Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 13-19, 2020. We're all waiting for our Packers to beat the crap out of the 49ers and earn their ticket to the Super Bowl, and it's going to be a long week of waiting. As always, why not spend that time watching some good movies? There's more from Star of the Month Patricia Neal on TCM, some other spotlights, and some really interesting stuff on other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
One of this week's TCM Imports is Kapò, which comes on at Monday. Susan Strasberg plays Edith, an adolescent girl living in Paris with her family in 1940, which is of course when the Nazis take over France. Edith and her family are Jews, which means that eventually they get rounded up and hauled off to one of the many concentration camps. She sees her parents get gassed to death, but her will to survive leads her to make a pact with the devil, or at least the closest thing to the devil, some of the camp authorities. One of the doctors gives Edith the identity of a non-Jewish prison laborer at the camp who had just died, and when she meets the Nazi guard Karl (Gianni Garko), she decides to give herself up sexually to him in order to survive, and eventually becomes one the titular Kapò, a civilian guard whose job it is to enforce the Nazi discipline, in order for a less bad life. But then some Soviet POWs are interned in a neighboring part of the camp, and Edith falls in love with Sascha (Laurent Terzieff), one of those POWs. He convinces her to take an important role in what's going to be a mass escape attempt.
If you liked the western Top Gun that I mentioned several weeks back, then you'll probably also enjoy the similar Noose for a Gunman, which is going to be on StarzEncore Westerns at 8:06 PM Monday. Jim Davis (the first Jock Ewing on Dallas until his death in 1981) plays Case Britton, a man who had to leave his hometown after killing a couple of guys and where the townsfolk really don't want him back. But he's back, for multiple reasons. One is that his old flame Della (Lyn Thomas) is supposed to come to town on the next stage. But in the intervening years, she's decided she's going to marry another man. Meanwhile, Case has also learned that nasty Jack Cantrell (Ted de Corsia) and his gang are looking to rob the stagecoach and lay waste to the town, so Case feels he has to warn the townsfolk. Finally, somebody killed Case's brother, and Case wants revenge. Could it be that all three things are actually tied together? Of course!
On Monday night, TCM is remembering the Holocaust with a night of films suitable for the occasion. Among them is one that hasn't aired in quite some time, The Juggler, at 1:15 AM Tuesday. Kirk Douglas plays the titular character, Hans, a Jewish juggler from Germany who survived the Holocaust and after the war made it to Israel as a refugee. One day he leaves the resettlement camp in Haifa and has a run-in with a police officer. Due to Hans' psychological scars from the concentration camps he responds by striking at the policeman, ultimately thinking he's killed the cop. Fearing he's going to be caught as a murderer, he flees and starts wandering around Israel, eventually meeting a fellow refugee who's a boy orphan, Yehoshua (Joey Walsh). Then he meets the kibbutznik Ya'el (Milly Vitale) and falls in love with her to the point that he could settle down on the kibbutz. But what about when the police come for him? Douglas himself is Jewish, and had a lot of the location shooting on this one done in Israel.
Patricia Neal returns for another night of her movies as Star of the Month on Tuesday. One of her movies that I don't think I've mentioned before is Week End with Father, at 9:45 PM. Neal plays Jean Bowen, a widow with two young sons (Tommy Rettig and Jimmy Hunt). When she's sending them off to summer camp, she meets Brad Stubbs (Van Heroin), another parent sending his two daughters (real-life sisters Gigi and Janine Perreau) to the same camp. It turns out that he's a widower, so you know that he and Jean are going to be right for each other, but that there are going to be complications along the way. One of the natural problems that you expect from a movie like this is that the children aren't particularly enamored with their potential new step-parent. But there's another problem, which is that each has another flame: Brad has TV actress Phyllis (Virginia Field), while Jean has camp counselor/fitness guru Don Adams (Richard Running). Still, this is a gentle family comedy, so you know where it's going.
If you want to feel old, consider that Chuck Norris will be turning 80 this year. 
He wasn't the most gifted of actors, but you know what to expect when you saw his name in the credits, and if that's your thing, then enjoy the movies. A good example of this is The Hitman, which is going to be on StarzEncore Action at 1:31 PM Wednesday. Norris plays Cliff Garrett, a Seattle cop who gets shot in a drug bust gone bad by… his partner, Ronny “Del” Delaney (Michael Parks). Cliff is briefly and erroneously declared dead on the operating table, but the cops realize they can use this to have everybody believe he really did die and give him a new identity, as the hit man Grogan, and then have Grogan infiltrate the two rival drug gangs, led by Luganni (Al Waxman) and Lacombe (Marcel Sabourin). Things get messy when a third gang muscles its way into the scene, and when Ronny realizes that the partner he shot is not in fact dead. And there's a sub plot about a kid getting bullied but helped by our hero with his martial arts moves.
