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Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of January 21-27, 2019.  This is the most inoffensive post you'll read all week, unless you're one of the easily-offended posters like certain Tottenham fans I won't mention.  Anyhow, I've used my discerning taste to pick out a series of interesting movies that I know you'll all like.  And I didn't even have to mention Star of the Month Kathryn Grayson.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

 

With Monday being Martin Luther King Day, we get another day of black-themed movies on TCM. This time out, the prime time lineup is several Denzel Washington movies, including A Soldier's Story at 12:30 AM Tuesday. At an Army base in Lousiana in 1944, Sgt. Waters (Adolph Carter) is murdered by an unknown assailant. He was black, and the regular base command doesn't want to investigate because they'll probably find a Klansman did it and they don't want to open up that can of worms. So Washington sends down investigator Capt. Davenport (Howard Rollins) to investigate the case. What he finds is quite complex. There is as always the lingering shadow of racism, but Waters was also an extremely difficult man. He'd witnessed some really ugly racism while serving with distinction in World War I, and holds his fellow black man to an even higher standard than most white people. That gives a lot of the soldiers serving underneath him (all black, of course, since the military wouldn't be desegregated until 1947) reason to hate him. This was near the beginning of Washington's career, so he only plays a PFC. It's an excellent movie, and a good mystery, too.

 

You've got a chance to catch the 1982 version of Annie this week, at 11:15 AM Tuesday on StarzEncore Family.  Based on the musical that was adapted from the old comic strip, the movie stars Aileen Quinn as Little Orphan Annie.  She lives at an orphanage run by evil Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett) during the Depression.  Then she gets selected to spend so e time at the home of the wealthy industrialist Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney) and Annie, bein so damn perky and spunky, immediately melts everybody's heart, including the notoriously difficult Warbucks.  Annie has reason to believe that her parents are still alive, so Warbucks sets out to find them and give them a reward that will help them care for their daughter.  Of course, such a reward is going to lead to con artists who want that money for themselves, and as you can guess Hannigan is one such con artist.  She gets her brother Rooster (Tim Curry) and his lady friend Lily (Bernadette Peters) to impersonate Annie's parents.  And they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids.

 

Wednesday night on TCM brings several movies featuring the comedian Ernie Kovacs.  When Kovacs made movies he was more often in a supporting role, but got a chance to be a lead in Five Golden Hours, which will be on at 4:30 AM Thursday.  Kovacs plays Aldo, who works at an undertaker's in Italy and makes a little money on the side by being an escort to grieving widows in exchange for financial gifts.  And then one day he meets the widowed Baroness Sandra (Cyd Charisse).  He falls in love with her and learns about a Ponzi scheme to swindle money from widows based upon the premise of investing money between the hours the stock exchange in Rome closes and the one in New York opens.  However, Sandra knows more about the scheme than she's letting on, and eventually winds up running off with Aldo's money, forcing him to go into hiding in a mental institution where he meets the similarly hiding Mr. Bing (George Sanders) and tries to put his life back together.

 

StarzEncore Classics is actually showing a relatively old move this week: Sands of Iwo Jima, at 7:28 AM Wednesday.  John Wayne plays Sgt. Stryker, a Marine sergeant who is one tough SOB, to the point that his wife left him and the men under him hate him.  Of course, it's 1943, which means World War II is on and they're fighting a tough enemy in the Japanese, so they need all that Marine discipline to survive.  Among the men under Stryker's command is PFC Conway (John Agar), who has a bit of a past with Stryker in that Conway's father was Stryker's commanding officer at Guadalcanal, and the elder Conway is worried that his song won't be able to cut it as a marine so the son is dealing with daddy issues (shades of Jack Webb's 1950s movie The D.I.).  The marines become battle-hardened first at Tarawa, and the in the titular battle, culminating in the famous photo of the Marines raising the flag after having beaten the Japanese.  John Wayne received an Oscar nomination for this.

 

If you like operetta, you're in luck, as TCM is showing several movies in the genre on Thursday, and they're not all Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald.  The day kicks off with one later remake with Eddy and McDonald, New Moon at 6:00 AM.  Grace Moore is the star here, playing a Russian princess Tanya who is on her way to be married off provincial governor Boris (Adolphe Menjou).  On the boat there, she meets the army lieutenant Petrov (Lawrence Tibbett) and the two fall in love.  Except that the governor finds out and gets posses, so he sends Petrov the a fort on the frontier where the Turkomen peoples attack the Russians.  Meanwhile, Tanya is none too pleased either, so she sets off for the fort with her uncle the count (Roland Young) so that she can give Petrov a piece of her mind.  Of course, if the Turkomen attack, it could kill everybody.  Moore was not yet used to the difference between opera acting and acting for a movie camera, yet a few years later she would go on to receive an Oscar nomination.  

