Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of July 13-19, 2020. It's been brutally hot and humid where I am, which is a good reason to stay inside and watch some good movies. This week sees a batch of films spanning some 70 years and all genres, including more from star of the Month Tony Curtis, and everybody's favorite dancers. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Tony Curtis gets a second night as TCM's Star of the Month on Monday; this week sees the first of two Monday dedicated to his comedies. I've mentioned Some Like It Hot (8:00 PM) enough; this week I'll recommend the following film, Captain Newman, MD, which begins at 10:15 PM. Curtis isn't Newman; that honor goes to Gregory Peck, playing an Army doctor in 1944 in an Army psychiatric hospital for soldiers with psychiatric problems from their service in the war. The Army doesn't really want to admit its soldiers have such problems, so the place is underfunded, forcing Newman's assistant Leibowitz (Curtis) to try to get resources any way he can, which is not always aboveboard. Among the patients are Eddie Albert and Robert Duvall, with acting honors among the patients going to Bobby Darin as a man whose plane was shot down. In addition to having to treat such difficult patients, the ward also gets a bunch of Italian POWs at Christmastime. A young and lovely Angie Dickinson plays one of the nurses.
A movie that's generally considered a commentary on the Hollywood blacklist but could just as easily be seen as relevant to today's “cancel culture” is High Noon. StarzEncore Westerns is running it on Tuesday at 5:27 AM. Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, marshal of a town somewhere in the west. He's recently gotten married to Amy (Grace Kelly), a pacifist Quaker who doesn't like the idea of her husband carrying and using guns. But the marshal may have to. Some time back, he sent one Frank Miller (Ian McDonald) to prison where Miller was supposed to be hanged. Instead, Miller was recently pardoned, and now he's back to gain revenge on Kane. He's also got a full gang of men with him to do it, so there's no way Kane can take them all down alone. But the townsfolk, from the deputy Harvey (Lloyd Bridges) to Mayor Henderson (Thomas Mitchell) and the rest, are a bunch of moral cowards who tell Will he's on his own; nobody wants to stand up for what is right. They think he should leave before Frank arrives on the train, which won't give Will much of a head start. How can Will save himself?
One of the odder movies this week is Wide Open, which will be on TCM at 10:30 AM Wednesday. Edward Everett Horton gets to play a romantic lead (really!) as Simon, a man who works as a bookkeeper at a phonograph company and has come up with a new needle that will supposedly boost business. But at work he has to deal with Agatha (Louise Fazenda) who thinks he's proposed to her. And then rifling through his office after hours is Julia (Patsy Ruth Miller), who escapes the police and tries to hide in Simon's house, passing herself off as a sick woman. His co-workers find out about Julia and naturally assume that Simon has gotten married and crash his house to throw a party for the couple that's not a couple! Julia, as we'll learn in the final reel, has a pretty good reason for breaking into Simon's office and then trying to get the books at his house. It's a bizarre little early talkie comedy that veers from one part of the plot to the next, but Horton makes it worth a watch.
I've mentioned Carole Lombard's final film, To Be or Not to Be, several times, but it's been quite a while since I've mentioned an upcoming airing of Mel Brooks' remake. Brooks' 1983 version of To Be or Not to Be is on this week, at 8:10 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Classics. Brooks and his real-life wife Anne Bancroft play the Frederick and Anna Bronski, a pair of popular actors in Warsaw in the summer of 1939. Anna has an admirer in Lt. Sobinski (Tim Matheson), a flyer in the Polish air corps who goes to Anna's dressing room to see her every time Frederick does Hamlet's famous soliloquy. Then the Nazis invade, and Sobinski flees to be part of the Free Polish flying out of London. But when Sobinkis realizes there's a traitor in their midst, he's sent back to Poland to help the Underground, giving him a chance to meet Anna again. Frederick discovers that Anna has a lover, but the Bronskis can't hand Sobinski over to the Nazis. Besides, it might be Frederick's chance to put his acting skills to good use for his country.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rоgers made nine movies together at RKO. The last of them was The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, which you can see this week at 10:00 AM Thursday at RKO. Fred plays Vernon, a British-born actor working in America circa 1910. One day, he meets Irene (that's Ginger), still living with her parents, and they fall in love and get married. Irene can do a bit of dancing, and convinces Vernon that perhaps he should give up the comic acting and instead do a ballroom dancing routine with her. They do this, and it becomes wildly successful, with the couple introducing several new ballroom dances to America. But then World War I comes, and Vernon, still feeling love for the home country, signs up for the Air Corps as a flight trainer. It splits up the act while he's away, and ultimately kills Vernon in a crash, with Irene to survive him for decades (if you haven't figured it out, this is based on two real people so you should already know how the story ends).
