Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of Feb. 14-20, 2022. Unfortunately, I had to skip a week last week because of an epic ice storm that left us without power for a good three days over the course of two outages. It's warmed up since and all the ice is off the trees, so it's time to get back to some interesting movies. There's more from Star of the Month Henry Fonda on Tuesday in prime time on TCM, as well as a programming tribute to a recently deceased legend. There's interesting stuff on other movie channels, too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Betty White did a lot more of her work on TV than in the movies, but she shows up as the comic relief in Hard Rain, at 10:47 AM Monday on Thriller Max. A rain of biblical proportions threatens to burst the dam protecting a small Indiana town, so everybody's preparing, including the bank, who are having armored-car driver Charlie (Ed Asner) and his guard nephew Tom (Christian Slater) move the cash from the vault. However, the armored car gets caught in a dip in the road. Meanwhile, Jim (Morgan Freeman) is a crook who, knowing the cash is being moved, has set up an ambush to get all the cash from the armored car. That ambush goes wrong, leaving Uncle Charlie dead, and Tom having stashed the money in a flooding cemetery. Meanwhile, the sheriff (Randy Quaid) who is supposed to be keeping the peace and preventing looting is a lame duck, and when he hears about the money from Tom, he thinks about taking it for himself. Karen (Minnie Driver), one of the few to stay behind, helps Tom against both Jim and the relentlessly rising water.
Monday on TCM sees a bunch of literary adaptations. This includes the 1948 version of Anna Karenina, airing at 3:45 PM Monday. Anna (Vivien Leigh) is married to Russian civil servant Karenin (Ralph Richardson) in Sankt-Peterburg. Anna's brother and his wife are having marital issues in Moscow. So Anna goes down to Moscow to smooth things over, meeting Countess Vronsky (Helen Haye) on the train. She's got a son, the Count Vronsky (Kieron Moore) who is an officer in the Russian army. Anna and Vronsky fairly quickly fall in love, which of course is a problem considering that Anna is married. Sure enough Karenin finds out about the affair, and not only won't grant Anna a divorce, but he won't even let her see their kid again. Anna and Vronsky go off to western Europe to try to find happiness, but of course military duties are going to call Vronsky back to Russia. Leo Tolstoy, who wrote the book, had some pretty strict views on Christianity, so there's really only one way Anna can expiate her sins.
Katharine Hepburn had a breakout role in her first Oscar-winning performance in Morning Glory. Somebody had the brilliant idea of taking that story and using it to try to make a star out of Susan Strasberg. That movie, Stage Struck, shows up on TCM at 10:15 AM Wednesday. The movie is being shown as part of Henry Fonda's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. Fonda plays Lewis Easton, a prominent Broadway producer. Eva Lovelace (Strasberg) has just arrived from Vermont with nonsensical dreams of becoming a star on the stage, so she camps out in Easton's waiting room, hoping to get a part in any play. Eva, like Eve Harrington, has a lot of chutzpah, so she's able to win the sympathy of older character actor Robert Hedges (Herbert Marshall), parlaying that into a meeting with Easton and the writer of a play Easton may produce Joe Sheridan (Christopher Plummer at the beginning of his career). Life is difficult for Eva until she gets drunk at a party which causes complications for everybody but might just get Eva a part.
TCM has a night of Montgomery Clift movies on Wednesday, which gives me another chance to recommend the excellent Wild River, at 10:30 PM. It's the 1930s in Tenessee, which means the Tennessee Valley Authority is constructing dams in order to control flooding and provide rural areas with electricity. of course, the dams are going to flood some areas for good, and the people living there have to be moved off the land and compensated for the loss of their property. Clift plays Chuck Glover, an bureaucrat working for the TVA and sent from Washington to get people to accept the buyout offers. One who doesn't want to accept is elderly Ella Barth (Jo Van Fleet), who only knows the little plot of land where she's lived all her life and understandably doesn't want to move even though the floodwaters are going to claim it. Meanwhile, there's also more generalized opposition to the TVA, shown for example in the scene where Glover insists on the black employees getting equal pay. And there's a personal complication for Glover in the form of Ella's daughter Carol (Lee Remick), with whom Chuck falls in love.
One of the movies currently in the FXM rotation is The King and I. It will be on this week at 11:10 AM Thursday. Since it hasn't been too long since I've mentioned Anna and the King of Siam, you should know the story. In the early 1860s, King Mongkut of Siam (Yul Brynner) wants to modernize his country, and hires a widowed British teacher, Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) to be a tutor to His Majesty's children and wives, teaching them the English language and western ways so that he can impress the European diplomats. Meanwhile, one of the King's wives, Tuptim (Rita Moreno), is in love with another man, which could mean the death penalty for both of them. Not that it's really Anna's place to intercede in the affairs of the royal household, either, although she and the king begin to develop a mutual respect for one another. This is Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical version of the story, introducing us to such song standards as "Getting to Know You" and "I Whistle a Happy Tune".
