Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of January 6-12, 2020. The Packers finally play this weekend, and get the chance to show how much better they are than the Minnesota team. But since it's still several days away, why not spend the time waiting by filling it with some interesting movies. There's a new Star of the Month and some new spotlights on TCM, as well as interesting stuff on some of the other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM ran a salute to actor Gig Young on his birthday back in October, and three months later they're running another one on Monday. Among the movies they're showing is A Ticklish Affair, at 6:00 AM Monday. Young stars as Key Weedon, a Navy officer stationed in San Diego who gets the job of investigating what seems like an odd SOS signal coming from near the naval air station. It turns out there's a widow, Amy Martin (Shirley Jones) with three sons, and they were given a blinker light by his pilot uncle Simon (Red Buttons). Key meets Amy, and it's obvious to everyone that the two are right for each other, although it's going to take quite some time for the two of them to figure it out. This especially because Key claims not to be the marrying kind, and Amy doesn't want a husband who is constantly on the move since her father (Edgar Buchanan) was in the Navy and constantly getting transferred. Trouble with the kids, however, may accelerate Key and Amy's relationship….
A movie that's back on FXM is The Man Who Understood Women, which is showing at 9:10 AM Monday. Henry Fonda plays Willie Bauche, a brilliant writer/director whose budget-busting gets him fired by the studio. He meets the lovely French woman Ann (Leslie Caron) and decides he's going to make Ann a star. The two fall in love and get married, although Willie is more in love with his job than with Ann, it seems, since he leaves the hotel room on their wedding night for work. So when the two are back in Ann's native France, she meets military man Major Ranieri (Cesare Danova) and decides she'd rather be with him than with her husband. This unsurprisingly bugs Willie, who comes up with the brilliant idea of hiring a couple of hit men to off the Major so that Willie can have Ann back for himself. The hit men, however, decide that it would be unromantic to kill just the Major and that he and Ann need to die together. Willie wants Ann, so of course this is a non-starter. But can he stop the hit men? Veteran screenwriter Nunnally Johnson directed, but he probably should have stuck to screenwriting.
TCM's Monday night lineup is dedicated to Mary Astor, including a new-to-TCM documentary. But the movie I'm going to recommend is the excellent Act of Violence, at 4:30 AM Tuesday. Van Heflin is the star here, playing Frank Enley, a World War II veteran living with his young wife Edith (Janet Leigh). Into their town comes Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), who served with Frank in the war. But Joe is unhappy, and looking for Frank for sinister reasons that Frank doesn't want to tell Edith about. Apparently Frank and Joe were part of a group of POWs, with Frank being the commanding officer of the group. And Frank's actions didn't cover himself in glory, so Joe wants revenge for what he considers Frank's dishonorable conduct. Frank tries to escape by running off to Los Angeles, but Joe follows close behind. In his attempt to escape, Frank runs into prostitute in all but name Pat (that's Astor in a really good atypical role), who helps Frank in his attempt to find a permanent solution to his problem with Joe.
Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month. That honor goes to Patricia Neal, whose movies will be on TCM every Tuesday in prime time, starting with The Fountainhead at 8:00 PM. Gary Cooper plays Howard Roark, an architect with unorthodox ideas that gets him booted out of academia and polite society as represented by his classmate who rises within the establishment, Peter Keating (Kent Smith). Roark toils away at the edges of society which is how he meets Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal) when he's reduced to working in a quarry. But the underground notices Roark, who gets a modicum of fame when media magnate Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey) commissions him for a building. Unfortunately, Wynand's empire has a fifth columnist in the form of columnist Ellsworth Toohey (Robert Douglas in a role that should have gone to Clifton Webb if Warner Bros. could have gotten him). Everything converges when Keating agrees to be a front for Roark on a radical design for public housing that the various pressure groups sabotage because it won't let them wet their beaks.
A western I'm not certain I've talked about here before is Smoky, which is going to be on StarzEncore Westerns at 10:10 PM Wednesday. Fred MacMurray plays Clint Barkley, an itinerant cowhand with a past who comes across people trying to corral wild horses, and helps them catch the one black horse Smoky that the other guys can't catch. For that he's able to get a job at the ranch they work for, which is owned by Julie (Anne Baxter), although the foreman isn't so certain Clint is right since he won't talk about that past. Eventually that past does show up, in the form of Frank (Bruce Cabot), who had gotten Clint sent to jail for a crime Frank committed. Clint is able to tame Smoky and make him a good horse, except that Smokey gets stolen by rustlers and sold to a series of abusive owners until Smoky ends up at the rodeo. And one day Clint goes to the rodeo and finds a horse that just has to be Smoky…. Burl Ives in one of his earliest performances as a singing ranch hand.
