Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of February 22-28, 2016. For those of you who are baseball fans 
the players are now in Florida as the Brewers start on another season of bitter failure. So since you're going to have to resign yourself to Brewers failure, why not ease the pain with some good movies? As always, I've used my good taste to select a bunch of interesting movies for you. All times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I've recommended The Westerner before; that's a dramatic movie about Judge Roy Bean starring Walter Brennan as the judge. For a more comedic version, you can watch The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, at 3:00 AM Monday on TCM. Bean, played here by Paul Newman, is nearly killed in a "town" out in the middle of nowhere in west Texas. He vows to get his revenge, which he does when he gets named judge of the place, and starts meting out his own brand of quirky but harsh judgment. As a result, the town starts to become more popular and grows with the times. Unfortunately, that also means that people who would rather have a greater sense of the rule of law and not just the rule of Roy Bean are becoming the majority. Watch for a lot of stars in small roles: Ava Gardner plays Bean's long-time crush Lily Langtry; Jacqueline Bisset is his daughter; director John Huston has a cameo; Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, and a young Victoria Principal are also among those showing up.
Robert Francis had a tragically short career, making only four movies before dying in a plane crash in 1955 at the age of 25. The first of those movies was They Rode West, which you'll find on Encore Westerns at 8:45 AM Monday. Francis plays Allen Seward, an army doctor who gets sent west to replace the previous doctor at a fort commanded by Capt. Blake (Philip Carey). Blake doesn't like army doctors, because all the ones he's had at his fort have been drunks unfit to do military service, with catastrophic consequences for his men. Two other things are going to cause problems. First is that Blake's niece Laurie (Donna Reed) who is living at the fort, takes a liking to Dr. Seward, and their romantic involvement is something the captain doesn't necessarily want. More importantly, the Kiowa that the cavalry is supposed to be keeping in check have contracted malaria, and Dr. Seward thinks it's his duty as a doctor to treat them above and beyond any duties he has to the army.
People who like Fred Astaire may want to look out for one of his lesser-known movies, The Sky's the Limit, airing at 2:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. In this one, Astaire plays a World War II pilot doing a promotional tour back in the States with his squadron because they've become decorated heroes. (One of Astaire's fellow pilots is a very young Robert Ryan.) Astaire has decided he doesn't like all this attention, however, and would just like a little leave, which he decides to take upon himself by going AWOL. While at a club in his civvies he meets photographer Joan Leslie and immediately falls for her, although the feeling is not mutual because she doesn't want this guy who's apparently not doing anything for the war effort But she decides she'd rather have him than her boss (Robert Benchley). Things get complicated, however, since Astaire still doesn't want to reveal his true identity. Astaire has a famous dance routine to "One For My Baby (And One for the Road)".
The next late-night movie is one I've recommended before, but is always worth another viewing: Kind Lady, at midnight Wednesday (ie. 11:00 PM Tuesday LFT) on TCM. Ethel Barrymore plays the title character, a London widow who likes art and the finer things in life. One day she meets artist Henry (Maurice Evans), who sees her house and the beautiful things she has, and decides he wants them for himself. So he sets up an elaborate plot about his wife (Betsy Blair) being ill, gets her in the house, along with some phony servants (Angela Lansbury and Keenan Wynn). By the time our heroine figures out what's really going on, Henry and his compatriots have more or less made her a prisoner in her own home! Worse, they're going to try to have her declared insane, with Henry to take guardianship of her affairs so he can dispose of all the stuff. How is she going to get out of this? This is one of those little (78 minutes) black-and-white movies MGM was making presumably to finance the big budget Technicolor musicals, and these little movies are often better than the musicals.
Over on FXM Retro, there's a good movie that I haven't recommended in a while: Where the Sidewalk Ends, at 11:15 AM Thursday and twice more Friday. Dana Andrews stars as Mark Dixon, a New York police detective who is known by his superiors for being a bit agressive. Well, that's putting it mildly. He's been going after the gangster Tommy (Gary Merrill) so long that he's obsessed with it and will stop at nearly nothing. In fact, Dixon roughs up a witness enough to kill the guy, at which point Dixon tries to pin it on. Unfortunately, it turns out that there were other people who would have been happy with the guy dead, such as his cab driver father-in-law (Tom Tully) who becomes the prime suspect. Dixon meets the suspect's daughter (Gene Tierney), falls in love with her, and realizes he has to get her father off without implicating himself. (The Production Code, of course, will ultimately require his guilt.)
