Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of July 19-25, 2021. I normally make some snarky comments about sport here, although we actually have some real sports movies this week. There’s also more from TCM Star of the Month Elvis Presley on Thursday in prime time, and a lot of interesting movies on other channels, more than normal in fact. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
For those of you who want sports other than the Bucks, the Olympics open up this week, with the opening ceremonies on Friday. TCM got the rights to run a lot of the documentary movies made on past Olympics. Some people might remember the name Bud Greenspan, but he only shows up for 16 Days of Glory at 10:15 PM Monday, about the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. If you want some famous names, eight famous directors were tapped to do one segment each on the 1972 Munich Olympics. That film, Visions of Eight, is on at 6:00 PM Monday and includes directors like Miloš Forman and John Schlesinger.
A movie that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation is Berlin Correspondent. It’s got another showing this week, at 4:40 AM Monday. Dana Andrews, very early in his career and sporting a mustache, plays Bill Roberts, an American radio correspondent in Berlin just before the entry of the US into World War II. Nazi intelligence officer Col. Rau (Martin Kosleck) wants to find out who’s getting classified information out of the country and correspondents seem like a a good place to start. Since Bill has been able to evade all the male spies following him, von Rau decides to try using a woman – his girlfriend Karen Hauen (Virginia Gilmore). What neither of them knows is that it’s actually Karen’s father (Erwin Kaiser), a stamp dealer, passing Bill the information. This gets Herr Hauen arrested and sent to an insane asylum to be killed (watch for Sig Ruman as the head of the asylum). When Herr Hauen is sprung, now it’s Bill who’s in trouble. Thankfully, Karen has fallen in love with him by this time and isn’t a loyal Nazi. Pure early war propaganda, but entertaining enough.
TCM is showing a bunch of Natalie Wood movies on Tuesday, concluding with Rebel Without a Cause at 8:00 PM Tuesday. Wood plays Judy, a student in a Los Angeles student who befriends new kid in town Jim Stark (James Dean). Stark has all sorts of teenage problems that cause his parents (Jim Backus and Ann Doran), who can’t figure him out, to movie from one neighborhood to the next as Jim wears out his welcome. Jim also becomes friends with another outcast, Plato (Sal Mineo). Judy, for her part, is the girlfriend of Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen), at least in Buzz’s mind. With the arrival of Jim, Buzz and his friends are merciless towards him, bullying him and challenging him to tests of courage that ultimately lead to tragedy. Of course, there’s really only one reason to watch the movie:
I think it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby. It’ll be on this week at 4:10 AM Wednesday on 5Star Max. Based on the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald that most of us probably had to read back in high school, the movie tells the story of Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston), a newcomer to the Long Island smart set of the 1920s. He’s the neighbor of the enigmatic and nouveau-riche Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford), and the two become friends as Gatsby begins to trust Nick, who himself gets caught up in the vapid lives of all these rich people.. Gatsby was in love with Daisy (Mia Farrow), but she decided to marry Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern) instead because he had money and at the time Gatsby hadn’t earned his fortune yet. But Gatsby has still held a flame for Daisy all this time, and since Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson (Karen Black), the wife of the Buchanans’ mechanic George (Scott Wilson), perhaps now would be the time for Daisy to restart a relationship with Gatsby. It all leads up to the tragic climax
There’s a fun double feature coming up on TCM on Wednesday, starting off with Big Hearted Herbert at 5:30 PM. Guy Kibbee plays Herbert Kainess, who runs a factory producing plumbing fixtures in one of those medium-sized Midwestern towns that populated movies in the years before World War II. Having built himself up by hard work, he has an affinity for “just plain folks” and doesn’t particularly care for college types. This is a problem because his son Junior would rather go to college to become an engineer instead of taking over the family business, while his daughter Alice (Patricia Ellis) is engaged to a lawyer Goodrich (Philip Reed). When Dad ruins a dinner in which Alice is introducing the Goodrich parents, mom Elizabeth (Aline MacMahon) decides it’s time to teach Herbert a lesson. When some important business clients are coming over for dinner, Elizabeth plans to show Herbert what “just plain folks” are really like. It’s material that could have been an episode of I Love Lucy 20 years later, but it works thanks to the acting jobs of Kibbee and MacMahon. Note that it’s a 60-minute movie in a 60-minute time slot, so you may want to set the DVR to run a few minute long.
Following at 6:30 PM Wednesday on TCM is The Millionaire. George Arliss plays the millionaire, James Alden, who runs an auto company until he’s told by his doctor that the stress of all the hard work is killing him. He and his wife Laura (Arliss’ real-life wife Florence) move west, whereupon James finds that the boredom is killing him even more than the stress he faced back at the car plant. James’ daughter Barbara (Evalyn Knapp) falls in love with a would-be architect Bill Merrick (David Manners) who is running a service station until he can save up the money to go into business as a architect. But the service station is a bad investment since a new proposed bypass highway is going to put it in a terrible location. Alden decides that he’s goin to take a half-interest in the station under an assumed name and show both Bill and rival Peterson (Noah Beery) how it’s done. Going back into business revitalizes Alden and helps Bill’s pursuit of Barbara along. Watch for a young James Cagney early in his career as an insurance salesman; he’s one of the few actors who isn’t blown off the set by Arliss.
