Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 24-30, 2022. I started these weekly posts 16 years ago, near the end of the 2005 NFL season, as that was a disastrous season for the Packers that led to inordinate bickering on the boards. So I figured I’d do my part to lessen the bickering by mentioning some interesting movies you might all enjoy watching. Not that it’s stopped the bickering; instead, you lot all bitch about me. In any case, I think that trying to reduce the bickering is needed now as much as ever, so I've got another week of movies for you, spanning 50 years and a variety of genres. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
A movie that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before is The Whistle at Eaton Falls. It’s going to be on TCM at 6:00 AM Monday. In the town of Eaton Falls, NH, the Doubleday plastics factory is the last big manufacturer, but even they’re being squeezed, so the owner announces plans to modernize that, unfortunately, will require “temporary” layoffs. Brad Adams (Lloyd Bridges) is the head of the labor union at the plant, and understandably he’s not pleased with this, with some workers like Webster (Murray Hamilton) being even more virulently opposed. But then Mr. Doubleday is killed in a plane crash, and his widow Helen (Dorothy Gish) takes over. She appoints… Brad Adams to manage the company since the workers seem to trust him and he might be able to get those modernization plans through. Brad quickly realizes that management doesn’t have it as easy as the unions would have you believe, while the workers are still humans who haven’t done anything to deserve being laid off.
If you want to see a bunch of old stars taking a paycheck at the end of their careers, try The Trouble With Spies, on 5Star Max at 9:00 AM Monday. Donald Sutherland, whose career is still going 35 years on, plays Appleton Porter, a British spy who is given a new mission by spymaster Angus (Robert Morley). Another spy has disappeared on Ibiza, and perhaps Porter could find out what happened. So Porter goes to Ibiza and finds the hotel where the other spy was last staying, and starts getting to know both the owner, Mona (Lucy Gutteridge), but also some of the guests like Mrs. Arkwright (Ruth Gordon) and Lewis (Ned Beatty) who might have known Porter’s colleague. Of course, there are various attempts on Porter’s life, since the baddies expect him to come for them if he’s trying to figure out what happened to his colleague. This one really feels like an excuse for everybody to go on a working vacation in Ibiza. Nice work if you can get it.
Kay Francis’ turn as TCM’s Star of the Month resumes on Monday in prime time. One of her final films, long after leaving Warner Bros., was Allotment Wives, which runs at 12:45 AM Tuesday (note that this is just before midnight between Monday and Tuesday LFT). In World War II, soldiers would have some of their income withheld to be given directly to their wives/families, and the government would match this in a scheme known as allotments. This was a program ripe for fraud, and some number of women defrauded the scheme by marrying multiple soldiers under different names. Col. Martin (Paul Kelly) is sent to investigate this, and find the crime syndicate behind it all, protecting the women and skimming off their cut. Sheila Seymour (Kay Francis) is a woman who runs a salon by day and a canteen for soldiers by night. But she’s really the head of one of those syndicates, with some help from Whitey Colton (Otto Krueger). However, a former friend from Sheila’s past, Gladys Smith (Gertrude Michael) shows up. She’s working for a different syndicate, so there’s going to be trouble. And then there’s Sheila’s daughter Connie (Teala Loring) who doesn’t know about Mom’s real identity. She’s off at a private school, but her rebellious nature is going to get her and Mom in trouble….
It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned The Guns of Fort Petticoat. So if you like Audie Murphy’s westerns, you can give this one a try, since it shows up at 7:21 PM Tuesday on StarzEncore Westerns. Murphy plays Lt. Frank Hewitt, a Texan who stayed in the US Army in the Civil War. He’s back in West Texas, since the US Army is occupying it. However, they’ve also massacred a group of Cheyenne Indians, and Hewitt knows that the Cheyenne are going to try to massacre the homesteaders. Hewitt goes AWOL to try to warn the homesteaders, but he finds that there are only women left, as all of the adult men have gone and joined the Confederate army. And needless to say, the women are none too pleased to have a Union Army officer in their midst. Will he be able to convince them of the danger that the Cheyenne pose? There are also a couple of outlaws around to complicate things. Among the women in town, watch for Kathryn Grant and Hope Emerson.
A surprisingly popular screen pairing was Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, who made some nice movies before World War II. After the war, they were reteamed for The Egg and I, which will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Wednesday. MacMurray plays Bob, a city slicker who served in the war, and having seen something of the world, wants to get out of the rat race in the city. So, having married Betty (that’s Colbert), he’s decided to buy a farm sight unseen where they can raise chickens and sell the eggs for money. Betty is a city girl too, and isn’t exactly thrilled about going rural and living on a farm. And then they see the place, and find that it’s going to take a lot of sweat equity to bring it up to snuff – and it’s not as if they’ve got much experience with farming. Meanwhile, Bob and Betty have some exceedingly rural neighbors in the form of Ma and Pa Kettle (Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride) and their brood, along with another chicken farm owner Harriet (Louise Albritton) who seems smitten with Bob and plans to break up Bob and Betty’s marriage. This is the movie that spawned the popular Ma and Pa Kettle series.
