Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 18-24, 2021. We have to wait until later today to find out whom the Packers are beating to advance to the Super Bowl, and the game itself won't be until next Sunday. So since there's ample time to wait, why not use it to watch some good movies. There's movies that are actually quite good, and some disasters that need to be seen to be believed. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
This week's Silent Sunday Nights selection is the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera, airing at 12:15 AM Monday on TCM. Lon Chaney plays the Phantom, a mysterious masked figure living in a cavern under the Paris Opera House whose existence is rumored about by the people above. Among the people above are Christine (Mary Philbin), an understudy who is in love with Raoul (Norman Kerry). But the Phantom sees Christine and falls in love with her, so he does what he can to make Christine the star, up to and including killing. Christine might be willing to dump Raoul, at least until she follows the Phantom underground and discovers that he's really a horribly disfigured man who doesn't intend to let Christine escape. She goes back up top intending to become a star and live happily ever after with Raoul, but naturally the Phantom has no intent of letting that happen. If he can't have Christine, nobody can. Chaney is fun to watch, and the sets are spectacular, together with some two-strip Technicolor photography.
Monday is Martin Luther King day, which means that TCM is giving us a bunch of black-oriented movies. The daytime has a lot of Sidney Poitier as always, including his Oscar-winning role in Lilies of the Field, at 11:45 AM. Poitier plays Homer Smith, a handyman who is traveling west to California in search of better job opportunities. In Arizona, his car overheats, and when he stops to get water, it's at a convent run by Mother Maria (Lilia Skala), who heads a group of Eastern European nuns who fled Communism and settled in Arizona. When Maria learns that Homer is a handyman, she believes that it's a message from God. She's been trying to get a chapel built, but of course a bunch of aging nuns aren't the most competent people to build a chapel. But now that Homer is here, maybe they can get that chapel built. Not that Homer is Catholic, of course, and not even particularly religious. But being around these nuns and the other people in the community starts to have an effect on him, and just maybe he will help them build that chapel.
A forgotten 1980s movie that I don't know I've ever mentioned here is Lassiter. It's on this week, at 4:20 AM Tuesday on MovieMax. Tom Selleck, who at this time had just become successful as Magnum, PI, plays Nick Lassiter, a gentleman jewel thief in late 1930s London with a love interest in dancer Sara (Jane Seymour). He gets caught trying to steal jewels from a mansion. What he doesn't realize is that he's actually been set up. Scotland Yard detective Inspector Becker (Bob Hoskins) has had it in for Lassiter, and this is his chance to get him. But there are more important matters. This being the late 1930s, the Nazis are on the rise, and have a dastardly scheme to smuggle a bunch of jewels to South America. Lassiter being the great jewel thief should be able to find those jewels and recover them for the good guys, and it's either take on this plot or go to prison. Lassiter has to figure out where Nazi agent Kari von Fursten (Lauren Hutton) and her evil henchmen have those jewels.
There are several movies that I haven't recommended in quite some time. One of them is Love Crazy, which runs at 4:00 AM Wednesday on TCM. William Powell and Myrna Loy play another married couple, this time Steve and Susan Ireland, who are celebrating their anniversary and doing it in an odd way, by recreating their first date in reverse. Things go wrong when the elevator gets stuck and Steve finds out that former girlfriend Isobel (Gail Patrick) lives in the same apartment building. That and some help from Susan's mom Mrs. Cooper (Florence Bates) leads Susan to file for divorce and take up with neighbor Ward (Jack Carson) to try to get revenge on Steve for what is really a misunderstanding. Steve figures that he can get the divorce request denied if he's determined to have insanity, but this also results in his getting sent to a sanatorium. Steve escapes by shaving off his mustache and dressing as his “sister” to visit Susan again and try to win her back. William Powell in drag is interesting, to say the least, and there's a great supporting cast.
Another 1980s movie that I'm not certain I've recommended before is The Newton Boys, at 4:54 PM Wednesday on StarzEncore Suspense. Based on the true story of the Newton Gang, the movie tells the story of the four Newton brothers: Willis (Matthew McConaughey), Joe (Skeet Ulrich), Jess (Ethan Hawke), and Dock (Vincent D'Onofrio). They were farmers in Texas in the era just after World War I, except that this was work that didn't provide much of a living. Willis gets the idea that the best way to get the money they need to survive would be to rob banks and trains, and convinces his brothers to join him on a crime spree that hit dozens of banks and half a dozen trains, most notably at Rondout, Illinois in 1924, which ultimately led to the brothers' arrest. But they were known for trying to rob bank safes at night rather than daytime robberies so that nobody would get killed, and indeed weren't charged with any killings, making them different from most other gangs. Two of the brothers, Willis and Joe, survived into the 1970s, when they told their stories for a documentary.
