Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of February 24-March 1, 2020. We're not quite to the end of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, so there are some great Oscar-nominated movies on TCM. But there are really good movies on other channels too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
For those of you who like foreign films, there are some good ones on this week. I'll mention Two Women, which is showing on TCM at 8:00 PM Monday. Sophia Loren won an Oscar for her role as Cesira, who's struggling to get by in life in Rome in 1943. If you remember your history you'll know that was not only during World War II, but when the Allies had just invaded Sicily and started moving north through Italy. So there's not only that, but the fact that Cesira is a widow with a teenage daughter Rosetta (Eleonora Brown). Cesira decides that the least bad option is to flee Rome and head back to her native province which is more rural and might not see so much war. But while there Cesire and Rosetta meet Communist intellectual Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is taken prisoner by the retreating Germans and ordered to help them find an escape route for their retreat. Poor Rosetta had begun to see Michele as a father figure. Cesira decides that perhaps she should go back to Rome, but that's going to be just as dangerous as staying in the hinterlands.
If you want to watch another World War II movie, you could do worse than to see The Enemy Below. It's going to be on FXM Retro at 6:00 AM Monday. Robert Mitchum plays Capt. Murrell, who has been given command of a destroyer plying the South Atlantic, searching for German ships and especially U-boats. Not that the crew are certain he can do the job, having lost his last command in the North Atlantic from German torpedoes. But soon enough, radar suggests there's a German sub in the vicinity, and they begin to investigate. The German captain, Von Stolberg (Curt Jurgens), realizes the Americans are on to him and he begins invasive action. However, each of the captains is extremely experienced and intelligent, and knows pretty much what tricks his adversary has up his sleeve, so it turns into a game of cat and mouse, and often a waiting game as we inexorably approach the final showdown. David Hedison plays the second-in-command on the destroyer, while Theodore Bikel, who was very proudly Jewish in real life, plays the second-in-command on the U-boat.
For another good movie set at sea, although not during World War II, there's an airing of the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty this week, at 3:30 PM Tuesday. Franchot Tone plays Roger Byam, who's going to the South Seas to study the languages of the region in the 1790s. He's put aboard the HMS Bounty, captained by William Bligh (Charles Laughton), and with a second-in-command of Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable); their mission is to pick up a bunch of breadfruit trees and bring them to the British colonies in the Caribbean, necessitating a long voyage because there's no Suez or Panama Canals to go through yet. Many of the sailors were impressed into service so didn't want to be there, and when Bligh shows himself to be a fairly dictatorial captain (to be fair, some of that is out of necessity), Fletcher Christian and several of the crew decide to mutiny, taking the Bounty to Pitcairn Island where they became inbreds, while Bligh was heroically able to make it back to England with Byam to start a search for the mutineers, while Byam decided to stand up for them in the naval court-martial.
Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian proved to be immensely popular. It was made into a movie on multiple occasions as well as a TV series. The 1929 movie version of The Virginian is running on StarzEncore Westerns this Wednesday at 5:00 AM. Gary Cooper plays the titular Virginian, a man working as a ranch hand in Wyoming together with his best friend Steve (Richard Arlen). Molly Wood (Mary Brian) is a teacher from Vermont who comes west. Once she shows up, both the Virginian and Steve fall in love with Molly although we know it's going to be the Virginian who winds up with her in the final reel because he's the good guy. Steve, unfortunately, gets roped in by Trampas (Walter Huston), who is a cattle rustler. Trampas' gang gets so bad that when all of them but Trampas are caught (saving him for the movie's final showdown), the Virginian is forced to hang them, including Steve! Of course, this leaves the Virginian free to marry Molly. This was the first talkie for Gary Cooper, helping him become a bigger star.
I probably recommended Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent the last time it showed up on TCM, but it's such an enjoyable movie that it's worth mentioning again. It shows up this week at 4:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. Joel McCrea plays Johnny Jones, a reporter who has what his editor Powers (Harry Davenport) considers a fresh, unused mind, so Powers decides to change his Johnny's name to Huntley Haverstock and send him to Amsterdam in August 1939 to figure out exactly what's going to happen in the current political situation in Europe. This leads him to a peace conference run by well-meaning amateurs Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall) and his daughter Carol (Laraine Day), who are hosting Dutch politician Van Meer (Albert Bassermann). Van Meer is assassinated, and Johnny follows the assassins to a windmill where he finds that Van Meer was not in fact killed but that what he saw was a body double and they've kidnapped Van Meer to find out what the secret clause of a peace treaty is. Johnny has to stop all this, with help from ffolliott (George Sanders, and yes the name isn't capitalized), and falling in love with Carol along the way.