Ronald Reagan was hired by Warner Bros. to replace tragic actor Ross Alexander, who had committed suicide in part because his first wife had a year earlier and possibly because he was gay and his career was going south as a result. But if you want to see an example of Alexander's light comic work, you can watch Brides are Like That, which will be on TCM at 6:45 PM Thursday. Alexander plays Bill McAllister, the nephew and only heir of orchard owner Fred (Joseph Cawthorn). Bill goes off to college and seems more interested in living the good life than in actually working. He meets lovely Hazel (Anita Louise) and proposes to her, but when he charges the engagement ring to his uncle's account, the uncle says no, which means that Bill is going to have to get a job to try to win Hazel. Meanwhile, Hazel's parents (the real life couple of Gene and Kathleen Lockhart) would rather their daughter marry nice doctor Randolph (Dick Purcell). But Bill is just so charming that he might yet win Hazel anyway.
Another movie about the movies, but this one based on reality, is Chaplin, which is showing at 2:41 AM Friday on StarzEncore (or three hours later if you have the west coast feed). As you can probably guess from the title, this one is based on the life of Charlie Chaplin (Robert Downey Jr.), who grew up poor in Britain at the end of the 19th century together with his brother Sydney (Paul Rhys). Eventually, Chaplin makes his way to America, and the new industry of the movies, which is where he meets Mack Sennett (Dan Aykroyd), one of the directors at Keystone Studios. Chaplin rises through the ranks, eventually becoming not only a leading actor, but a director who wants more control over his work, which he does in co-founding United Artists together with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (Kevin Kline and Maria Pitillo respectively). There's success, but also a lot of personal difficulty, both with women and with the FBI who don't like Chaplin's socialist tendencies and eventually prevent him from re-entering the country since he's not a citizen.
TCM's Friday prime time lineup is a threesome of Douglas Sirk movies, which are always worth watching for the unintentional comedy value. The evening kicks off with Written on the Wind at 8:00 PM. Rock Hudson plays Mitch Wayne, geologist for an oil tycoon Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith). He meets executive secretary Lucy (Lauren Bacall) and the two go out for a night on the town with Jasper's son Kyle (Robert Stack). Both men fall in love with Lucy but rich Kyle marries her even though she probably prefers Mitch. As for liking Mitch, there's also Kyle's kid sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone), a hard drinker (like all of the Hadleys) who has a reputation for being easy and is clearly putting the movies on Mitch. Meanwhile, Kyle's hard living led to the doctors telling him he might be impotent, which leads him to start drinking again. And then he finds out that Lucy is pregnant, leading to an obvious conclusion…. Stack was nominated for an Oscar but lost; Dorothy Malone won.
You probably recall Franco Zeffirelli's version of Romeo and Juliet which introduced a generation to Olivia Hussey, hubba hubba. It wasn't the director's first -- or last -- foray into Shakespeare. Twenty years later, he directed a version of Hamlet, which you'll be able to see on Epix2 at 6:35 AM Saturday. Mel Gibson plays the Danish prince, whose dead father returns as a ghost (Paul Scofield) telling Hamlet to avenge his death. Apparently the old King's death was brought about by Hamlet's uncle Claudius (Alan Bates), who then went on to marry Hamlet's mom Gertrude (Glenn Close)! So Hamlet decides he'll try to determine whether his uncle is in fact a killer and how to deal with that if so. However, he's also suffering from some sort of mental illness that clouds all his judgments and leads to tragedy for all. Shakespeare's original play is rather long (the Kenneth Branagh version runs four hours!), so some stuff gets a bit less coverage here, long the Ophelia character (Helena Bonham Carter), but there's still a lot interesting in this version.
The Packers finally start their post-season campaign on Sunday, so what better than to mention a football movie? Well, it's another of Hollywood's inaccurate looks at football, in Huddle, airing at 6:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Ramon Novarro, who was 33 at the time, is the college football player here, as Tony, the son of Italian immigrant parents where the father works at a steel mill in Gary, Indiana. Tony is able to get a scholarship to go to Yale, in the days when Ivy League football was still a relatively big thing. Unfortunately, there are still all sorts of class issues at Yale, and with Tony being decidedly working class and the child of immigrants, he finds it difficult to fit in and has an Aaron Rodgers-sized chip on his shoulder as a result. The current BMOC, Tom Stone (Kane Richmond), doesn't care for Tony in particular. There's also difficulty with women, in that Tony finds himself falling in love with Tom's sister Rosalie (Madge Evans). Can these football players come together and actually win games?