Those of you who don't like the more recent movies will be thrilled to see that the 1929 version of The Thirteenth Chair is on TCM this week, at 8:15 AM Friday. There's been a murder in British India, and Edward (John Davidson) is the best friend of the murdered man who, as it turns out, had a lot of enemies. So Edward comes up with a crazy plan that the police inspector Delzante (Bela Lugosi in one of his roles before he came typecast as a horror star). He'll invite famous medium La Grange (Margaret Wycherly) to hole a séance to talk to the dead guy, inviting all the suspects as well as some completely innocent people so that the suspects won't know what's up. Among the guests are the two nominal leads, Conrad Nagel and Leila Hyams. So they start the séance in a completely dark room, and… one of the attendees gets stabbed to death! But who did it, and how, since they were all holding hands at the séance?
Back in the FXM rotation is Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. It airs on Saturday at 3:30 AM and 12:45 PM. Bette Davis plays Charlotte, a woman who's been living as a spinster at the family's old decaying southern mansion ever since her lover was killed in the 1920s and then her father died. The townsfolk think Charlotte was responsible for the lover's death. She can't let go of the past, and so people naturally think she's going crazy… but is she really? Many years have passed, and now the local highway commission wants to build a new road right through Charlotte's property, so they try to convince her to leave the house. Living with Charlotte is her trusty housekeeper Velma (Agnes Moorehead). Cousin Miriam (Olivia de Havilland) shows up to move Charlotte out, although Charlotte thinks Miriam is going to help overturn the eminent domain ruling. Perhaps if Charlotte can be declared insane they can move her out of the house by force, so Miriam enlists the help of Charlotte's doctor Drew (Joseph Cotten). Rounding out the cast is Mary Astor in her final film as the widow of Charlotte's murdered lover.
Up against the first airing of Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a movie that's not quite TCM Underground material but isn't so well-known is The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder, part of this week's Underground schedule at 2:30 AM Saturday. Timothy Bottoms plays the titular Vrooder, a Vietnam veteran who's returned home and copes with what he faced in Vietnam and the society he's returned to by acting crazy, which has landed him in a VA hospital with veterans of various wars. There he tries to make their lives better, but he also escapes the facility to an underground bunker he's built, stealing electricity and telephone service which has caught the attention of the utilities. His shrink has a girlfriend Zanni (Barbara Hershey) who is a nurse at the facility and who gets drawn into Vrooder's quirky world. Watch for veteran movie director George Marshall as one of the patients. Curiously, the movie was produced by Hugh Hefner.
I've mentioned a lot of Audie Murphy's westerns which have been airing over on StarzEncore Westerns, but this time I'll mention him in a straight-up drama: The Quiet American, at 4:30 AM Sunday on TCM. Murphy plays the titular unnamed American, but the story starts with a British acquaintance of his, Fowler (Michael Redgrave), being brought to the police in French-controlled Vietnam a few years before Dien Bien Phu for questioning. Apparently a dead body has been found in the river that's likely the American, and what does Fowler know about it? Flash back to the American's arrival; he's an idealistic young man who wants to help the Vietnamese people and meets and falls in love with a young Vietnamese woman Phuong (Giorgia Moll). Fowler has been in country long enough to know that what the American is doing isn't going to work, and has had a relationship with Phuong himself. The American's ideas won't work, unless he's got somebody backing him…. The movie is not without its flaws, but Murphy shows he was a more than capable actor.
For those of you who like more recent movies, we've got one this week that isn't even 25 years old: Sling Blade, on Cinemax at noon Sunday (and three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). Billy Bob Thornton plays Karl, a mildly retarded man who, as a pre-teen killed his mother and her lover, and spent decades in a mental hospital for it. The authorities have declared him cured, and release him back into society in his small home town in rural Arkansas. There, he gets a job fixing motors, something he's good at. He makes the acquaintance of a fatherless boy, Frank (Lucas Black), who lives with his mom Linda (Natalie Canerday) and her violent boyfriend Doyle (Dwight Yoakam). Karl becomes friends with Linda, and Linda's boss at the grocery store, the homosexual Vaughan (John Ritter). Doyle is mean to all of them, but especially the two “abnormals” Karl and Vaughan. How is Karl going to be able to survive in a world he barely understands? Thornton wrote and directed, and gives an excellent performance in a cast full of fine performances.