Robert Ryan is going to be the Star of the Month on TCM in a few months' time. Until then, you'll have to content yourself with a movie like The Proud Ones, which you can catch on Encore Westerns at 11:35 PM Thursday. Ryan plays Marshal Cass Silver, the law in one of those frontier towns that the railroad has just come to. The presence of the rail means that the cattle drives are going to come, complete with their rowdy behavior. One of the cattle drovers, young Thad (Jeffrey Hunter) has an issue with the marshal, since Thad believes the marshal killed his father, shooting him in the back. The marshal takes Thad under his wing as a deputy, explaining to Thad that his father was a hired gunman for "Honest" John Barrett (Robert Middleton), who basically ran the vice in the town where the marshal shot Thad's father. Things are going to get a whole lot more complicated when "Honest" John shows up in this town, and made even more complicated by the fact that the marshal is going blind.
If you want to see some lovely color cinematography and location shooting, you could do worse than to watch King Solomon's Mines, airing at 6:30 AM Friday on TCM. This is the original 1950 version, not the 1980s remake, and stars Stewart Granger as Allan Quatermain, who is approached by Elizabeth (Deborah Kerr) a damsel in a sort of distress. It seems her husband went off to Africa looking for the legend of the mines King Solomon had, which if they were found would bring untold wealth to the people who could extract the fortune. However, he never returned, and Elizabeth would like to find her husband. So she hires Quatermain to be her guide on an expedition to find her husband. Unsurprisingly, Quatermain doesn't like the idea of having a woman along on the expedition, but she's paying for it. Sure enough, his suspicions are borne out when they have to deal with the African tribesmen. Along the way, however, they begin to fall in love which presents a problem since she's still married.
If you're one of those people who's intimidated by foreign films because you think they're pretentious, do yourself a favor and watch Day For Night, at 3:30 PM Friday on TCM. Director FranÇois Truffaut plays a director more or less like himself, who says at the start of the movie that making a movie is like a stagecoach ride in the old west: you start off with high hopes, but halfway through, you just hope to survive. And such is the case of Truffaut's character here, directing a movie on the French Riviera. Unfortunately, it seems as though almost everything that can go wrong does. The lead actress (Jacqueline Bisset) is recovering from a nervous breakdown; the lead actor (Jean-Pierre LÉaud from The 400 Blows)has problems with his girlfriend; the supporting actress (Valentina Cortese) is a dipsomaniac who has difficulty remembering her lines; a supporting actress gets pregnant; and on and on. There's not much real plot here, just a movie about the making of a (fictitious) movie. It's very accessible and very funny.
I've recommended a lot of Spencer Tracy movies in these posts, but I'm not certain if I've ever recommended The Seventh Cross before. That one is coming up on TCM at 9:00 AM Sunday. Set in Nazi Germany in 1936, this one stars Tracy as Heisler, a political dissident who has been rounded up and put in one of the early concentration camps (before they became extermination camps) along with other dissidents. Heisler and six others escape (hence the title), and the Nazis start to hunt each of the seven down methodically, with Heisler eventually being the last of the seven to survive. He makes it back to his home town only to find that his old girlfriend has gotten married to another man; this forces him to try to turn to other people, although most people are frightened enough by the Nazis that they aren't so certain they want to help. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, who were married in real life for 50 years, play a married couple who help Heisler in their first joint appearance on film.
And now for the shorts. For those of you who like those old Pete Smith shorts, we've got two of them this week. First, at about 3:46 AM Tuesday, or following The Sky's the Limit, is Movie Pests, which is about going to the movies and the people who make watching a movie difficult, mid 1940s style. This obviously means no cell phones going off since there weren't any yet, and nobody talking back at the screen the way we'd get starting with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Instead it's more genteel things like women with big hats of the sort nobody wears these days.
The other short is Seeing Hands, at 12:01 AM Thursday on TCM (that is during the Wednesday prime time schedule). This one is surprisingly serious for a Pete Smith short, but then it's got a serious subject matter. A kid who was blinded as a boy learned how to use his hands to the point that he's become a pretty good wood-worker working with dangerous machinery. As an adult, he's discovered by some industrialists who know that, since there's a war on, this blind guy can be put to good use working in one of the machine shops doing fine metalwork.