Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 20-26, 2020. We're all waiting for the Packers to play in the Super Bowl two weeks from today. It's going to be a long, nerve-wracking wait, so the right thing to do is to sit down with some good movies and watch them. There's more from Star of the Month Patricia Neal on Tuesday night on TCM, including her Oscar-winning turn in Hud. But there's other stuff too, from the early 1920s through to about a dozen years ago. So there's definitely something worth watching for all of you. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is Martin Luther King Day, so we get a bunch of movies with black protagonists on TCM. There are a few interesting things in prime time (more on that later), but first I'll mention Carmen Jones, which will be on at 10:00 AM Monday. This is a retelling of Bizet's opera, with the action moved to World War II and a defense factory and army base in the Jacksonville, FL area. Dorothy Dandrige plays Carmen Jones, the temptress who is bad news for any man who would fall in love with her. She sets her eye on Joe (Harry Belafonte), even though he's already got a girlfriend in Cindy Lou (Olga James). Sure enough, Carmen wins Joe and gets him to go AWOL up to Chicago, resulting in tragic consequences. Pearl Bailey plays Carmen's friend Frankie and was the only one who wasn't lip-synced, since none of them could really sing opera. Bailey is so energetic that it doesn't matter, while Dandridge gives an excellent performance and Belafonte is the weaker link as he is in almost all his movies. Still, this one is lively and definitely worth another viewing.
If you want something that doesn't have anything to do with Martin Luther King Day, you could try Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, which StarzEncore Classics is showing at 5:41 PM Monday. Mom is Tutti Bomowski (Estelle Getty) Newark, the mother of Los Angeles cop Joe (Sylvester Stallone; at least the two aren't playing a romantic couple). Mom goes to visit her son and begins to make a mess of his life, such as ruining his gun. So she decides she'll try to make it up to him by buying him a new gun, except that she tries to buy an illegal machine gun out of the back of a van. The purchase goes wrong and Tutti witnesses a murder, which gets her involved with her son on a professional level since he's one of the cops investigating the case. She winds up interfering in all of Joe's cases, but Mom isn't quite the ignorant old broad some might think as, actually winding up as Joe's partner and helping him to solve the case if you can believe that.
Tuesday on TCM brings a bunch of Andy Hardy movies, seven of them to be exact. They're formulaic, but you know what you're getting and there's a reason why the series was so popular. So if you like Mickey Rooney, I'm sure there will be something to please you on Tuesday.
Joan Crawford signed a contract with MGM in 1925 and stayed at the studio for the next 18 years before she got sick of the crap the studio was assigning her. Her final film under contract to MGM was Above Suspicion, on TCM at 9:30 AM Wednesday. Crawford plays Frances Myles, a woman who has just gotten married to Richard (Fred MacMurray), an American lecturing at Oxford, in 1939. This is just before the start of World War II (even though the movie was released four years later), and the couple goes on honeymoon in Nazi Germany! Of course, there's a good reason for this, which is that Richard has gotten himself involved in a scheme to be spies, looking for information on a magnetic bomb the Nazis are working on. Frances is certainly no spy herself, but she winds up getting involved in the case too out of necessity. Conrad Veidt made his final film appearance before his untimely death as the Myles' contact in Germany, while Basil Rathbone plays a German classmate at Oxford who may or may not be a Nazi. Not bad, but you can see why Crawford wanted meatier roles.
For those of you who insist on something more recent, I suppose I should mention that In Bruges will be on at 8:10 PM Wednesday on Action Max. Colin Farrell stars as Ray, an Irish hit man in London working with partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson). They screw up a job such that an innocent bystander gets killed and their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) tells them to go to the medieval city of Bruges in Belgium until things cool off and he can assign them another job. Ken makes the best of it by seeing all the wonderful sights, but Ray doesn't like the place at all? That is, until he meets Chloë (Clémence Poésy) and begins to start a relationship with her. This even though she's already got a boyfriend. All sorts of other quirky things happen to Ray and Ken that make them question their lives as the city weaves its magical spell around the two men. And then Harry shows up with his next job for Ken, but Ken is no longer so certain that he can do it.
The TCM spotlight on the Roaring 20s continues on Wednesday, including what I think it the TCM premiere of a really fun if slightly bizarre movie: Bugsy Malone, at 10:00 PM. This is a gangster movie, except… all of the gangsters are played by kids! And the violence is, while kinda-sorta toned down, also perverted into…. Scott Baio plays Bugsy, who frequented the nightclub run by gang leader Fat Sam (John Cassisi) with Sam's girlfriend Tallulah (Jodie Foster) as the nightclub singer. Sam's gang robs banks, but instead of using guns, the world of Bugsy Malone has gangsters offing people with cream pies! The problem for Sam is that, while his gang throws the cream pies, rival gangster Dandy Dan (Martin Lev) has come up with a cream pie machine gun that shoots the pies, enabling them to bump off people at a much greater distance. And Dandy Dan is moving in on Fat Sam's turf! There are other homages to the world of kids' stuff, such as the pedal-powered cars, but the kids are definitely acting like their perception of adults. Still, I'd say the movie is OK for the whole family, and a lot of fun.