Another movie that's always worth mentioning because of how hilariously wrong it goes is Torch Song, showing on TCM at 8:30 AM Thursday. Joan Crawford returns to MGM to play Jenny Stewart, a Broadway star who personifies the word “diva”, treating everybody around her like dirt. She's just fired her current accompanist for not living up to her exacting standards; that guy gets replaced by Tye Graham (Michael Wilding), who knows all of Jenny's arrangements but happens to be blind. (“Get yourself a seeing eye girl,” Jenny derisively tells him.) But of course, the blind guy can see more than everybody else, and knows the way to Jenny's heart that obviously needs some sort of fixing. The dialogue is terrible, the plot is ridiculous, Crawford has to do the “Two-Faced Woman” number in blackface, and the color scheme is one of the things everybody who reviews this movie talks about. It's a spectacular train wreck that needs to be seen to be believed. Amazingly, the movie got an Oscar nomination, for Marjorie Rambeau as Best Supporting Actress playing Jenny's mother.
A classic that's always worth mentioning is Night of the Hunter. It shows up this week at 10:00 PM Saturday on TCM. Ben Harper (Peter Graves) is a bank robber on the run in 1930s West Virginia, and as he's about to get caught, he hides the large sum of money he has in his daughter Pearl's (Sally Jane Bruce) doll. Before Ben gets executed, fellow prisoner Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) finds out Ben hid the money somewhere, so when Harry gets out, he passes himself off as a preacher to marry Pearl's mom Willa (Shelley Winters) and look for the money. Pearl's big brother John (Billy Chapin) realizes something is very wrong with his new evil stepfather, so when Willa doesn't know where the money is and Harry gets rid of her, John knows it's time to make a break for it with Pearl and the doll. An extremely pissed-off Harry chases after the two kids as they go down the river. Lillian Gish and James Gleason get excellent supporting roles, and it's the only movie directed by Charles Laughton.
A movie that's back on FXM after a long layoff is The 300 Spartans, which you can see at 8:35 AM Saturday. Persian King Xerxes (David Farrar) is going after the ancient Greek city-states, and Leonidas (Richard Egan), king of the Spartans, knows that the Persians mean big trouble. So he tries to get all of the other city-states to raise an army to go into battle against the Persians together, but most of the others are reluctant. The one who might be able to help is Themistocles (Ralph Richardson), who leads Athens, but Athens has a good navy, not an army. Perhaps if an army can hold off the Persians long enough for Athens to use its navy to good effect against the Persians. That of course resulted in the naval battle of Salamis, which was a decisive victory for the allied Greeks. But before that, Leonidas and his men, 300 by legend, have to try to keep the tens of thousands of Persians bottled up in the mountain pass at Thermopylae, which was a suicidal if necessary mission. There's also a romantic subplot between Barry Coe and a young Diane Baker.
This week's Noir Alley selection is Born to Kill, airing as always at 10:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Claire Trevor plays Helen, a rich lady from San Francisco who is in Reno getting divorce so she can go back and marry her fiancé. While gambling, she meets Sam (Lawrence Tierney), who excites her because he's the sort of man she wouldn't meet in her San Francisco high society circles. The only thing is, Sam already has a girlfriend in Laury, who just happens to be staying in the same rooming house Helen has been using while waiting for the divorce to go through. Laury is intending to dump Sam for another guy, and when Sam finds out, he kills Laury and the guy. Helen sees the bodies when returning home, and… does nothing, because she doesn't want her life complicated and nobody will know she saw the bodies. Not that she knows who committed the murders. When she gets to the train station to go back to San Francisco, who does she see but Sam, who doesn't know that Helen found the dead bodies? They go to San Francisco together, and all sorts of complications ensue.
Some time back I mentioned Miloš Forman's 1989 movie Valmont. The same material was used for a movie that came out several years earlier and is better remembered, Dangerous Liaisons, which is on at 1:00 PM Sunday on The Movie Channel Xtra. The Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) is a playboy in 1780s France who brags about his conquests. So the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) makes a bet with Valmont over whether he can successfully woo young Cécile de Volanges (Uma Thurman), who is betrothed to a man who jilted Merteuil many years earlier. Meanwhile, the Marquise has another trick up her sleeve, in trying to get Cécile's music teacher Danceny (Keanu Reeves who's rather hilariously miscast here) to woo Cécile as well; since he's closer to her age, those two do fall in love with tragic consquences. Valmont, meanwhile, while wooing Cécile winds up falling in love with Mme. de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), which also has far-reaching consequences. Both versions of the story are well worth a watch.