Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread for the week of February 1-7, 2016. The Super Bowl is this coming weekend, but the Packers aren't playing, so who really cares? February also means the beginning of 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, when all of the movies showing were nominated for at least one Oscar. However, that also means no Star of the Month, and no Bowery Boys movies on Saturday mornings. There's some good stuff on other channels, too; Fedya's good taste would never lead you wrong now, would it? As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned
I think this week we'll start off with a movie on Encore Westerns: Three Hours to Kill, at 8:05 AM Monday. Dana Andrews plays Jim Guthrie, who was nearly lynched for a murder he didn't commit three years earlier until his girlfriend Laurie (Donna Reed) helped him escape. This, even though the guy he supposedly killed was her brother -- Jim swears up and down the brother beat him unconscious in a fight, and then somebody else took his gun and shot the brother to frame him. He's been on the run all this time, but has finally decided to come back to town to clear his name. Of course, nobody in town really wants him back, but the sheriff (Stephen Elliott) generously gives Jim until sundown to find the real killer. If nobody wants Jim back in town, well, nobody wanted Laurie's brother around either, it seems, as there are a whole bunch of people who could have killed him. Surely Laurie knows something that she's not letting on, too.
I didn't plan it this way, but we're going to be getting several war movies this week. We'll start off with one that tries to be more factual: The Battle of the Bulge, at 5:00 PM Tuesday on TCM. This is one of those 1960s epics, from towards the beginning of the cycle when Hollywood was making grand-scale docudramas about the war, complete with an all-star cast. The Battle of the Bulge, of course, was the Nazi counteroffensive in December 1944 as the Allies were advancing eastward after the successful D-Day invasion, in the Belgian Ardennes forest. Spain substitutes for Belgium here, and looks badly out of place, but it's the first of the film's many problems. Most of the Americans apart from Henry Fonda are preternaturally stupid; there are a ton of anachronisms; and as far as I know none of the characters here is a real person. And yet somehow, there's still some entertainment value in this one. I said there's an all-star cast; watch for Dana Andrews again, Charles Bronson, Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas, and more.
A movie with an odd title is Edward, My Son, showing up at 5:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. The reason the title is so odd is that we never see Edward on screen. The movie, therefore, is pretty obviously about the parents, specifcally the father, played by Spencer Tracy. He's Sir Arnold Boult, a Canadian-born industrialist living in the UK. He and his wife Evelyn (Deborah Kerr) both love Edward, but Dad loves him perhaps too much. Or maybe not enough, but certainly in the wrong way. Dad is willing to do almost anything to ensure that Edward becomes a success in life, and when I say almost anything, I mean including things that show an extreme character flaw. Along the way, this hurts some people who should otherwise be close to Dad, such has his business partner (Mervyn Johns) Edward learns well from Dad, meanwhile, growing up to become Just Like Dad, somethinig that ultimately horrifies poor Mom. MGM made this one over in the UK with an entirely British cast outside of Tracy, so it doesn't have quite the gloss that normal MGM movies do.
Yet another movie I think I haven't recommended before is The Lost Patrol, airing on TCM at 10:00 AM Wednesday. During World War I, a British army patrol is on a mission somehwere in the Arabian peninsula to get back to the rest of their troop. The commanding officer doesn't tell the rest of the men exactly where the rendezvous point is supposed to be, which is a problem when an Arab sniper kills the CO. So it's up to the sergeant (Victor McLaglen, who himself served in Mesopotamia in World War I) to take command and try to get the soldiers to safety. He finds a small oasis that seems like a safe place, but there's the problem that the Arabs can surround the place and wait out the British, especially after they steal the men's horses one night. The cast includes Boris Karloff as a deeply religious man in the patrol, and Alan Hale and Reginald Denny as other members of the patrol.
