Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of January 31-February 7, 2021. Normally, these threads run Monday to Sunday, but thanks to events in the news I had to add something that's airing tonight. The normal week is the first full week of a new month, so we're going to get a new Star of the Month on TCM, as well as some other new programming features. There's also another movie that's recently started showing up in the FXM rotation, and some interesting more recent stuff on other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Actress Cicely Tyson died this past week, after I put up last week's post. TCM had already scheduled an evening of her films, for tonight just before Silent Sunday Nights and the TCM Imports, so you can watch two of her films: Sounder, which earned her an Oscar nomination is on at 8:00 PM, followed by A Man Called Adam, with Sammy Davis Jr. as an alcoholic jazz musician, at 10:00 PM.
In January, TCM's Imports slot went through several of the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Since their programming day runs from 6:00 AM one day to the next, there's still one more night of his movies, concluding at 4:00 AM with All About My Mother. Cecilia Roth plays the mother, Manuela, living in Madrid with a teenaged son Esteban (Eloy Azorin) who doesn't know anything about his father. Esteban gets killed in a freak accident trying to get an actress' autograph, so Manuela decides she's going to Barcelona, where Esteban was conceived, to try to find the father. Along the way, she runs into a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was running in Madrid when Esteban died. Manuela is also made acquainted with young nun Rosa (Penélope Cruz), who is supposed to go to El Salvador, except that she's violated her vows and gotten pregnant… by the same man who happened to father Esteban all those years ago. All of them have more secrets that get revealed over the course of the movie.
If you want an unintentionally hilarious movie, then you'll probably really enjoy Race With the Devil, which airs on FXM at 11:45 AM Tuesday. Warren Oates and Peter Fonda play friends Frank and Roger, who go on a couples' vacation with their respective wives Alice (Loretta Swit) and Kelly (Lara Parker), intending to go from Texas to Colorado for some skiing, traveling there in their state-of-the-art (at least for 1975) RV. However, on their first night out, they stop at a place where the two men see a satanic ritual murder take place just across the river. More unfortunately, the Satanists spot them, and the two couples have to beat a hasty escape, the Satanists close behind and ever threatening. These Satanists seem to have thousands of supporters, and are able to set up a bunch of elaborate, and increasingly implausible, scenarios to try to catch the two couples on their way across rural west Texas to get home. It's so dumb and full of plot holes, but the stupidity makes this one a lot of fun.
We're into the first full week of a new month, so it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, it's John Garfield, who made a surprisingly large number of films over about a dozen years at Warner Bros. His movies will be running on Tuesdays in prime time. One that I don't think I've mentioned before is Blackwell's Island, at 6:15 AM Wednesday. This doesn't refer to the best-dressed island out there, but an island New York City uses to house its prisoners. One of them is Bull Bransom (Stanley Fields), a practical joke-playing mobster running the Waterfront Protection Agency, a racket if you've ever seen one. Garfield plays Tim Haydon, a crusading reporter whose stories are able to get Bransom sent to the island. However, Bull has a lot of money and pull, and basically runs the prison from the inside, using it as a country club for his prisoner friends and a headquarters for the racket. Tim decides he's going to have to get himself sent to prison to root out the corruption from the inside. This is the sort of B movie Warner Bros. was always able to make so well.
If you like literary adaptations, we've got one that I think will be a first-time mention here: A Handful of Dust, which is on MovieMax at 6:41 AM Wednesday. Based on a story by Evelyn Waugh, this is set in the 1930s involving fading aristocratic couple Tony and Brenda Last (James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas). One of Tony's lower-class but financially connected friends John Beaver (Rupert Braves) comes for a visit, along with his mom (Judi Dench), who makes money in real estate and thinks she can get more for John out of the Lasts. John starts having an affair with Brenda, and this leads to a series of tragedies: Tony finds out, Tony and Brenda's son dies in an accident, the plans for an amicable divorce go awry, and ultimately, to get away from it all, Tony goes off to South America for what is ostensibly a scientific expedition, but results in his getting ill and saved by oddball Mr. Todd (Alec Guinness) who has a thing for Charles Dickens.
