Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of January 3-9, 2022. We’ve reached a new month, which as always means TCM is changing the Star of the Month, which we’ll get to in due course. Just by coincidence, we’ve got a couple of Latin American-themed movies, and multiple action movies, although at least one wouldn’t have gotten the action movie moniker back when it was made. There’s stuff from the silent era all the way through to the 90s, so if for some bizarre reason you don’t like the older movies, there’s still going to be something for you. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
First up, we’ll mention this week’s Silent Sunday Nights selection: the 1921 version of The Three Musketeers, Monday at 12:30 AM. Douglas Fairbanks Sr plays D’Artagnan, who in this version comes to Paris wanting to serve with the Musketeers (watch for a relatively thin Eugene Pallette at Aramis). Their King, Louis XIII (a young Adolphe Menjou) has a wife in Queen Anne of Austria who has been less than faithful to him, giving her lover the English Duke of Buckingham a brooch that Louis had given her. The King’s adviser and the power behind the throne, Cardinal Richelieu (Nigel de Brulier), has learned of this, and is basically blackmailing Anne in order to accrue more power for himself. Somebody has to go to England to get that brooch back and save the king from the Cardinal’s machinations, and wouldn’t you know that D’Artagnan is just the man to do it. OK, this isn’t quite as swashbuckling as some of Fairbanks’ other movies, and some liberties are taken with Alexandre Dumas’ novel, but it’s still fun.
Now that we’re into a new month, it’s time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around it’s Kay Francis, known as a clothes-horse in the 1930s. Her movies will be airing on four of the five Mondays in January, with a night off for Martin Luther King Day on Jan. 17. This first Monday of the month sees one that doesn’t show up much, First Lady, at 12:30 AM Tuesday. Francis isn’t actually the First Lady here, but Kate Wayne, the granddaughter of a President and wife of current Secretary of State Stephen Wayne (Preston Foster). Kate is one of those Washington hostesses back when the Washington social scene was a big deal, and she’d like to help her husband become President. Kate’s rival in terms of being a hostess is Irene Hibbard (Verree Teasdale), wife of pompous Senator Hibbard (Walter Connolly) and stepping out on him with Senator Keane (Victor Jory). Irene would like to push Keane for the presidency, but Kate tries to box her in by pushing Senator Hibbard, since Irene can’t say no to that and nobody really wants Hibbard as President. Except that he somehow does become popular, and Kate has to come up with a way to stop it.
Our next movie is Romancing the Stone, which HBO2 has for you at 6:15 AM Tuesday. Kathleen Turner plays Joan Wilder, a writer of romance novels who is fairly successful, but who unfortunately doesn’t have anywhere near the exciting life that the characters she writes about lead. All of that is about to change, however, when she gets a package in the mail from her sister in Colombia which contains what looks like a treasure map. She then gets a phone call from the sister who claims to have been kidnapped, and bringing that map down to Colombia is part of the ransom demands. So of course Joan gets on a plane bound for Colombia to try to find her sister. Of course, Joan, never having led an exciting life, doesn’t know so much about real life and quickly finds herself in all sorts of trouble in Colombia. That is, until she meets Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), an American adventurer who is willing to help Joan because he has his own issues with the local bandits. Will Joan finally find the romance that’s been missing from her real life?
If you want to see Ronald Reagan and first wife Jane Wyman in a movie together, you have your chance this week, as Tugboat Annie Sails Again will be on at 2:15 PM Tuesday on TCM. If you remember the original Tugobat Annie, it starred Marie Dressler as Annie, alongside Wallace Beery. Of course, Dressler had died in the intervening years, and this was made at Warner Bros while Beery was under contract to MGM, so now Annie is a widow, played by Marjorie Rambeau, in a sort of rivalry with Capt. Bullwinkle (Alan Hale Sr). Rich J.B. Armstrong (Clarence Kolb) wants equipment delivered to his dry-dock and the two boat captains vie for the contract, although you know Annie is going to wind up tops in the end. As for Reagan, he plays Eddie Kent, an apprentice sailor on Annie’s boat. He’s also in love with Peggy Armstrong (Wyman) who, as you can tell from the name, is the daughter of J.B. If it hadn’t been for the memorable pairing of Beery and Dressler all those years ago, the movie would probably be better remembered.
If you want to feel old, consider that the movie Jackie Brown will be 25 years old in 2022. It has an airing this week, at 2:00 PM Wednesday on HBO Zone. Pam Grier plays Jackie Brown, a 40-something flight attendant with a criminal record who works charter flights between LAX and Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, and also smuggles cash back into the states for Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), who gets the money from running guns. Robbie recently bailed a confidant out of jail using bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster), only to kill the friend because he would have spilled the beans on Ordell. So when Jackie gets found with some of Ordell’s cash, along with some planted cocaine, by ATF agent Nicolette (Michael Keaton), Ordell bails her out with the plan to kill her. Nicolette wants her to turn state’s evidence and get the goods on Ordell, while Max is willing to help her double-cross Ordell and the ATF. Robert De Niro co-stars as a bank robber who just got out of jail and is now working for Ordell.
