Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of July 17-23, 2017. Football training camp doesn't open for another week and a half, and the big tennis ends today so there's not much in sports worth watching right now. So why not spend the time watching some good movies instead? I've used my good taste to select a bunch of movies I know you'll all find interesting. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
A movie I don't think I've recommended before is Southwest Passage, which will be on TCM at 5:15 PM Monday. The idea sounds daft, but is apparently based on a real historical event. The US government, trying to find a quicker passage across the southwest to California, hires the guide Beale (Rod Cameron) who leads an expedition using… camels as pack animals. Hollywood decided that wasn't interesting enough on its own for a movie, so they spiced it up. Lilly (Joanne Dru), her boyfriend Clint (real life husband John Ireland), and her brother Jeb (Darryl Hickman) rob a bank and in trying to get away, Jeb is shot. So Lilly gets a doctor, but can only find a veterinarian who wants to go back east. Lilly buys his stuff, enabling Clint to pose as a doctor. After Jeb dies, Lilly and Clint meet up with Beale, and you know that since Clint is trying to pass himself off as a doctor, he's going to have to put that nonexistent medical knowledge to good use. Also, Beale falls in love with Lilly, causing further problems.
It's been a while since The Marriage-Go-Round has shown up on FXM Retro, but it's back this week, at 11:35 AM Tuesday. James Mason and Susan Hayard play Paul and Content Delville, a pair of married college professors. Paul, who teaches anthropology, gives his students a lecture on marriage and the difficulties it can sometimes present, a topic on which he's an expert since he's just been through a tough time himself. That tough time comes in the form of Katrin. Many years ago, Paul knew Katrin as the child of a Swedish colleague of his. But decades have passed, and Katrin is all grown up, played by Julie Newmar. And boy is she stunning. Anyhow, Katrin has learned well from her father apparently, and has the same sort of genius IQ that Paul does. Katrin visits and wants Paul to be the father of her children, basically because she wants two geniuses to reproduce. Content, for fairly obvious reasons, is having none of it, and thinks that Katrin is trying to take her husband away. Cheap hijinks ensue.
For those of you who want something more recent, you could do worse than to watch Cat's Eye, which will be on TCM at 6:15 PM Tuesday. This one is a horror anthology of two short stories and a third which was original for the movie, all written by Stephen King who also had a hand in the screenplay. The hook connecting all three is that the same cat gets involved. In the first story, James Woods tries to quit smoking, going to a clinic run by Alan King. However, he finds out that if he fails to quit, the consequences are going to be quite severe. Next up is one involving Robert Hays (Ted Striker from Airplane) as a tennis pro sleeping with a gambler's wife. The wealthy gambler makes the tennis player try to walk a ledge around the gambler's apartment building. The only thing is, that ledge is hundreds of feet above street level. Finally, the cat runs into a house where pre-teen Drew Barrymore lives. It turns out there's a troll in the walls of Drew's bedroom, and perhaps the cat can keep Drew safe.
TCM is running a bunch of Joel McCrea movies on Wednesday; one that doesn't get shown very often is Born to Love, which will be on at 9:15 AM. Here, McCrea plays Barry, a soldier in World War I who, during a bombardment of London meets and falls in love with nurse Doris (Constance Bennett). War calls and Barry goes off and gets himself MIA and presumed dead when he doesn't show up after the war. Of course, Barry and Doris spent just long enough together to have sex and knock her up; Doris, being in need of a man, marries Sir Wilfred (Paul Cavanaugh). But, of course, Barry isn't actually dead. Eventually he makes his way back to the UK and finds out what's happened to Doris. When Doris finds out that Barry is still alive, she realizes she's still in love with him even though she doesn't really want to hurt her husband. The only problem is that the law will recognize Doris as the guilty party in the divorce, so she'll never get custody of her child.
A movie that has a related plot is The Hired Hand, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 8:05 PM Monday and 7:37 AM Friday. Harry (Peter Fonda, who also directed), plays a hired hand who has been drifting through the west for years, meeting up with now friend Arch (Warren Oates) along the way. The only thing is, Harry had been married when he was very young, and after years of drifting, he's decided that it's finally time for him to settle down and go back to live with the wife and young daughter he left all those years ago. The wife Hanna (Verna Bloom) isn't so certain if she wants Harry back. She's been satisfyin gher needs with a series of hired hands, and at first that's how she's going to treat Harry. And the daughter doesn't even remember her own father, that's how young she was and how long he's been away. And can Arch really settle down?
