Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 17-23, 2022. The Packers finally get back on the field this week, but that’s not until the weekend, and we’ll all be nervous until then. So why not deal with the nerves by watching some great movies? TCM takes a week off from Kay Francis’ turn as Star of the Month for Martin Luther King Day. After that, there’s a bunch of interesting stuff from the 30s through the 90s over the course of the week. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is Martin Luther King Day, and as always TCM is showing a lineup of movies dealing with race. The prime time lineup has documentaries while the daytime lineup has the more traditional films. Sidney Poitier died last week, and one of his movies is part of the Monday lineup: The Defiant Ones, at 11:00 AM. Poitier plays Noah Cullen, a prisoner who is being transported as part of a southern chain gang. It’s a very rainy night, and the prison truck gets into an accident with a car. So while the truck is stopped, it gives Noah the chance to escape! There are a couple of problems, however. The big one is that Noah is chained to another prisoner, Joker Jackson (Tony Curtis). And, to make things worse, Joker is quite the racist, not particularly trusting Noah who is trying to get north to catch a freight train he thinks might still be running. But the two form a bond while all the time, the local sheriff (Theodore Bikel) is in pursuit, with help from a state police captain (Charles McGraw). Curtis and Bikel both picked up Oscar nominations but didn’t win.
If you want a movie looking at a different sort of oppressed minority, try Sophie’s Choice, on Showtime at 4:10 AM Monday. Peter MacNicol plays Stingo, a Southern writer in the late 1940s who moves north to New York to write the Great American Novel. He rents a room in a rooming-house where he lives one floor below Sophie (Meryl Streep), a woman with a past, and with an odd boyfriend in Nathan (Kevin Kline). Stingo quickly learns that Sophie survived the concentration camps as she’s got a tattooed forearm, but she was also born Catholic. Stingo begins to fall in love with Sophie, but Nathan is insanely jealous. It also seems as though he may be lying about his job in which he claims to be a big-time research biologist. Eventually Sophie runs away to try to escape Nathan, and when Stingo goes looking for her, he learns more about what really happened to her at Auschwitz and why she thinks she could never really love him. Meanwhile she tries to patch things up with Nathan.
Robert Mitchum was in a bunch of great noirs in the 1940s and 1950s. This week, however, I’ll mention one of his later movies, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which will be on TCM at 10:00 PM Tuesday. Mitchum plays Eddie Coyle, a 50-something man in Boston who’s been a low-level criminal in the gangs for most of his life. Unfortunately, he’s been caught enough times that as a repeat offender, he’s facing a ridiculously long sentence that’s as good as a life sentence. So when Jackie Brown (Steven Keats; no relation to the Pam Grier character from the 90s) is planning a bank heist and would like Coyle to obtain the guns, Eddie thinks seriously about ratting out Brown and his partners in crime to police detective Foley (Richard Jordan) in exchange for a lighter sentence. Meanwhile, the bartender Dillon (Peter Boyle) seems to be aware of Eddie’s dealing with the authorities, leading the crime bosses to get Dillon to try to get Eddie bumped off.
For a cheesy 80s flick, try Explorers, on StarzEncore Family at 11:29 AM Tuesday. A young Ethan Hawke plays Ben Crandall, a kid in suburban Washington who likes old scifi movies and daydreams about space travel. One night, he starts having dreams about some sort of device that would make those daydreams a reality. Ben talks with one of his friends, Wolfgang Müller (River Phoenix) about it, drawing what he can remember from his dream. Wolfgang, being exceedingly bright, constructs what Ben saw in his dream, which is a microchip that produces some sort of space-time bubble which would enable people to travel through space at hitherto unheard of speeds. Needless to say, the boys, being curious, try out their device despite shady forces from the government having spotted their “UFO”. They do make it to outer space, but find out that space can be a little more dangerous than they thought when they get tractor beamed onto an alien ship.
Politicians have always been corrupt shits; it’s not just the Bidens and their hangers-on that started it. Political corruption has long been a theme in movies, going back even before Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a movie you can see on TCM at 8:00 PM Wednesday. In one of those unnamed western states, one of the two US Senators suddenly dies. As you’ll recall from the Constitution, it’s up to the governor, Hopper (Guy Kibbee) to name a replacement until a special election can be held. Hopper is a pawn in the corrupt political machine run by Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), so he picks a neophyte non-entity to be a lame duck named Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), the leader of a Boy Scout-like organization. Smith goes to Washington and is immediately in awe of the place, as well as the now senior senator from his state, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains). Smith is naïve, but so much so that his chief of staff, Saunders (Jean Arthur) grows to like him. Smith proposes a bill to create a national scouting camp, but the land it’s on is already planned for something else by the Taylor machine, so they have to try to stop him. And they’ll stop at nothing.