One of those movies that shows up on lists of Oscar winners but seems to have been largely forgotten in the intervening years is Darling. It'll be on TCM this week, at 10:00 PM Friday. Julie Christie plays Princess della Romita, a title she gained through marriage. Not particularly happy with life, she tells the story of how she came to be the princess to a reporter; cue the flashback that's a trope of movies like this. Some time earlier, she was Diana Scott, a model and small-time actress from one of England's Home Counties. She had a husband fairly early in life, but then she met also-married TV journalist Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde) and started a relationship with him. She then met another man, advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), before finally meeting the Prince della Romita and marrying him along with a move to Italy, something she did in the hopes of escaping the London scene she was growing tired of. But can any man actually satisfy Diana, or does she need to grow up first. Christie won the Oscar for a movie that seems really dated today.
Looking through the StarzEncore Westerns lineup, one movie I don't think I've mentioned in a while is JW Coop. It will be on this week, at 4:24 AM Saturday. Cliff Robertson plays Coop, a man who was an up-and-comer on the rodeo circuit until some transgressions got him sent to prison for ten years. Thankfully for him there was a prison rodeo, but still, he spent ten years in prison, so by the time he gets out, he's much too old for the rodeo circuit. However, it's the only thing he knows, so he plans on trying to make it in his second chance at professional rodeo. Mom (Geraldine Page) can't do much for him other than giving him back his old car she had stored in the garage for him, but that's enough to get him driving to rodeos. And somehow, he actually starts having some success. It's enough to get him to second on the money list, but he wants to be #1. Times have changed in the decade since he went into prison, however, and the new culture may prove to be just as much of a problem as his having aged a decade.
One of the popular comedy teams from the early days of Hollywood was Wheeler and Woolsey, who starred in some 20 movies at RKO until Woolsey's untimely death. One that doesn't show up so often is Cracked Nuts, but it will be on this week at 6:45 AM Saturday on TCM. Wheeler plays Wendell, in love with Betty (Dorothy Lee, who co-starred in about a dozen of the films) although her aunt (Edna May Oliver) doesn't approve. So he tries to make something of himself by going off to the South American kingdom of El Dorania. There, he finds that there's been a coup, and that a revolutionary named Boris (Boris Karloff) is trying to recruit people for the cause. Wendell for some reason joins up, but finds that part of his job is going to involve killing King Zup (that's Robert Woolsey). Zup, named for his initials, is an old friend of Wendell's who somehow won El Dorania gambling and certainly doesn't want to be killed. A lot of comparisons are made to the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, but that movie came out two years later.
It may be hard to believe, but it's been 35 years since the release of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. You have a chance to see it this week, at 11:00 AM Sunday on Showtime Showcase. Matthew Broderick plays Ferris Bueller, a high-school senior in suburban Chicago who has a severe case of senioritis, not wanting to go to school. So he fakes illness and calls in sick. Dean of students Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) just knows Ferris is faking it, and plans to prove it. Meanwhile, Ferris wants his friends to join him on his day off. Hypochondriac Cameron (Alan Ruck) is actually sick this day, while Ferris has to figure out a way to get girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) out of school. Eventually, Ferris gets Cameron to agree to let them all take Cameron's father's vintage Ferrari and drive in to Chicago, for what turns out to be a day of epic adventures. Watch for a young Charlie Sheen, as well as Ben Stein whose career took off after an impromptu economics lecture.
Actor Sidney Poitier died last month a few weeks before his 95th birthday. Saturday would have been his birthday, to TCM rejiggered the schedule to give Poitier a 24-hour tribute of his movies, starting at 8:00 PM Saturday. This includes his movie debut in No Way Out, at 10:00 AM Sunday. Poitier plays Luther Brooks, the first black doctor at the county general hospital, who on this night is on duty in the prison ward of the hospital. Two suspects, the Biddles, are brought in having been shot in a gas-station holdup. However, Dr. Brooks thinks one of the two Biddles might have a more serious problem of a brain tumor. While trying to determine that, the patient dies. Ray (Richard Widmark), the other Biddle, is understandably peeved, since why would you do a spinal tap on somebody shot in the leg. But he's also a vicious racist, and vows revenge on Dr. Brooks as the black doctor who killed his brother. To prove Dr. Brooks right, the administrators are going to have to do an autopsy, but good luck getting the family, including ex-wife Edie (Linda Darnell) to agree. The case becomes a bit of a cause célèbre, pitting white against black and leading to a race riot.