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Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of February 3-9, 2020. We're now fully into 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, which means no Star of the Month. But there are still lots of interesting movies on. Indeed, I've picked fewer movies than normal from TCM, and more from some of the other channels. This includes one from as recently as the decade that just ended, which I know will surprise you all. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

 

There are a lot of movies that are mediocre to bad that TCM can run in 31 Days of Oscar because they got nominated in the Best Original Song category. An example of such a mediocre movie is The Tender Trap, which is showing at 4:15 PM Monday. Frank Sinatra plays theatrical agent Charlie, who seems to have one woman after another, juggling relationships with all of them while stringing along concert violinist Sylvia (Celeste Holm) because Charlie is in no way interested in marriage. One day Charlie gets a telegram from his midwestern friend Joe (David Wayne), whose marriage has hit a rough patch, that he's coming to visit. Joe begins to fall for Sylvia, while a young woman looking to break into the stage, Julie (Debbie Reynolds), shows up for an audition. She actually wins the part, but there's a problem. She's already got her life fully mapped out, and she knows exactly what day she's getting married (despite not having a boyfriend yet), and all the following stuff. And that marriage date conflicts with the run of the play contract she'll have to sign. No biggie; she'll just turn everybody's lives upside down. Frankly, I found Julie so obnoxious I didn't get what anybody would see in her. But the 50s interiors (especially Old Blue Eyes' apartment) are quite nice.

 

If you'd like to see Martin Landau do a western, you're in luck this week. Stagecoach to Dancers' Rock is on StarzEncore Westerns at 10:02 PM Monday. Landau plays Dade Coleman, a gambler taking a stagecoach across the Arizona Territory from Tucson to Yuma. Also on the stage are gunfighter Jess (Warren Stevens), medical student Ann (Jody Lawrence), army Major Southern (Don Wilbanks), crooked Indian agent Hiram (Del Moore) and a couple of Chinese-American women. Unfortunately, one of the Chinese women is determined to be carrying the smallpox virus, which of course is deadly and highly contagious, so the driver throws the passengers off and forces them to fend for themselves. They have to make their way across the desert not only with the threat of dissension within the ranks and the threat of disease, but also the external threat of attacks from the Apache. Oh, and a terrible sandstorm. Strictly B stuff, but with the interesting casting of Landau.

 

If you want to see a movie that didn't get any Oscar nominations, and you like more recent movies, then head on over to Starz Comedy for A Very Brady Sequel at 9:39 AM Wednesday. You may recall that in 1995 The Brady Bunch Movie was released, portraying everybody's favorite TV blended family as still stuck in the 70s while society had moved on to the 90s. That movie was popular enough that a sequel was made, and the Bradys are still somewhat naïve. Roy Martin (Tim Matheson) shows up at the Brady house one day; if you don't remember the name, that because he was a brief mention on the original series as Carol's (Shelley Long) first husband (and the daughters' father). Apparently he didn't die at all. Well, actually, he did, and this is Roy's partner Trevor from the expedition the two had gone on that resulted in Roy's death, Trevor pretending to be Roy in order to get at that horse statuette that's been in the Brady house all these years. It's actually a valuable artifact, unbeknownst to the family. Trevor absconds with it to Hawaii, leading to the Bradys going back there for a rehash of one of their famous multi-part episodes. And we finally meet George Glass.

 

Up against A Very Brady Sequel, over on TCM, is The Story of Louis Pasteur, which starts at 10:15 AM Wednesday. Paul Muni stars in the title role, as the French medical researcher who did far more than finding a way to make milk safer. The movie starts with Pasteur theorizing on the microbe theory of disease transmission, specifically in terms of causing infections in mothers who have just given birth getting the germs from doctors' dirty hands and instruments. From there, he goes on to researching anthrax out in the French provinces, coming up with a vaccine. Then he turns to rabies, trying with his experimental treatment to save the life of a little boy (Dickie Moore) who was bit by a rabid dog. All the while, Dr. Charbonnet (Fritz Leiber) has been railing against Pasteur's radical new ideas that always turn out to be right and even Charbonnet is a convert in the end. Anita Louise plays Pasteur's daughter who has a subplot involving a rural doctor (Donald Woods) who at first disagreed with Pasteur, only to change his opinion and fall in love with the daughter.

 

I mentioned one of Olivia de Havilland's Oscar-nominated performances last week; this week, I'll mention another, as The Snake Pit has returned to the FXM lineup. It will be on again at 7:40 AM Thursday. Olivia plays Virginia Cunningham, a woman who has wound up in a women's insane asylum, having no idea how she got there. Apparently, she has a husband Robert (Mark Stevens), but doesn't recognize him, her erratic behavior having already started before their marriage. This being a 1940s insane asylum, it's fairly backward and many of the patients have more or less been abandoned there. (The movie is adapted from the semi-autobiographical stories of a woman who actually made it out of a mental hospital.) But there's hope for Virginia, as Dr. Kik (Leo Genn) thinks she has the capacity to get better, figure out what happened to lead to her breakdown, and live a relatively normal life with her husband again. She goes through the various therapies, including electroshock, and does seem to be getting better, but there are also forces in the hospital that might prevent her full recovery….