A couple of actors at the beginning of their careers show up in Caption Caution, at 3:30 AM Thursday on TCM. Set against the backdrop of the War of 1812, it stars Louise Platt (fresh off her success in Stagecoach, which you can catch at on Encore Westerns at 8:00 PM Monday) as the daughter of an American merchant ship owner and captain. The British kill him in an attack, so she takes control of the ship and picks Bruce Cabot (King Kong) to be the new first mate over a young Victore Mature. That's a bad idea since Cabot is actually working for the British, so he takes the boat and all its crew captive. He eventually breaks the rest of the crew out of prison, and takes off after our traitorous captain. The other young actor to watch out for is Alan Ladd, who was even closer to the beginning of his career than Mature who had already had a modicum of success. This isn't quite as good as Errol Flynn swashbucklers, but there's some interesting stuff here.
A movie that's returning to FXM Retro after a substantial absence is The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, which gets two airings, at 11:00 AM Friday and 9:30 AM Saturday. The title character is played by Joan Collins. She's Evelyn Nesbit, a young woman at the turn of the last century) whose only asset is her looks, and she immediately draws the eye of wealthy (and already married) architect Stanford White (Ray Milland), who falls for her. However, she marries millionaire Harry Thaw (Farley Granger), who happens to be insanely jealous and doesn't want anybody else to have her. So when Stanford keeps seeing Evelyn, Harry does the only thing a man can do: he shoots Stanford dead! The two men were both prominent citizens, so the trial was an enormous media spectacle -- note that this is based on a real case. The real Evelyn Nesbit was still alive when the movie was made, so her character is presented rather more kindly than she probably was in real life. Elsewhere in the cast, watch for an older Glenda Farrell as Evelyn's mother.
A Fox movie that shows up over on TCM this week is Leave Her to Heaven, at 4:00 PM Friday. Writer Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) is heading west to a New Mexico ranch for a vacation. On the way, he meets lovely Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney), who is going west to scatter her father's ashes. The two immediately fall in love despite the fact that her old boyfriend, District Attorney Quinton (Vincent Price) knows Ellen is a difficult person. They get married and Richard finds out just how jealous Ellen can be. She's resentful of Richard's younger brother, who has been recovering from polio at Warm Springs, and deals with the kid by.... Well, I'm not going to reveal that if you haven't seen the movie yet. Ellen's half-sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain) begins to fall for Richard, too, and the feeling starts to become mutual, which presents more serious problems, culminating in Ellen's showing herself to be one of the more shocking monsters you'll see on screen. This one is in lovely Technicolor, which works well for the scenes in the "Maine" wilderness (actually Bass Lake, CA for our friends out west).
A different sort of war movie is showing up at 6:15 PM Saturday on TCM: Swing Shift. Goldie Hawn plays Kay, a housewife in 1941 married to Jack (Ed Harris). Of course, you all know what would happen on December 7 that year as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sending the US into World War II. Jack goes off to enlist and fight in the war, as do a whole bunch of other husbands and boyfriends. This means there's an acute labor shortage, and Kay goes off to work at an airplane factory to do her job in the war effort. There, she meets Hazel (Christine Lahti), a nightclub singer whose boyfriend has also enlisted. Her boss Lucky (Hawn's real life partner -- NOT husband -- Kurt Russell) is 4-F due to a heart condition so can stay in the US and work in the defense plants to do his part. But he begins to fall for Kay even though he knows she's married, and tries to pursue her romantically. Kay eventually decides to have a relationship with Lucky, which causes problems when Jack returns home.
Since we know that none of you wants to watch 163 hours of Superb Owl pregame coverage, TCM has the most appropriate movie for the day: The Fortune Cookie, at 12:15 PM Sunday. Jack Lemmon stars as Harry, a TV cameraman in Cleveland who does Browns games for CBS. During one of the games, the WR (Ron Rich) catches a pass, and heads for the sidelines, getting pushed out of bounds forcefully enough that his momentum carries him into Harry, knocking Harry down. Harry spends a night in hospital, but is going to be OK. At least, he'll be OK until his brother-in-law Willie (Walter Matthau) gets to talk to him. Willie, a lawyer, convinces Harry that his medical situation is rather more severe, and that Harry should sue everybody he can to try to get some financial compensation for his "devastating" injuries. Harry doesn't particulary like the idea but reluctantly goes along; meanwhile detectives for the defendants try to catch Harry as not really being injured. All of this is portrayed as a rather dark comedy from the mind of Billy Wilder.