Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of December 4-10, 2017. The Wisconsin Badgers failed like Dom Capers last night, so they're only going to something like the Goldie's Port-a-Potties Bowl. While you're waiting for that worthless bowl game, or just to deal with the depression, why not sit back and enjoy some good movies? I've found another series of interesting movies that I know all of you will like. This being the start of a new month, there's also a new TCM Star of the Month and a new TCM Spotlight. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned, which is mimportant this week since one of the movies starts at midnight.
TCM is starting the week of with some prison movies. I don't think I've mentioned There Was a Crooked Man before; that's one's coming up at 6:00 AM Monday. Kirk Douglas plays Paris, a thief and leader of a criminal gang who steals a large sum of money from a rancher in the old west. For this his gang gets hunted down and killed, except for him, and he gets sent to the territorial prison along with a motley group of crooks, but not before hiding the loot. There's drunk Floyd (Warren Oates), who also shoots the sheriff Lopeman (Henry Fonda, although Floyd did not shoot the deputy); gay conmen Dudley and Cyrus (Hume Cronyn and John Randolph); and probably innocent Coy (Michael Blodgett). They all get put in a cell with The Missouri Kid (Burgess Meredith). Paris immediately sets about trying to escape, with the help of his fellow prisoners if need be, but the warden puts the kibosh on that. Until there's a riot and the warden is replaced… by Lopeman. Paris still plans to escape.
Monday night's theme on TCM is boxing, and TCM is giving Fat City another airing, at 9:45 PM. Goldie will like the beginning, which has Stacy Keach (as Tully) in just his tighty-whities) getting ready for the day, which he begins by going to a gym to train – Tully is a boxer who should be a former boxer, but still dreams of getting a payday. At the gym he runs into young Ernie (Jeff Bridges), a young boxer who looks like he could have the right stuff, if only he could find the right people to train with. That's going to be difficult, since this is Stockton CA, which as depicted is already becoming a run-down city and a place where nobody aspiring to be a success would stay. Indeed, both men wind up working stints as fruit pickers. Still, Tully's old trainer Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto) takes Eddie under his wing. Both also meet women: Tully and alcoholic Oma (Susan Tyrell who got an Oscar nomination), and Ernie with young Faye (Candy Clark).
Meanwhile, back on StarzEncore Westerns, they're running another of John Wayne's old B movies from before Stagecoach made him a star. This week, it's West of the Divide, at 4:21 AM Monday. Wayne plays Ted Hayden, who's looking for his brother and the man whokilled his father some years back. He and his partner Dusty (Gabby Hayes before he was Gabby) have the great good luck of running into wanted killer Gat Ganns, who is now dying. So Ted takes Gat's identity, and gets a job with Gentry (Lloyd Whitlock). It quickly (these B westerns only run an hour or so) becomes apparent that Gentry knows something about what happened to Ted's brother and father. But right now, Gentry is trying to steal a ranch out from under the father of The Girl (Virginia Faire Brown), as well as plotting to bump off Ganns (not knowing that this isn't the real Ganns) and take Ganns' share of the loot! Formulaic stuff, but what were you expecting from a one-hour B western from the mid-1930s?
On Tuesday night, we get a new Star of the Month on TCM: Lana Turner. We'll start off with her first movie, one that I could recommend over and over again since it's so good: They Won't Forget. This one is set in a small southern town. This town has a “business college” (really a secretarial school) that trains young women. One day one of those young women, Mary (that's 16-year-old Lana) goes back to the classroom to get something, and she's ultimately found dead in the basement. Suspicion immediately falls on Robert Hale (Edward Norris), who was Mary's instructor and who, more importantly, came from the north. The old Civil War prejudices are still there, and the townsfolk are out for blood. Ambitious prosecutor Andy Griffin (Claude Rains, who you'd think is badly miscast as a southern prosecutor but who is so good you don't care) decides this is his opportunity. Robert's wife Sybil (Gloria Dickson) pleads for mercy and protests her husband's innocence. This one is actually based on a true story.
Those of you who prefer more recent movies may want to watch Commando, which is on StarzEncore Classics at 6:59 AM Wednesday. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John Matrix, the titular commando of the story, a former army special forces man who is now retired and living in the mountains with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) to get away with it all. Unfortunately, he's not going to be able to stay away from it all, because it turns out that somebody is killing off all the former members of his unit. And then they kidnap his daughter! It turns out it's being masterminded at the behest of a former Latin dictator named Arius (David Hedaya). Matrix is informed that Arius wants the new leader of his country to be deposed so that he can become dictator once again, and that if Matrix doesn't take out the new guy, then Arius is going to have Jenny killed. Of course Matrix says “hell no” and goes on a rampage to get to Arius and get his daughter back, helped by a flight attendant (Rae Dawn Chong) he shanghais off a plane. Full of mindless violence and plot holes, but fun.
