Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of February 21-27, 2022. We've got one more night of Star of the Month Henry Fonda on Tuesday in prime time, including later movies like his Oscar-winning role in On Golden Pond at 10:45 PM Tuesday. There's also a TCM Guest Programmer, director Dennis Villeneuve, on Thursday night. But there's other stuff as well, including a surprising number of 1980s films. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is the birth anniversary of Ann Sheridan, so TCM is giving us a day of her movies, kicking things off at 6:00 AM with One More Tomorrow. Sheridan plays Christie Sage, a photographer for a "liberal" magazine in 1939 who shows up at a party hosted by the family of playboy Tom Collier (Dennis Morgan). Christie and Tom fall for each other, with Tom eventually buying the magazine and keeping its comsymp tendencies even though that's not what his social circle would like. Instead, they get him married off to Cecelia Henry (Alexis Smith), who is really a social climber marrying up and resenting Tom's management of the magazine. And then the magazine digs up a story on defense contractors producing substandard work; the story could send people in Tom's social circle to jail if it's published, so Cecelia and his father (Thurston Hall) try to get him to spike the story. Meanwhile, Tom and Christie still have feelings for each other that they don't want to admit. This movie has a really odd tone because it's set before World War II, but was made in 1943 when having to put the USSR in a positive light was de rigueur since they were our nominal allies in the war; the movie, however, was shelved and not released until 1946.
MGM brought Lassie to the screen in the early 1940s, but by the early 1950s the big screen Lassie was getting played out, as can be seen by the final MGM Lassie movie, The Painted Hills. It will be on StarzEncore Family at 9:58 AM Monday. Lassie here is owned by a prospector named Jonathan Harvey (Paul Kelly). Jonathan has finally discovered gold on his property, but when he goes into town to tell his partner Blake about the discover, he finds that the partner has died, leaving behind widow Martha (Ann Doran) and son Tommy (Gary Gray). Jonathan leaves Lassie with the kid to cheer him up, and takes on a new partner in the form of Lin Taylor (Bruce Cowling), since Jonathan needs the venture capital. Lin, unsurprisingly, gets gold fever, and decides that he wants the gold all for himself. But since this is a Lassie movie, you know that somehow, Lassie is going to be able to do something about it and save the day.
For those of you disappointed the football season is over, we've got a couple of football movies this week. First, TCM is showing several Desi Arnaz films on Tuesday, and the movie on which he met Lucille Ball is Too Many Girls, which will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Ball plays Connie, a young woman who has quit her European finishing school because her boyfriend Beverly Waverly has decided to go out to New Mexico to write. Connie intends to follow him out there and attend the cow college her father attended. Dad is worried about his daughter, so he hires four of America's finest college football players: QB Clint (Richard Carlson), WR Jojo (Eddie Bracken), running back from the Argentine Manuelito (Desi Arnaz, who doesn't look at all like a football player), and Al (Hal LeRoy) to be surreptitious "bodyguards" and make certain Connie doesn't get into trouble. Things get complicated when Clint falls in love with Connie, while the other three join the football team and turn the team's fortunes around. But when Connie discovers the ruse, she plans to head back east, which would make the others quit the team just before the big game. Desi gets to play the drums in the musical finale, while Eddie Bracken gets to dance with Ann Miller.
The other football movie is Black Sunday, and you can catch that at 3:05 AM Tuesday on Epix Hits. Bruce Dern stars as Lander, a Vietnam Vet whose psychological issues from the war cost him his marriage and who now pilots one of the Goodyear blimps. Marthe Keller plays Dahlia Iyad, head of a Black September-like cell of Palestinian terrorists intent on making America know the sort of suffering she thinks Israeli has caused the Palestinians to know. Mossad agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) and his FBI counterpart Corley (Fritz Weaver) both know about Dahlia, and know she had a film of Lander, but can't quite figure out how the two are related. Dahlia's plan is to blackmail Lander and force him to use his Goodyear blimp to commit a terrorist bombing at the Super Bowl since the Israelis don't get the significance of the Super Bowl. The FBI obviously does, and it's a race to stop whatever might happen from happening. Amazingly, the NFL allowed director John Frankenheimer to use real footage from Super Bowl X; also Goodyear allowed their name to be used which is equally surprising.
It's been a while since I've mentioned Fame. It's going to be on TCM this week, at 2:45 AM Thursday. The movie starts off with audition day for the new incoming freshmen at New York's prestigious School for the Performing Arts. Among those who get accepted are singer Coco (Irene Cara); dancer Leroy (Gene Anthony Ray); gay would-be actor Montgomery (Paul McCrane); shy Doris (Maureen Teefy); and Puerto Rican who doesn't want to be typecast Raul Garcia, insisting he be called Ralph Garcy (Barry Miller). After getting accepted, the proceed to go through four years of school, learning that the performing arts makes for an extremely difficult career, and having to face academic work that isn't always easy. All of them also have a lot of problems in their personal lives, and some of the students aren't able to make the grade. The title song won the Oscar as it's performed in a very energetic sequence in which all the students pour out onto the street to perform their dance routines; "Out Here on My Own" is probably a better song but it was only used in a scene with Coco practicing, and not as a metaphor of the challenges of growing up and becoming independent.