You probably know the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A year before that movie was released, Fox released a movie in the same genre, Phantom of the Paradise. That's finally back on the FXM schedule, and you can see it at 6:00 AM Thursday. Winslow (William Finley) is a struggling songwriter whose music is discovered by the producer Swan (Paul Williams). Swan likes the music and steals it, planning to open up a new theater with singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper) singing the songs. This pisses off Winslow to no end, and he attacks Swan, winding up in prison. He escapes and plots his revenge against Swan, but his first attempt goes wrong, leaving him badly disfigured and looking like the Phantom of the Opera, which is one of several inspirations for the movie. Another one is Faust; Winslow's music is a cantata telling the Faust story and Swan's plot of the movie mirrors it; there are also shades of The Picture of Dorian Gray and other references. It's an interesting look back at the 70s that deserves to be remembered as much as Rocky Horror.
TCM's salute to Martin Luther King Day runs all day Monday through prime time, but also has a second night on Thursday in prime time, when TCM is running a night of lesser-remembered movies with memorable performances from black actors who didn't become quite as big as Sidney Poitier or even Harry Belafonte. I think I've recommended all of them before, but I'd like to point out that the night concludes with two “race movies” from pioneering black director Oscar Micheaux. Within Our Gates at 3:30 AM concerns a teacher at a southern school who has to go north to raise money for the school and has to face prejudices surrounding her past, while The Symbol of the Unconquered at 5:00 AM tells of a black woman who inherits a farm, and then has to deal with the Klan driving her off the farm. Unfortunately, this one does not survive completely missing a reel or two; one of the missing reels has the climax where they beat off the Klan.
One of Robert Mitchum's late-career movies that I don't think I've mentioned before is The Yakuza. It's going to be showing at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT) on TCM. Mitchum plays Harry Kilmer, a retired police detective who served in World War II and was stationed in Japan during the post-war occupation. Harry is approached by his old friend George Tanner (Brian Keith), who needs help. Apparently George made the mistake of doing some business with a Japanese yakuza, their equivalent of the Mob, and the deal went sour, with the yakuza kidnapping George's daughter. Since both George and Harry had been stationed in Japan, perhaps Harry can do something. Indeed, he's got connections in the form of a woman he loved named Eiko (Keiko Kishi) and still loves, but could never marry, and her brother Ken (Ken Takakura), who's part of the reason the proposed marriage was broken off and who has yakuza connections of his own. Much of the movie was filmed on location in Japan.
You'd be amazed at the number of stars who seem like they wouldn't fit in to westerns but made one anyway. A good movie to show this is The Rawhide Years, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 1:34 PM Saturday. Tony Curtis of all people plays a riverboat gambler, Ben Matthews. After fleecing an old guy and getting caught, Ben decides to give up the career and settle down, being offered a job on a ranch by Matt (Minor Watson) near the town of Galena. Ben thinks it over and even falls in love with Zoe (Colleen Miller), a saloon girl in Galena. But Matt gets murdered and unsurprisingly everybody in town thinks that Ben did it, so he's forced to go on the run to escape a lynch mob, running into guide Harper (Arthur Kennedy, who made a surprising number of westerns considering he doesn't look like a western actor), who is also as much of a con artist as Ben was when Ben was on those riverboats. Ben eventually realizes he's going to have to go back to Galena to clear his name….
The week concludes with a double feature of Deanna Durbin movies on TCM on Sunday night, starting with the fun Three Smart Girls at 8:00 PM Sunday. Durbin plays Penny Craig, one of the titular girls along with her sisters Joan (Nan Gray) and Kay (Barbara Read). They're living in Switzerland with their mom (Nella Walker), who has been divorced from Dad (Charles Winninger) back in America for several years. The sisters hear that Dad is going to remarry, to a gold digger named "Precious" (Binnie Barnes), so they head off to America to try to stop the marriage, especially since Mom has always regretted the divorce. The girls' plan is to introduce Precious to a phony "Count" Arisztid (Mischa Auer). But on the boat to America, they make a mistake and instead of thinking this actor is the Count, they run into a real member of the nobility, Lord Michael (Ray Milland) and rope him into the scheme. Things get even more complicated when Kay falls for Lord Michael. This was Durbin's first film at Universal, and she was such a hit that she pretty much helped save Universal from bankruptcy.