In the early days of sound, there were all sorts of bizarre things made, with some of the most bizarre being the Dogville shorts. One of them, The Dogway Melody, will be on TCM at 8:00 AM Wednesday. This is a spoof mostly of the movie The Broadway Melody, except with dogs on guide wires playing all the roles. If you know the original movie, it’s got two young women who go to the big city to try to make it on Broadway, and one of them eventually does, but not without some heartbreak. This version has that, and some of the musical numbers, along with a fairly strongly implied doggy rape. There’s also a parody of Al Jolson doing “Mammy”, and the “Singin’ in the Rain” number from the end of The Hollywood Revue. (You may recall that the 1950s movie Singin’ in the Rain was conceived when lyricist-turned-producer Arthur Freed wanted to reuse a bunch of his songs for a new musical.) Some people will probably find these shorts highly offensive and abusive toward the poor dogs, but damn if they aren’t jaw-droppingly bizarre.
For those of you who complain about the old movies, try a mindless 80s action flick like Code of Silence, airing at 5:06 AM Thursday on Action Max. Chuck Norris stars as Eddie Cusack, a rare honest Chicago cop who finds himself in the middle of a drug and gang war. The Luna gang, led by Tony Luna (Mike Genovese), are trying to muscle into the territory of the more established Comacho gang, led by Luis (Henry Silva). Eddie is in fact about to arrest some of the Comachos when the Lunas beat him to the punch and shoot them dead. One of the surviving Comachos responds by kidnapping Tony’s daughter Diana (Molly Hagan). Eddie would like to find Diana and ensure her safe recovery, but surprisingly none of the other cops want to help. That’s probably because Eddie had the audacity to testify against one of his fellow cops who shot an innocent kid and planted a drop gun on the kid. Eddie is going to have to rescue Diana and break the gangs by himself.
Charles Laughton makes anything he’s in worth watching. You can see him this week in Payment Deferred, at 8:00 AM Friday on TCM. Laughton plays Willie Marble, a London banker with a wife Annie (Dorothy Patterson) and adult daughter Winnie (Maureen O’Sullivan). Unfortunately, trying to provide his family with a good life has led to Willie getting too far into debt that he can’t pay off, and the bank is ready to fire him for his lack of fiscal probity. However, a distant cousin from Australia, young James Medland (Ray Milland) shows up, and with a good deal of money. Willie tries to get that money out of James to pay off those debts, and when James wisely declines, Willie responds by poisoning James, burying him in the backyard, and taking the money, with nobody any the wiser. However, as in The Tell-Tale Heart, Willie has a conscience which begins to gnaw on him, especially when he can’t account for the sudden cash injection. Turning his eye to the pretty neighbor, Mme. Collins (Verree Teasdale), doesn’t help either.
It’s always nice to see another airing of Bad Day at Black Rock. This week, that’s at 4:30 PM Saturday on TCM. Spencer Tracy plays John Macreedy, a man with a withered left arm who steps off the train in Black Rock, NV, one day in 1945. The train doesn’t normally stop there any more, so the presence of a stranger is a big deal. However, everybody in town starts to get suspicious when he says he wants to go to Adobe Flats to see the family of Kamoko, a Japanese-American who had served the US with distinction in the war. Their refusal to tell him how to find the family only makes him investigate further. It turns out that Sheriff Tim Horn (Dean Jagger) is running interference in town for the wealthy ringleader, Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who has pretty much everybody in town under his thumb, and not just his direct subordinates Coley (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector (Lee Marvin). Macreedy’s continued investigation is going to put his life in danger as he ferrets out the shocking secret of Black Rock.
Back in the FXM rotation after a three-year break is Thunder Island. This week you can see it at 4:50 AM Sunday. Latin American political intrigue has caused one dictator to flee his country and take refuge on a private island in another country. Political opposition from the dictator’s home country want to kill him, and hire assassin Billy Poole (Gene Nelson) to do the deed. Of course, getting on the private island is going to be tricky. Fortunately, he’s in luck, as he’s got an American couple, the Dodges (Brian Kelly and Fay Spain) on his charter boat as a ruse to get close to that island, and the Dodges have a daughter who’s close in age to the dictator’s daughter. So the dictator’s daughter, wanting to make a new friend, invites them all onto the island. In the early 1960s when this movie was made, Fox was hemorrhaging money from the production of Cleopatra, and getting the rights to distribute all sorts of interesting B movie stuff like this, some good, some hilariously awful. Thunder Islandprobably wouldn’t be remembered, however, if it weren’t for the fact that one of the screenwriters was a very young Jack Nicholson.