A search of the site claims I haven’t mentioned What About Bob? since the last time the old posts were purged. It’ll be on this week at 9:50 PM Thursday, so now is as good a time to point out that it’s airing. Richard Dreyfus plays Leo Marvin, a psychotherapist who’s just written a new book on treating patients with phobias. Meanwhile, another psychologist has a patient he’s no longer able to deal with, Bob Wiley (Bill Murray). Bob has such severe anxiety that he has difficulty leaving his apartment and is very emotionally needy with all of his therapists. Sure enough, Bob gets the same way with Dr. Marvin, something which is decidedly contraindicated. Bob tries to find Dr. Marvin first at his home, somehow getting the address, and then follows Marvin and his family to where they’re vacationing. Bob doesn’t even realize what he’s doing, but his constant pestering is beginning to drive Dr. Marvin nuts. Dr. Marvin thinks of taking some decidedly non-therapeutic actions to deal with Bob.
The TCM spotlight on true crime continues on Thursday night. A particularly disturbing movie that’s absolutely worth a watch is Star 80, on TCM at 4:45 AM Friday. This one tells the story of Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway), who grew up in Vancouver, BC, and in the late 1970s was working at a Dairy Queen. She’s noticed by Paul Snider (Eric Roberts), one of those creepy guys who always seems to have a side hustle going on. Paul thinks he can get Dorothy into the entertainment business, and takes her down to Los Angeles. But this really means the porn industry, where Dorothy gets noticed by Hugh Hefner (Cliff Robertson). Being part of Hefner’s empire, however, means that Dorothy is going to be less a part of Paul’s life, which makes Paul insanely jealous, something that’s eventually going to lead to tragedy. In real life, Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich, who died recently, was also in love with Dorothy, although the writers come up with a fictional character to replace him. Bogdanovich would go on to marry Dorothy’s kid sister.
Some people may recall there was a time when Alec Baldwin didn’t shoot innocent people willy-nilly on set. Back in those days, Baldwin was making movies like The Juror, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 9:02 AM Friday. Baldwin isn’t the title character; that would be Demi Moore, playing an artist named Annie. She gets called for jury duty, and has to serve on the jury for a mobster named Louie Boffano (Tony Lo Bianco). Louie doesn’t want to leave anything to chance, she he sends a man named Mark (that’s Baldwin) to buy some of her art. Or at least that’s why he’s ostensibly there. The real reason he shows up is to tell Annie that she’s got a nice son Oliver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and it would be a shame if something happened to him because she didn’t try to convince all those other jurors to vote not guilty. Annie is able to engineer a not guilty verdict, but that’s not the end of things. Louie believes that she’s still a risk, so perhaps Mark, better known as “The Teacher”, should bump her off. But he’s developed an emotional attachment to Annie and her kid.
If you’ve ever had to deal with somebody who’s come to a new belief and become incredibly irritating about trying to push it on you, then you’ll enjoy Susan and God, on TCM at 6:00 AM Saturday. Joan Crawford plays Susan Trexel, who is in a loveless marriage with husband Barrie (Fredric March) that they’re not ending mostly for the sake of their daughter Blossom (Rita Quigley). Susan takes a trip to Europe, in the way that only the idle rich could do in those days, and comes back to a few changes. Barrie has decided that he’s going to quit drinking and become a real father, which makes the Trexel’s friend Charlotte (Ruth Hussey) happy. The other change, however, is in Susan, who found some new strain of Christianity while she was in Europe. And now that she’s back in the States, she’s going to try to foist this new religion on all of her friends. Most of them were on her side before she left for Europe due to Barrie’s drinking. But with her missionary zeal she might just lose them and show that perhaps Barrie wasn’t the only problem in the marriage.
Finally, I’ll mention Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, on TCM at 4:00 AM Sunday. Peter Sellers has a triple role, with one as US President Merkin Muffley. Muffley has a big problem on his hands, which is that one of his generals, Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has gone nuts and decided to launch a small-scale nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The President is trying to get the attack called off, while another general, Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), thinks this is the perfect time to destroy the Soviets once and for all. Ripper’s adjutant, RAF Capt. Mandrake (also Sellers) is trying to stop Ripper too, but without much success. Worse, Dr. Strangelove (Sellers in his third role) tells the President and everybody in the war room about a doomsday device that will go off automatically in a nuclear attack. The American pilots, including Maj. Kong (Slim Pickens), may also be overly zealous about trying to carry out the attack.