We've got a couple of movies set in the south this week, starting with one that was released just about 30 years ago (sorry to make you all feel old): My Cousin Vinny, at 4:00 PM Wednesday on Movie Max. Bill (Ralph Macchio) and Stan (Mitchell Whitfield) are two friends from New York who have been accepted to UCLA, and have decided to take the scenic route through the south to get there. At one stop in Alabama, somebody driving a car that looks just like theirs robs a service station and, since it's an uncommon vintage car, the two yutes are arrested and put on trial for the crime. The only lawyer either of them knows is Bill's cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci), who has kept failing the bar exam to the eternal chagrin of his long-suffering girlfriend Mona Lisa (Marisa Tomei). Vinny and Mona Lisa go south to take on Bill and Stan's defense, at a trial presided over by Judge Haller (Fred Gwynne). Needless to say, Vinny proceeds to turn the place upside down through his unorthodox style of lawyering, and Marisa Tomei walks off with the Oscar for showing a surprising amount of knowledge about vintage cars.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is on again this week, at 3:45 PM Thursday on TCM. Alan Arkin plays John Singer, a deaf-mute in a small southern town who has a best friend who is a fellow deaf-mute, Antonapoulos (Chuck McCann). However, the best friend keeps getting into trouble, and is sent to the state mental hospital by his father, so John moves to be closer to his best friend. He's able to rent a room from the Kellys, a family that needs the money because Dad is on disability and their teenage daughter Mick (Sondra Locke) has dreams of the finer things in life. John is basically a good guy, and has a way of being likable to everybody around him and having an effect on them, as when he meets the town drunk (Stacy Keach) and has to take the drunk to the nearest doctor, who happens to be black in a segregated society. Meanwhile, Mick is growing up, and Antonapoulous is having his own problems at the hospital. A well-acted movie, but a bit of a mess of a story.
William Powell and Myrna Loy are remembered for the six Thin Man movies they made together, but they made several other movies together as well, including Manhattan Melodrama, at 7:45 AM Friday on TCM. The movie starts with a prologue around 1910. Young Blackie (Mickey Rooney) and Jim are friends who are both orphaned when the cruise boat they were on with their families catches fire. Two decades later, they've both grown up. Blackie (Clark Gable, and yes, it's a hoot to imaging Mickey Rooney growing up to become Clark Gable) is one of the heads of the New York crime syndicate, and has a girlfriend in Eleanor (Myrna Loy). But she wants somebody more honest and not likely to wind up on death row, so she eventually goes for Jim (William Powell), who has become a lawyer, the assistant District Attorney for Manhattan, and an ambitious man planning to run for Governor of New York. Indeed, he does become Governor, but his old friendship with Blackie comes back to haunt him once Blackie finally does wind up on death row. Listen for the song "The Bad in Every Man", which has a very familiar tune but with completely different lyrics nowadays.
One of the movies that's been back in the FXM rotation for a little while now is 9 to 5. It's on again this week, at 11:00 AM Sunday. Jane Fonda plays Judy, a recent divorcée who is going back into the working world after her marriage and gotten a good job in the secretarial pool of a large company. Her supervisor Violet (Lily Tomlin), shows her the ropes, but she and everybody else in the office has a thing against Doralee (Dolly Parton), the personal secretary to boss Franklin (Dabney Coleman), since from everything they see Franklin is favoring Doralee over all the other secretaries. He really isn't, however, and when Judy and Violet learn this from Doralee, the three become friends. And then they learn that Franklin is embezzling from the firm and try to figure out a way to notify higher-ups without Franklin learning. But because the company computer is down, that may take a while, and they have to resort to extreme measures. The title song was nominated for an Oscar, but it was an extremely strong year for original songs, and it lost out to the aforementioned "Fame".
We'll conclude this week with another 1980s movie, Blood Simple, at 8:00 PM Saturday on TCM. Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) owns a seedy bar in a small Texas town, who has a wife Abby (Frances McDormand) who he fears is stepping out on him. So he hires private detective Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), who finds that Abby is sleeping with Julian's bartender Ray (John Getz). Julian then gets the brilliant idea that he'll have somebody do a contract killing of Abby and Ray, namely Visser. However, Visser has his own ideas, doctoring photos that make it look like Ray and Abby have been killed in order to prove it to Julian, and then killing Julian at their meeting to collect payment, using Abby's gun and leaving it at the crime scene as evidence so that the police will obviously suspect Abby of being the prime suspect. Of course, things don't quite go as planned as Julian was able to maintain some evidence to blackmail Visser, and Ray finds the crime scene before anybody else, with more twists and turns ensuing....