I mentioned Peter Fonda earlier, so I figure I should probably mention his father Henry, too. Henry Fonda is the star of Welcome to Hard Times, at 2:30 PM Friday on TCM. Henry plays Will Blue, the pacifist “Mayor” of old west town Hard Times. Into town comes the otherwise unnamed Man from Bodie (Aldo Ray), who proceeds to drink the town dry and shoot it up, killing anybody who gets in his way, just because. After Bodie burns down the town and leaves, there are only four survivors: Will, Molly Riordan (Janice Rule), now orphan Jimmy Fee (Michael Shea), and Indian medicine man John Bear (Royal Dano). There's a mine that's been serviced by the town, and when a brothel owner Zar (Keenan Wynn) passes through and learns this, he decides to stop. Perhaps the town can be rebuilt. But there's always the threat that Bodie might come back. So Molly is trying to teach Jimmy how to shoot so that somebody will do something about Bodie, since Will certainly won't. Will anybody be able to solve the town's problem?
A more recent movie that harkens back to old times is De-Lovely. It's going to be on Epix Hits at 2:20 AM Saturday. You may recognize that title as coming from the song “It's De-Lovely” by Cole Porter. This movie is a biopic of sorts about Cole Porter, played by Kevin Kline, starting off with Porter as an elderly man not long before his death. He's met by the mysterious Gabriel (Jonathan Pryce), who may or may not be the archangel, who presents a flashback of Porter's life in the form of a musical revue, with songs from throughout Porter's career. Porter was gay, but had a wife in the form of divorcée Linda Lee Thomas (Ashley Judd), who accepted his homosexuality more or less and married him to get away from her nasty first husband. The couple remain married until her death, staying together through tragedy, notably the horse-riding accident that would eventually cost Porter his leg. Although Kline is a good enough singer to do Porter's songs, having won multiple Tony Awards, the music is actually performed by a wide range of singers, from Kline to Sheryl Crow to Natalie Cole.
There's another showing of Rope this week, at 6:30 PM Saturday on TCM. Two young college students, Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) come up with the perfect crime. Filled with Nietzschean bullshit about the superiority of some men, Brandon convinces Phillip to help him strangle classmate David and then hide the body in a chest in their apartment, where they will be holding a dinner party later that evening. Coming to the party are the dead man's fiancée Janet (Joan Chandler), as well as Prof. Cadell (James Stewart), from whom Brandon got the idea in the first place that an inferior like David deserved to be killed. Of course, that body in the chest works like Poe's telltale heart, making Phillip increasingly agitated as he doesn't know how to deal with his guilt. The movie is known for its style of looking like it was filmed in one long take in real time, but in fact there are a couple of cuts; director Alfred Hitchcock realizes that whenever the projectionist had to change a reel the audience would notice that, so that's where the cuts are.
Cloris Leachman died last week as well as Cicely Tyson. One of the movies in which she had a small part is on this week: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, at 3:18 AM Sunday on StarzEncore Westerns. Butch (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) are part of the Hole in the Wall Gang, a group of bank robbers in Wyoming circa 1900. Butch winds up running the gang, and decides to try robbing a train. The robbery doesn't go according to plan, and now there's a posse on the tails of Butch and Sundance, who have to escape along with Sundance's girlfriend, Etta Place (Katharine Ross). Eventually Butch and Sundance are able to escape, successfully leaving the United States and making it all the way to Bolivia. But they have no real way of making a living down there, and the Bolivians are going to look very askance at American bank robbers. Butch and Sundance being real people, you know how the story is going to end. As for Leachman, she plays Agnes, one of the workers at a brothel where the two robbers spend a night during their escape.
This week's Noir Alley presentation is a very timely movie: The Killer that Stalked New York, airing at 10:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Evelyn Keyes plays Sheila Bennet, who has smuggled in uncut diamonds from Cuba (this being before the Castro regime), intending for her fiancé Matt (Charles Korvin) to fence them. Matt's a real nasty piece of work, having an affair with Sheila's sister Francie (Lola Albright) while planning to abscond with the diamonds himself. Anyhow, Sheila also brings something else back to New York along with the diamonds. She gets sick and, being a wanted woman with US Customs on her tail, she tries to avoid doctors. But she's got smallpox, and she's started infecting other people. So you've got Customs after her, and the public health authorities looking for Patient Zero, not realizing that they're all looking for the same person. At least the authorities had the good sense here not to put everybody under house arrest and destroy the economy so they could get rid of a president they hated.