For those of you who like the 1930s movies, an interesting on on this week is Is My Face Red?, showing on TCM at 9:45 AM Thursday. Ricardo Cortez plays Poster, a gossip columnist who dishes the dirt on everybody and constantly tries to scoop his rival Maloney (Robert Armstrong). Poster gets a lot of his stories from his girlfriend Peggy (Helen Twelvetrees), a chorus girl. But he gets one of his bigger stories himself, after seeing to gangsters get into it in a speakeasy and one of them, Tony (Sidney Toler) stab the other to death. So he publishes this which of course makes Tony want Poster dead. Meanwhile, Poster, while covering a different story, meets British heiress Mildred (Jill Esmond) and falls in love with her despite already having a girlfriend. Not only that, but he takes the ring he was going to get Peggy and gives it to Mildred instead! Eventually, Tony does find Poster leading to the climax. An enjoyably zippy pre-Code.
The 1980s were a fertile period for the buddy cop genre. One of the movies that kicked it off is 48 Hrs., which will be on StarzEncore Black at 8:07 AM Friday. Technically it's not two cop buddies, since the pair are a cop an a criminal. Notorious robber Albert Ganz (James Remar) escapes from a prison road gang with help from one of his old partners in crime, Billy Bear (Sonny Landham). Ganz shoots multiple cops trying to chase him down, including two partners of San Francisco cop Jack Cates (Nick Nolte). So Cates' superiors learn that Ganz has another associate still in prison, Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy in his movie debut). The authorities give Reggie a 48-hour furlough on the condition that he help Cates find Ganz and bring him back to justice. Reggie is actually willing to help, in part because he was set up by Ganz which resulted in his imprisonment. Of course, he's still going to have to finish his sentence after the 48 hours are up. The movie proved to be an auspicious debut for Murphy.
Wisconsinoids may be shocked by the premise of the following movie, The Big Hangover, which is on TCM at 12:15 AM Saturday. Van Johnson plays David Muldon, a top law school graduate with a past, who is getting a job at one of the prestigious law firms, run by John Belney (Percy Waram). John's daughter Mary (Elizabeth Taylor) meets David and falls in love with him. But social functions come up for the young lawyer, and that's where his past comes into play. His plane was shot down in World War II with his best friend dying in his arms and he having a long recovery. During that time, he nearly drowned in an accident with a vat of alcohol, and there comes the problem: David can't drink, not because he's an alcoholic but because the slightest taste of alcohol now makes him violently ill and drunk. Even smelling it can cause problems. And as a lawyer, he's going to have to negotiate a lot of dinners and social events where the alcohol flows freely. In and among all this he also litigates a discrimination case involving some Chinese-Americans who get wrongly evicted. This one is a good example of the programmers MGM was making in the early 50s to help fund all those Freed Unit musicals.
Actor Tom Tryon eventually went into writing novels (and became fairly successful at that), in part because his acting career was filled with not-very-good movies and “prestige” movie flops. An example of the former is Marines, Let's Go, which will be on FXM at 11:35 AM Saturday and 9:35 AM Sunday. Tryon plays Pfc. Roth, a Marine who is on leave in occupied Japan circa 1950. He's there together with two of his friends, Pfc. Chatfield (David Hedison), and the nominal leader of the group, Pfc. McCaffrey (Tom Reese), who's been given the nickname “Let's Go”. Together, the three get into the usual sorts of escapades that you can expect from a service comedy, except that they're lower-quality versions. And then the movie takes an abrupt turn. If you noticed the year I mentioned, 1950, you'll recall that that was the year the Korean War started, so soon enough, the three Marines get sent over to Korea to fight and the movie tries to turn darker, although it mostly winds up being more jarring because the two halves are so different.
Up against the Saturday airing of Marines, Let's Go is Laura, at noon Saturday on TCM. Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) is a newspaper and radio columnist who informs us he shall never forget the weekend that Laura (Gene Tierney) died. She was clearly murdered, so a police detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) is brought in to investigate, and he's enchanted by the portrait of Laura that hangs in her apartment. We get a flashback of how Laura became famous, with some help from Lydecker who built her up. Laura also had a would-be boyfriend in weak-willed Shelby (Vincent Price) who is under the thumb of his aunt Ann (Judith Anderson). McPherson doesn't seem to be getting anywhere on the case, until one night he returns to Laura's apartment and finds… Laura is there, clearly not dead! Somehow the police incompetently mis-identified the dead body and Laura having been incommunicado didn't know she was declared murdered. And obviously, whoever killed that other woman is going to want to kill Laura now that she's back.