Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of July 15-21, 2019. There's still another week to go before training camp opens and all the UDFAs look great until they get into actual game action. Since we're all in nervous anticipation, why not use the time to watch some good movies? There's more from Star of the Month Glenn Ford; more scifi; and interesting stuff on other movie channels too. As always, all times are in ET, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is running a bunch of movies on Monday morning and afternoon about innocent people getting mixed up with gangsters and other crooks. One that I'm not certain I've mentioned before is Go Chase Yourself, which you can watch at 4:45 PM. Joe Penner, a popular radio star of the early to mid 1930s, plays bank teller Wilbur Meeley, married to Carol (Lucille Ball). He wins a trailer the couple has no use for, so he makes use of it by parking it in front of the house and sleeping in it. Then crooks rob the bank where Wilbur works, and to make their getaway, they spot… Wilbur's unattached trailer. They can attach it to their car and pose as tourists. The only problem is that Wilbur is still in the trailer. And the police think evidence from the robbery points to him being part of an inside job. Carol and Wilbur's boss decide to go looking for Wilbur, while the crooks hide out at a campground where a runaway heiress (June Travis) is also hiding out with the man she eloped with. Chaos ensues. Penner's popularity quickly waned, and as you'll probably notice watching this, his shtick grows thin after a while.
We get another night of Glenn Ford movies on Monday in prime time, including the 1960 remake of Cimarron at 3:15 AM Tuesday. Ford stars as Yancey Cravat, who at the ending of the movie takes part in the 1889 land rush in Oklahoma along with his wife Sabra (Maria Schell). They help found the town of Osage, setting up the local newspaper and becoming prominent citizens. But Yancey is a dreamer, and can't stand being cooped up in civilization, so he up and leaves for greener pastures, forcing Sabra to raise a family alone and become prominent in her own right. Meanwhile, in this sprawling story that covers a good 30 years, Yancey's presence touched other people's lives. There's Tom Wyatt (Arthur O'Connell), who winds up striking oil and becoming rich. Another one is Dixie Lee (Ann Baxter), who was a former girlfriend of Yancey's. Edna Ferber's novel which had been turned into the Best Picture of 1931 gets the Technicolor and widescreen treatment?
Back on FXM Retro is People Will Talk, which you can see at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Cary Grant plays Dr. Pretorius, who is a doctor teaching at a medical school. Pretorius has some views that his colleague Dr. Elwell (Hume Cronyn) considers unorthodox, so Elwell hires an investigator; after the investigation Elwell pursues a misconduct hearing. Meanwhile, Pretorius has to deal with one of his students, Deborah Higgins (Jeanne Crain). She faints during a lecture, and after Pretorius examines her, he realizes that she's pregnant! That in and of itself isn't the biggest deal, except that she's not married, and this is 1950. Deborah has a bit of a rough life, and after Pretorius operates on her she begins to fall in love with him. This of course is a big problem not just for the ethical reasons of a student/teacher romance, but because with Elwell's misconduct investigation the news of Higgins' actions is bound to be twisted by gossip into something sinister that it isn't.
The science fiction spotlight continues on TCM on Tuesday night. Since we're almost up to the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's stepping on the moon, this Tuesday the theme for all the movies is the moon, starting with Destination Moon at 8:00 PM. The plot is nothing new to modern film viewers. Scientists trying to launch rockets has lost its federal funding and comes up with private funding for their atomic-powered rocket to the moon. They're able to get a working rocket and assemble a crew of people for the dangerous voyage. And when they land on the moon, they realize why it's so dangerous: they may not have enough fuel to get back off the moon. It's all old hat now, but the movie was released in 1950 when themes like this were quite new. And the producer, George Pal, who was known for his animation, strove for accuracy, or at least as much as they could get in 1950 not knowing what the moon would really be like. Pal also hired fellow animator Walter Lantz to create a Woody Woodpecker short to explain the basics of physics in space. The result is a movie with surprisingly good effects for the time but a bit lacking in plot and characters.
Probably the most popular selection this week will be Raising Arizona, on Starz Encore Classics at 11:10 AM Wednesday. One of the Coen brothers' earliest movies, it stars Nicolas Cage as H.I. "Hi" McDonough, a serial criminal who keeps holding up convenience stores and getting sent to jail for it. Taking his prison booking shot every time is Ed (short for Edwina and played by Holly Hunter). So naturally, the two fall in love. They get married and it would help Hi to settle down, except that there's one problem. Ed is barren, and can't get pregnant. Then the two learn of the furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), whose wife has just made the news for giving birth to quintuplets. Hi comes up with the brilliant plan that they'll kidnap one of the quints and raise it as their own. Of course, the aftermath doesn't go to plan as Nathan hires a bounty hunter to find the kid, and a couple of Hi's old convict friends (including John Goodman) show up. And did the couple even think of a plausible explanation for how they got the kid?