John Wayne won an Oscar for playing Rooster Cogburn in the movie True Grit. He would play the character again, in a movie titled, appropriately enough, Rooster Cogburn. That movie will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 2:00 AM Thursday. Rooster gets stripped of his marshal’s powers, but has a chance to get them back when an Army shipment of explosives gets waylaid in the Oklahoma territory. Rooster, in following the gang that stole the explosives, which is lead by Hawk (Richard Jordan), happens upon Eula Goodnight (Katharine Hepburn), who was with her father trying to Christianize the Indians. Her dad got killed, and when Rooster shows up, Eula decides that she’s going to tag along with Rooster to try to find the men who killed her father. Of course, Rooster isn’t happy about this, but as with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, what’s he going to do about a woman as strong-willed as Eula? Indeed, Rooster and Eula wind up going down a river on a raft. Sound familiar?
TCM is running a bunch of Irene Dunne Movies on Thursday. One that I can’t recall the last time I mentioned is This Man Is Mine, at 4:15 PM Thursday. Dunne plays Tony Dunlap, happily married to Jim (Ralph Bellamy) with a young son. Things stay that way until Fran (Constance Cummings) shows up. Fran had apparently been engaged to Jim at one time before jilting him and leaving him to marry Tony. Now she wants to win Jim back, at least for a night just to show that she can. And she does to the point that Tony is willing to file for divorce on the grounds of infidelity and naming Fran as the correspondent. Fran is really hoping to marry wealthy Mort (Sidney Blackmer), so getting named in a divorce case just won’t do. Meanwhile, Fran’s brother Jud (Charles Starrett) is Jim’s best friend, while Jud’s wife Bea (Kay Johnson) is Tony’s best friend. Perhaps Jud and Bea can knock some sense into everybody else. It’s interesting to see Ralph Bellamy be something other than the man who loses out to the romantic male lead.
It’s been quite some time since I mentioned The Brady Bunch Movie. You can see it this week at 10:32 AM Friday on 5Star Max. As you’ll recall from the TV show, the Bradys were a very square blended family in the rapidly-changing social mores of the early 1970s. Now it’s the mid-90s, and the Bradys, the same ages they were on the TV show, have the same square moral values they did circa 1970, which makes them even more out of place. Dad Mike (Gary Cole) is still an architect, only not so successful since all the buildings he designs look too much like the Brady house. Meanwhile, their evil neighbors the Dittmeyers are trying to get everybody in the neighborhood to sell out to property developers, with the Bradys being the last holdouts, so the Dittmeyers try to intercept the Bradys’ tax bills. When the Bradys find out what’s happened, the kids decide they’re going to try to raise the money by entering a talent competition. That’s reminiscent of the plot of one of the old TV show, and in fact, the plot of the movie is less important than references to the old show and jokes about how out of place the Bradys are in the 1990s. That, and cameos from some of the TV show actors.
For those of you who like silent movies, we’ve got one not in TCM’s Silent Sunday Nights slot: The Adventures of Prince Achmed, at 8:00 AM Friday on TCM. Described in the opening titles as a “silhouette film”, director Lotte Reiniger uses elaborate cutouts and stop-motion photography to tell the story of Achmed, prince of a medieval Arabian monarchy. He’s given a magical flying horse by a sorcerer who wants to be rid of Achmed and get at Achmed’s sister. Achmed is able to control the hors and fly to the island of Wak-Wak, where he meets a beautiful princess Pari Banu and falls in love with her. But the sorcerer returns and kidnaps Pari Banu to China, selling her into slavery and forcing Achmed to find both her, and Aladdin’s magic lamp, to be able to defeat the sorcerer and return to his home country and take his rightful place on the throne. The animation is stunning, setting the cutouts against tinted backgrounds.
If you want an excellent, more recent movie, you can try watching Glengarry Glen Ross, which will be on Showtime Showcase at 2:15 PM Sunday. A Brooklyn real estate office is failing, so office manager Williamson (Kevin Spacey) brings in a man from corporate, Blake (Alec Baldwin) to try to increase sales. The result is a contest: the salesman in the office who makes the most sales over the next month will get a car, while the one who makes the least will be summarily fired. Williamson has some good leads in his filing cabinet, but that’s locked and those leads aren’t being given out, with the salesmen getting crappy leads instead. Among the salesmen are Levene (Jack Lemmon), who probably ought to retire, but he still thinks he can make one more big sale. Roma (Al Pacino) is the younger hot shot, while Moss (Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin) round out the office. All four get increasingly desperate as they know they’re up against one another and Williamson and Blake won’t show them any mercy. Just remember, ABC: Always be closing!