Wednesday night over on TCM brings a night of the films of Alan Ladd, Jr. Not the actor we know from movies like Shane; that's Alan Ladd Sr. Ladd Jr., obviously his son, was (well, still is, since he's alive at 80) not an actor, but a producer, starting at Fox where he got the green light for a little thing you may have heard of called Star Wars. After a successful tenure at Fox, he struck out on his own, with his Ladd Company producing the Academy Awards' Best Picture of 1981, Chariots of Fire (on at 12:30 AM Thursday), as well as other Oscar-winners like The Right Stuff (on at 9:00 PM Wednesday). There's also going to be a documentary about Ladd, which will kick off the night at 8:00 PM and be on again following Chariots of Fire, at 2:45 AM Thursday.
Another film that's back on FXM Retro is The Reward, which you can catch at 8:05 AM Thursday. Max von Sydow of all people plays a crop-dusting pilot in Mexico who crashes his plane causing damage he has no way to pay off. So the local police chief Carbajal (Gilbert Roland) comes up with an idea: help in the capture of a fugitive and we'll count that against the damage you caused. After all, Scott claims to have seen the fugitive from his plane, so he should know more or less where to start looking. That fugitive is Frank (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), a businessman who got in a dispute with his partner and tried to kidnap the partner's son, resulting in the kid's death. So now he's trying to escape in his girlfriend Sylvia's (Yvette Mimieux) convertible. A couple of other men join in the search, and it turns out that there's a substantial reward on Frank's head, so when they do capture him, the men naturally start squabbling amongst themselves about how to split the reward. It's an interesting cast, but a bit of a mess as a movie.
On Thursday nights in December, TCM has this month's Spolight: the Great American Songbook. Michael Feinstein, singer of standards and good friend of TCM, will be presenting movies that include any number of those standards. Among the selections this week is Hollywood Hotel at 2:15 AM Friday, starring Dick Powell as a saxophone player in Benny Goodman's orchestra (Goodman plays himself) who gets a shot at Hollywood stardom, only to find out it's not as easy as they make it look. The movie features the song “Hooray for Hollywood” with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. (There's also a bit of “Blue Moon”, which had actually premiered in Manhattan Melodrama in 1934 with lyrics completely different from what we know today. That, however, isn't on any time soon.) Hollywood Hotel will be followed at 4:15 AM by a short featuring Harry Warren in 1933 singing a couple of his songs, notably “42nd Street”.
Revenge of the Nerds is back on this wee, on Starz Comedy at 1:06 PM and 11:15 PM Saturday. Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards play Lewis and Gilbert, a pair of nerds who go off to Adams College and find that college isn't necessarily so different from high school, what with all the cliques and stuff. In particular, all the jocks from Alpha Beta fraternity make their life a living hell, even accidentally burning the dorm down. So Lewis and Gilbert find a couple of other nerds like Booger (Curtis Armstrong) and Takashi (Brian Tochi) and decide to start their own fraternity, Lambda Lambda Lambda. Complicating matters is that Lewis likes pretty Betty (Julia Montgomery), which is a problem since she's already the girlfriend of Stan (Ted McGinley), the star quarterback. The rivalry and pent-up resentment all comes to a head at the annual Greek games. Can the nerds finally extract their revenge? Makes me feel old to think that this was was released a third of a century ago already.
A couple of years ago there was a big-budget version of James Thurber's short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty that hit the big screen. The original movie version, released in 1947, will be on TCM at midnight Sunday (ie. 11:00 PM Saturday LFT). Walter (played by Danny Kaye) is a meek man working at a publishing house in New York while living with his mother (Fay Bainter), who henpecks him. So does his fiancée (Ann Rutherford), so Walter retreats into a fantasy world in which he can imagine himself to be the hero, constantly saving a damsel in distress (Virginia Mayo). And then one day, he runs into the woman he's been basing his fantasies on in real life. They've been commuting on the train together, and the woman, named Rosalind, uses Walter to escape from another man who's chasing her. It turns out that the man who is after her, Hugo (Boris Karloff), is a spy who is looking for information about a book that contains the addresses of hiding places for royal treasure spirited out of Europe to keep it safe from the Nazis. Or is all of this just another of Walter's fantasies, too?