For those of you who like more recent movies, we've got a couple of them this week, with the first being from the 1990s: Hot Shots!, at 5:18 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Charlie Sheen, before he went fully nuts, plays Topper Harley, a former “top gun” fighter pilot in the Navy who left in part because of an nicident of his own and in part because of his father's own reputation weighing too heavily on him. But the Navy realizes they need Harley back for a special mission, so they find him, now living in the wilderness with Native Americans, and bring him back, where he has to destroy Iraqi nuclear plants. He also gets involved with another “top gun” (Cary Elwes) in a romantic dispute over a woman among other things. Of course, that plot isn't really what's important here, as the movie is a spoof of movies like Top Gun. If you're into parodies, you'll probably really like this one.
I mentioned Walter Huston in The Virginian. Huston also has a prominent role in The Devil and Daniel Webster, airing at 10:30 AM Thursday on TCM. James Craig plays Jabez Stone, a farmer in 19th century New Hampshire who hasn't had much success because farming in that part of the world is tough. He muses that he'd sell his soul to the devil for some good luck, so sure enough, the Devil himself appears, in the form of a Mr. Scratch (Walter Huston). They make an agreement that Stone will get seven years of success in exchange for his soul. After those seven years, Scratch shows up again looking for Stone's soul. Stone by this time has a son and doesn't want to give up his soul, or especially give up his son's soul in exchange for continuing the run of good fortune. So Stone and his wife hire the prominent New Hampshire attorney Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) to defend Stone in a trial against Mr. Scratch, judged by a jury of the damned. This one is full of great character actors, notably Jane Darwell as Jabez' mother.
Our other relatively recent movie this week is one that's already 23 years old: Donnie Brasco, showing on Epix at 10:00 PM Thursday. Johnny Depp plays Joe Pistone, an FBI agent who in the 1970s is given the job of infiltrating the Mafia to help bring them down. To that end Joe takes the assumed name Donnie Brasco. He becomes friends with Lefty (Al Pacino), a mobster who doesn't have as much respect as he'd like. Donnie uses this to manipulate Lefty with his need to be seen as valuable into getting him in with the other mafiosi, with the ultimate intention of bringing down boss Sonny Black (Michael Madsen). Donnie does get a lot of information on the mafiosi, but it comes at a pretty big cost. He's got a wife Maggie (Anne Heche) and kids whom he can't tell about what he's really doing, so when he's away for long stretches without a good excuse it puts such a strain on the relationship that she files for divorce. And Donnie perhaps becomes too close to Lefty, threatening the whole operation when Donnie fails to call in to the FBI as required.
Another movie that's based on a true story is The Miracle Worker, which runs on TCM at 4:00 PM Saturday. Army captain Arthur Keller (Victor Jory) and his wife Kate (Inga Swenson) had a daughter Helen who was developing normally until she got scarlet fever at the age of about 18 month that left her both blind and deaf. Unable to communicate with the outside world, she became increasingly violent, to the point that her parents were ready to dump her in an institution because they didn't know what to do for her. However, a school for the blind sends Anne Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) to visit the now seven-year-old Helen (Patty Duke) to see what can be done for little Helen. It's tough work, but with a lot of patience and some discipline, Anne is able to use Helen's sense of touch to get Helen to understand what water is. The rest, as they say, became history. Keller was still alive at the time the movie was made, and Bancroft and Duke both won Oscars for their roles.
TCM's tribute to the recently deceased Kirk Douglas is going to be next week, but they're showing two of his movies this week (others, not he, were Oscar-nominated for these). I'll recommend The Story of Three Loves (7:45 AM Monday) next week since that's part of the tribute; this week I'll point out the airing of A Letter to Three Wives at 6:00 PM Sunday since that's not going to be part of the tribute. Three women: Deborah (Jeanne Crain), Lora Mae (Linda Darnell), and Rita (Ann Sothern) are set to have a day excursion together, when they get a letter from a mutual friend Addie Ross (never seen, but voiced by Celeste Holm). In that letter, Addie tells them that she's going to be running off that night with one of the three women's husbands, but doesn't say which one. Naturally, all three women have been having relationship problems that lead them to believe she might be the one about to lose her husband to Addie. Kirk Douglas plays Rita's husband George; he's a college professor married to a more financially successful wife who writes for a radio soap opera. The other couples are wealthy businessman Porter (Paul Douglas) who married Lora Mae from the wrong side of the tracks; and World War II navy couple Deborah who was a WAC and naval officer Brad (Jeffrey Bishop).