 

For those of you who prefer the more recent stuff, I'll mention The Chamber, which is only 23 years old.  It's airing at 10:52 PM Thursday on Starz Edge.  In the 1960s south, Klan member Sam Clayhall (Gene Hackman) bombed the offices of a Jewish civil rights lawyer, killing the lawyer's two young sons and earning Clayhall the death penalty.  Amazinly that sentence still hasn't been carried out, and now a norther law firm is doing pro bono work trying to get the death sentence commuted.  To that end, they send young lawyer Adam Hall (Chris O'Donnell) down to Mississippi to investigate and handle the appeal in court.  Adam, it turns out, has reasons of his own for taking the case.  Clayhall is his grandfather, and Adam's father -- Sam's own son -- committed suicide over the inability to del with the family legacy when Adam was just a child.  So Adam is just as much trying to exorcise the demons in his own family's past as well as do pro bono work.  Faye Dunaway plays Adam's aunt, who dealt with the demons by becoming an alcoholic.  Based on a novel by John Grisham.

 

Earlier, I mentioned Sands of Iwo Jima and how it earned John Wayne an Oscar nomination.  One of the people he was up against was Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart, which will be airing at 10:00 AM Friday on TCM as part of a salute to Patirica Neal.  Todd plays Scottish corporal MacLachlan, who is at an Army hospital in Burma in the days right around the end of the war, which means that everybody is going to be going home!  One group of soldiers gets MacLachlan, nicknamed Lachie, transferred to their ward.  He's difficult to get along with but the other soldiers are nice to him because apparently the wounds he suffered are going to be fatal, even though he hasn't been told this.  Meanwhile, Lachie is falling in love with the head nurse, Sister Margaret (that's Patricia Neal), and even proposes to her not realizing he'll never get married.  And then he does find out that he's terminally ill, and it really makes him more difficult.  Ronald Reagan plays "Yank", an American soldier recovering in the same hospital.

 

This weekend, TCM is putting aside some of its normal programming like TCM Underground, in order to run 48 hours of movies dedicated to the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.  The marathon starts off at 8:00 PM Friday with Strike Me Pink, which is a salute to the first award winner, Eddie Cantor.  I mentioned this one just last June; Cantor plays a meek man who winds up running an amusement park, although a bunch of gangsters led by Brian Donlevy try to take over the place.  William Frawley is another of the gangster's underlings, and Ethel Merman plays a nightclub singer who is in with the gangsters, but whom Cantor loves.

 

It's been a while since I've recommended The Secret of Convict Lake.  It's going to be be on StarzEncore Westerns at 2:32 AM Saturday.  Glenn Ford plays Jim Canfield, a man who was framed for a crime he didn't commit and has broken out of prison for it, together with some real nasty criminals like Johnny (Zachary Scott) and Limey (Cyril Cusack).  They head for the town where Jim believes the man who framed him lives, and it's not as if they're going to go any further since there's a blizzard on.  When they get to town, they find that all the menfolk have left, having formed a posse to find Jim and the other criminals.  Johnny thinks the money is here and that's why Jim has stopped.  Jim meets Marcia (Gene Tierney) and falls in love with her, although it turns out that her fiancรฉ is the one who framed Jim, which causes all kinds of problems in Jim's scheme to gain revenge.  Johnny manipulates another woman (Ann Dvorak) to try to get information on the stolen goods, and Ethel Barrymore plays the matriarch of the place.

 

Last year's SAG Lifetime Achievement Award winner was Alan Alda, so it's fitting that TCM's salute wraps up with one of his movies, California Suite, at 6:00 PM Sunday.  Based on a play by Neil Simon, this one tells the stories of four different sets of people who rent the titular suite at a swanky hotel in Beverly Hills.  First, Maggie Smith (who won an Oscar) is in town for the Oscars with husband-for-show Michael Caine.  Alda is in the second segment, as the ex-husband of Jane Fonda (surprisingly not a recipient of the SAG Award).  She's living in New York while he's in California now with their daughter (Dana Plato before her life spun out of control).  Third is one with two couples (Richard Pryor and Gloria Gifford on one hand, and Bill Cosby minus the Quaalude-laden Jello pudding pops with Sheila Frazier on the other) who find that everything in their vacation has gone wrong and they're all forced to share a suite together.  Last is Walter Matthau, in town a day before his wife (Elaine May) for his nephew's bar mitzvah.  So Matthau's brother hires a hooker for him!  Personally I prefer Plaza Suite, but there's some fun in California Suite, too.

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