According to a search of the site, it hasn’t been since 2015 that I mentioned The Quiller Memorandum. It’s back in the FXM rotation, with an airing this week at 8:00 AM Thursday. George Segal stars as Quiller, a British spy. A couple of his colleagues are killed in Berlin when they're investigating the shadowy West German neo-Nazi movement. Quiller's handler, Pol (played by Alec Guinness) then brings in Quiller to send him to West Berlin to find out what happened, and infiltrate the neo-Nazis. Of course, as is the case with spy movies, you know the spy is going to face danger; in this case, that's Max von Sydow, as Oktober, the head of the movement. There's also the standard love interest, in this case a school teacher played by Senta Berger. And George Sanders has a small role as Gibbs, a higher-up in British intelligence. In some ways it’s not particularly distinctive as far as 60s espionage movies go, but it also has a lot of location shooting in West Berlin as it was in the mid-60s.
TCM’s “True Crime” spotlight continues on Thursday night. This week, I’ll mention The Phenix City Story. Phenix City, AL, is a town on the border with Georgia and its nearby Fort Benning. Phenix City is an open town serving the soldiers and more or less fleecing them. John Patterson (Richard Kiley) is a young lawyer who’s come back to town from having served in the military, and his horrified at what’s going on, although his lawyer father Albert (John McIntire) has been too scared to do anything – at least until John gets assaulted. That leads Albert to run for the state Attorney General’s office, and frightens the syndicates so much that they wind up killing Albert. John decides to avenge Dad’s death by taking up the fight for political office, although it’s not without some substantial danger. In real life, John Patterson was elected AG, and then went on to become the segregationist governor just before George Wallace. Patterson died last year at the age of 99. The movie opens with journalist Clete Roberts interviewing some of the real-life people involved in the case, including Ma Patterson, and those interviews are one of the highlights of the movie.
A movie that could have been included in TCM’s “True Crime” spotlight if they had the rights to it is Serpico. But they don’t seem to, as it’s on Showtime Showcase at 3:00 AM Saturday instead. Al Pacino plays Frank Serpico, who at the start of the movie is getting shot in the face in 1971. The police chief is concerned that Serpico might have been shot by another cop, because a lot of the other cops seem to have a problem with him. We then learn that Serpico had always wanted to be a cop, and graduated the police academy full of idealism. But he very quickly learns that the cops are on the take in ways both small and big, starting with diner owners giving cops free meals to get better protection. As Serpico’s career continues, there are a few civilian oversight types who want him to testify about the corruption, but Serpico begins to realize that it goes all the way to the top, and to testify would be dangerous. And some people still think it’s just a few bad cops, or that it’s only racially motivated.
For something a little lighter than Serpico, try She Couldn’t Say No, airing on TCM at 6:00 AM Saturday. Jean Simmons stars as Corby Lane an oil heiress whose father worked his way up through the industry as an itinerant oil wildcatter. When she was young, she got ill in a small town called Progress, AR, and the townsfolk donated money for her medical treatment. Now that she’s well-to-do, she wants to repay the town for what they did for her, but she wants to do it anonymously. She tries to contact Dr. Sellers, who help her back then, but he’s died. However, his son, Robert Sellers (Robert Mitchum), has become a doctor and is still practicing in Progress. Corby tries to figure out what the townsfolk want, but Robert realizes that trying to meet individual people’s needs is going to cause all sorts of problems, as opposed to just endowing the town with something for the whole town. Watch also for a bunch of character actors.
People come, people go; nothing ever happens. That’s the supposed premise of Grand Hotel, which will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Sunday. The movie tells the story of Berlin’s Grand Hotel, and some of the people who wind up as guests of the hotel one weekend. There’s businessman Presying (Wallace Beery), who is there to consummate some sort of business deal, and possibly also consummate his relationship with his mistress Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford). Flaemmchen also winds up getting pursued by the Baron (John Barrymore), who passes himself as wealthy although he no longer is. In fact, he’s at the hotel because he knows the ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) is there with her valuable jewelry, and the Baron is planning to rob her of some of that jewelry. And there’s Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore), who is one of Presying’s low-paid employees, who shouldn’t be able to afford to stay at such a hotel at all, but he’s terminally ill and having a big blowout since he can’t take the money with him. Lewis Stone plays the hotel doctor who utters the line about nothing ever happening, while Garbo has the line about wanting to be left alone.