For those of you who like more recent movies, we've got one from the 1990s: Unlawful Entry, at 1:45 AM Thursday on Cinemax, or three hours later if you have the west coast feed. Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe play Michael and Karen Carr respectively, a couple living in the suburban parts of Low Angeles. One day, their lives are turned upside down when a burglar breaks in and holds a knife to Karen's throat. They call the cops, who send out Officer Davis (Ray Liotta) to investigate. He offers the couple some advice and stops by to check up on them. When Michael comments about what he'd do the burglar if given the chance, Davis actually takes Michael on a ride along to where the burglar is and tells Michael to go take his nightstick and beat the crap out of the burglar. Michael can't, so Davis does, at which point Michael begins to realize Davis is a bit nuts and is really interested in Karen, which is why he keeps visiting. Relatively standard fare for a thriller, but reasonably well done.
If you watch enough TCM, you'll probably have seen the piece that director John Frankenheimer did when Burt Lancaster was Star of the Month many years back. TCM is running a night of films in which Frankenheimer directed Lancaster on Thursday night, starting at 8:00 PM with The Train. Lancaster plays Paul Labiche, who manages a railway yard in Paris in 1944, during the Nazi occupation of the country. That occupation is about to end as the Allies have invaded and are getting close to Paris. With that in mind, German officer Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) has raided Parisian museums to loot a bunch of fine artwork to Germany. Waldheim tasks Labiche with making certain that the train makes it to Germany without getting destroyed. What Waldheim doesn't know is that Labiche is part of the Resistance. He's not so sanguine about taking risks for inanimate art over people, but these are after all national treasures. Circumstances eventually bring about a desire in Labiche to stop the Nazis.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns, I'll mention Two Flags West, which will be airing at 8:01 PM Friday. This one is based on a little-known period in American history, that portion of the Civil War in which the North offered parole to those Southern POWs who offered to go west and fight the Indians on the frontier. Joseph Cotten plays Confederate colonel Clay Tucker, who leads the group of men agreeing with Union captain Mark Bradford (Cornel Wilde) to go west to New Mexico on the grounds that they won't be forced to fight against their own. They wind up at Fort Thorn, with the commanding officer being Major Kenniston (Jeff Chandler). With the war going on back east, the Union didn't have the luxury of putting good commanders out west, so there are reasons Kenniston is out here. Also at the fort is his widowed sister-in-law Elena (Linda Darnell). The Union and Confederate forces start conspiring against each other, while all three officers start having thoughts about pursuing Elena. Of course, the Indians are still out there about to rear their heads....
TCM's salute to the films of 1939 continues on Friday. The movie I'd like to mention this week is the excellent and in some ways daring Confessions of a Nazi Spy, at 3:15 PM Friday. The Bund, a German-American organization similar to the Ancient Order of Hibernians for Irish-Americans, was being infiltrated by the Nazis, who wanted to use it as a means of gathering intelligence. Respected Dr. Kassell (Paul Lukas) is an American Nazi who leads one local chapter of the Bund. Kurt Schneider (Francis Lederer) is an out of work teacher influenced by Kassell's speeches who is willing to become a spy for Germany. The Nazis send over Schlager (George Sanders) to see that Schneider is getting the information they want. The US government figures that something is going on, and they send in agent Renard (Edward G. Robinson) to investigate and crack the case. The movie is interesting for being told in a docudrama style, and daring because it was released in May 1939, four months before the start of the war in Europe, a time when Hollywood was still pretty much ignoring the political situation in Europe so as to keep the money flowing in from all of Europe.
This week's TCM Essential is Losing Ground, which will be on at 8:00 PM Saturday. Sara (Seret Scott) is a philosophy professor living in New York City with her husband Victor (Bill Gunn). Where she's generally logical and practical, he's a passionate artist. It's a clash of personalities that's beginning to cause son strains in their relationship. Indeed, he wants to go upstate for the summer to paint, even though she really needs access to the big city libraries to do her scholarly research. She relents, and when they get to their summer house ("upstate" being represented by Nyack, which is most definitely not upstate) Victor starts to get decidedly too close to a Puerto Rican woman he's going to paint (Maritza Rivera). But Sara meets an actor in the library who understands her, and when one of her students asks her to play a part in a short film he's making for another class, she meets that actor again.