Of course, their lives are going to be in big danger. What Matt finds is what makes the movie really interesting. The original plot had a bunch of neo-Nazis having taken over the town trying to bring back Hitler, which is nuts enough. But after primary shooting was done, RKO studio boss Howard Hughes decided it was more important to fight Communism, so he ordered that the bad guys should be Commies, which forced re-shoots that introduced all sorts of continuity messes.
If you remember Nanook of the North, then you may be interested in another of the movies made by the same director, Robert Flaherty: Louisiana Story, at 10:00 PM Saturday on TCM. Filmed on location in southern Louisiana, this one purports to tell the story of a boy (played by non-professional Joseph Boudreaux) who lives on a bayou with his parents, idyllically fishing and whatnot. Then, one day, things change when Dad leases part of their land to Standard Oil so that they can drill for oil. The kid seems curious and gets surprisingly close to the drillers, which I would think is rather dangerous and would lead to an industrial accident. But the workers are more or less OK with the kid poking his nose around, in part because Flaherty's movies were more staged than documentary, and in part because this movie was commissioned by Standard Oil, so they were clearly engaging in PR. The other interesting thing about the movie is the score (there's much more score than dialog), which was composed by Virgil Thomson and won a Pulitzer Prize.
A 1980s movie I think I haven't recommended before is Harry and the Hendersons. It's going to be on StarzEncore Kids and Family at 6:15 AM Sunday. John Lithgow plays George Henderson, head of a suburban Seattle family who go for a camping trip in the Cascades. George accidentally hits and kills something with their car, and finds that it's actually a Sasquatch -- they exist after all!. George ties it up to the car roof and takes it home, only to discover that night that the Sasquatch really isn't dead. Not only that, but Sasquatches are in many ways just misunderstood gentle giants. George doesn't get all of this and his inadvertent actions cause the Sasquatch, now named Harry, to escape. Thus leads to a bunch of Sasquatch sightings in town, and Lafleur (David Suchet), a hunter who has been trying to bag one for years, shows up, trying to catch Harry for his own nefarious purposes. Can George save Harry? This also stars and elderly Don Ameche as a naturalist who helps George.