TCM is running a whole bunch of Alfred Hitchcock movies as part of the month-long spotlight on him. One of the movies that TCM hasn't run in a while is Rope, which will be on at 8:00 PM Wednesday. John Dall and Farley Granger play Brandon and Philip respectively, roommates and former classmates under their teacher Rupert (James Stewart). Dominant Brandon has taken Rupert's lessons on philosophy too much to heart, deciding that an “inferior” classmate deserves to die and ropes Philip into joining him in the murder. The two men then hold a dinner party, with the body of their dead classmate in a chest of books and the food being served off the top of that chest, because Brandon is just that ballsy. Philip, however, is liable to crack under the increasing pressure. Hitchcock wanted to film this in one long take without cuts, although there actually are a few cuts because Hitchcock realized the reel changes in the theater would interfere with the attempt to make it look like it was done in one take. (The film packs the cameras used were shorter than theater reels and Hitchcock did disguise those changes, even though they're obvious when you know to look for them.)
For those who like 80s movies, I'm recommending another one this week: Monsignor, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 12:23 PM Thursday. Chistopher Reeve plays the title character, an Irish-American named Flaherty who becomes a priest, fights in World War II, and winds up working in the Vatican treasury toward the end of the war. The War has hit the Church hard, so Flaherty comes up with a daft idea. One of his Italian-American friends, a fellow soldier named Varese, has been dealing in the black market, and apparently has some connections to the Sicilian Mafia. So Flaherty is going to have the Church get in on the black market in exchange the Mafia getting its cut. Meanwhile, part of the Church looks the other way because it's useful to do so and help the position of certain Cardinals in Vatican politics. Along the way, Flaherty meets the nun Clara (Geneivève Bujold) and falls in love with her, even though she doesn't know he's a priest and both of them are supposed to be celibate anyway. At least it's consensual, not like a relationship with altar boys.
There's another night of Ronald Colman's movies on Thursday night; one that I don't think I've mentioned in these parts before is Lucky Partners, which you can catch at 2:30 AM Friday. Ronald Colman plays David, an “artist” in Greenwich Village who meets Jean (Ginger Rogers) one day and wishes her “good luck”. She gets it when somebody gives her an expensive coat, which gets her to ask him to go halves on an Irish Sweepstakes ticket. The only thing is, Jean already has a fiancé in Freddie (Jack Carson), and Freddie and David have wildly different ideas on what to do should they win the money. The result is that David goes on a vacation in a car that's technically registered to Jean although bought with the sweepstakes money, while Jean ends up with one of David's paintings that may or may not be by a different artist and simply stolen by David. Everybody ends up in a wacky courtroom scene to figure this all out.
This week I'm going to recommend a second western over on StarzEncore Westerns: Black Bart, at 3:04 AM Thursday. Dan Duryea plays Black Bart, who at the beginning of the movie is an outlaw along with his partners in crime Lance (Jeffrey Lynn) and Jersey Brady (Percy Kilbride). However, news comes that gold has been struck in California, and with the Gold Rush, Bart decides he's going to go west to California to find bigger things. What he finds is that Wells Fargo is shipping gold back east, and that all that gold being valuable, holding up stages can be lucrative! Except that one of the stages he holds up has as passengers Lance and Jersey Brady! Oh, and there's also Lola Montez, the famous European dancer (Yvonne De Carlo). Bart and Lance both fall for Montez, and already didn't like each other after the split…. Black Bart and Lola Montez are actually based on real people, although the story is wholly fictional.
Finally, we'll mention a pair of Judy Holliday movies airing in prime time Sunday, both of which I've recommended several times in the past. At 8:00, there's It Should Happen to You, in which she plays a woman trying to make a name for herself who takes a chance on putting her name on a billboard; when people realize she's the woman who did that she suddenly gains fame. Jack Lemmon plays a documentarian love interest; Peter Lawford plays the rich guy love interest.
Then at 10:00 PM there's The Marrying Kind, in which Holliday and Aldo Ray play a married couple who are now in divorce court. The judge gets the two of them to open up about how they met, fell in love, and what went wrong to lead up to the divorce, and the story is a tragic one that really shows just how good an actress Judy Holliday was.