 

Debbie Reynolds, previously referenced in The Tender Trap, only received one Oscar nomination in her career, for The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which is on TCM at 3:15 PM Friday. Reynolds plays Molly, a foundling who grows up in the backwoods of Colorado, so backward that she can't read or write. In town as an adult, she meets Johnny Brown (Harve Presnell), who is a prospector. He eventually strikes it rich and marries Molly, but it still takes a while before the couple is able to move to the big city of Denver and live in the rich people's part of town. Although they live there, the couple is still “new money” which the old money doesn't like and thinks doesn't have enough class, leading Molly to go over to Europe to try to get that class. It leads to friction between Molly and Johnny, who returns to the States. Molly eventually has a change of heart and decides to join him, but her trip is on the Titanic. From the title of the movie, you can guess that she survives, although the Titanic scene is surprisingly short. Debbie naturally did all her own singing and dancing.

 

It's not often that I recommend a movie from the current century, but this week I'd like to mention The Death of Stalin, which is on Showtime Showcase at 9:00 AM Friday. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) died of a cerebral hemorrhage in March 1953, leaving a serious power vacuum. The various people in Stalin's cabinet, the Central Committee, don't know what to do when he's stricken, but all of them realize that they need to block each other. Georgi Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) is the Deputy General Secretary, so nominally first in line, but is fairly weak. So the head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) decides he's going to try to use Malenkov as a puppet and become the real power himself. If Stalin was brutal, the rest of the Central Committee fear that Beria is even worse, so the others try to stop Beria, including Moscow Mayor Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi). Army leader Marshal Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) is pissed that Beria ordered the army to barracks, while Molotov (Michael Palin) had been on Stalin's final purge list. And all of these people still have to go through Stalin's funeral.

 

I am very pleased to see that TCM is showing Atlantic City again for the first time in a long time. Your chance to catch it will be at 10:00 PM Saturday. Burt Lancaster plays Lou, an aging gangster in declining Atlantic City circa 1980 who makes most of what little money he makes these days as a gigolo to Grace (Kate Reid), spending his free time ogling young Sally (Susan Sarandon) in the next apartment over. Sally has dreams of becoming a dealer in one of the new casinos that are supposed to revitalize the city, but real life comes intruding in a big way. Her estranged husband Dave (Robert Joy) heard about a drug deal where the transfer was supposed to be made in a particular phone booth, so he decided to swoop in and take the drugs before the dealer could get them, which is really quite idiotic. And he shows up at Sally's apartment together with her kid sister who is now pregnant. Of course, the drug dealers are not far behind, and Dave being an amateur, doesn't know what to do. But Lou has experience and concern for Sally, and sees this as a chance to have one final shot at some sort of glory.

 

A movie I think I haven't mentioned before is Sharky's Machine. It shows up twice this week, at noon Wednesday on StarzEncore Action and at 5:31 AM Sunday on StarzEncore Classics. Burt Reynolds plays Tom Sharky, a narcotics officer in Atlanta. However, one of his busts goes awry resulting in an innocent bystander getting shot and wounded. For this, Sharky gets demoted to the vice squad led by Friscoe (Charles Durning), which is the one part of police work everybody seems to hate. They arrest a small-time hooker one night, and figure out that she's really part of a high-priced call-girl ring. More worryingly, one of those call-girls, Dominoe (Rachel Ward), is servicing Hotchkins (Earl Holliman), who is running for governor of Georgia. That, of course, would blow the governor's race wide open, and there are powerful forces, under Mob boss Victor (Vittorio Gassman), who don't want that. So Dominoe is killed, and the murder campaign ramps up to try to get other witnesses and even Sharky's “machine” investigating the case.

 

Up against the Sunday airing of Sharky's Machine, at 6:45 AM Sunday on TCM, is another airing of Mystery Street. Ricardo Montalbán is oddly cast as Peter Morales, a police lieutenant out on Cape Cod (he's passed off as being Portuguese-American, and there is a reasonable Portuguese-American community in Rhode Island, for what it's worth). A birdwatcher in his town is on the beach one morning and runs into some human remains that have been revealed by the sand. There's not much to go on, so Morales calls in for help from the forensic scientists from Boston, namely Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), who determines that the victim was a young woman… and pregnant. Armed with the forensic evidence and a lot of legwork, Morales determines that the young woman was one Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling), who lived in a rooming house run by the widow Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester). Evidence points to Shanway (Marshall Thompson) as the killer, but is that evidence really right? Montalbán shows here that he really could act, but Lanchester winds up with the best scenes.

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