Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of July 27-August 2, 2020. August, of course, means another edition of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, with each day in the month having the movies of a different star. But more on that when we get to the weekend. Before that, you'll get one last night of Tony Curtis on Monday, a salute to a a recently deceased director on Tuesday, and other interesting stuff on non-TCM movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I think I recommended The Sea Hawk not too long ago, but it's worth a watch, and it's on again this week at 5:00 PM Monday on TCM. Errol Flynn plays Geoffrey Thorpe, a privateer for England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Flora Robson). Unfortunately one of the ships he waylays has the new Spanish ambassador Don José (Claude Rains) and his niece Doña Maria (Brenda Marshall) with whom Geoffrey eventually falls in love, so political events force Geoffrey to leave England, getting sent to Panama to do spy work for England. However, Thorpe and his men (including second-in-command Alan Hale) are captured by the Spanish and sentenced to be galley slaves. Of course, Geoffrey is able to figure out a way to escape, and just in time. The Spanish have been building an armada that's planning on attacking England, but there are people in Elizabeth's court who want to prevent Geoffrey from getting this information to Her Majesty.
Baseball returned at the end of last week, for those of you who care about the sport. A baseball movie of sorts is The Babe, running at 11:46 AM Monday on StarzEncore Classics. John Goodman plays Babe Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat” known for hitting all those home runs at the start of the live-ball era and being the subject of several legendary stories, such as pointing to where he'd hit a home run, or promising a sick kid he'd hit two home runs in a game. But there were the off-the field problems, too, such as a falling out with his friend and teammate Lou Gehrig, his drinking and carousing that resulted in weight gain at the end of his career, or his difficulties with women (Kelly McGillis plays second wife Clare). This version of Babe Ruth's life is a polar opposite of the one in the studio era biopic The Babe Ruth Story, which was made while Ruth was still alive and sugar-coated Ruth's life; watch both and realize that the truth is somewhere in between.
Carl Reiner died last month at the age of 98. TCM changed a night of its schedule to do a tribute to Reiner, with several of the movies he directed. That night comes up this Tuesday in prime time, including Oh, God! at 3:30 AM Wednesday. John Denver plays Jerry Landers, a supermarket manager in Los Angeles with a wife Bobbie (Teri Garr) and two kids. One day, he gets a message purporting to be from God telling him to meet at a certain time of place. Naturally he doesn't believe it, but circumstances convince him to go anyway. There, he hears a voice claiming to be God that eventually reveals it self to be a kindly old man (George Burns). God has selected Jerry to give the world a very important message, which is that God wants people to be happy in life, and that people have the potential to make that happen if only they put the work into it. It's a relatively benign message, but unsurprisingly, people don't believe that Jerry actually saw God, and a group of religious leaders sets out to prove that Jerry did not in fact see God.
A brief search suggests that I haven't blogged about Valerie before, so I'll point out that it's on this week, at 2:25 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. Valerie, played by Anita Ekberg, is an immigrant who was shot by her husband John Garth (Sterling Hayden), who also shot and killed her parents. Valerie survived, and not John is on trial for the crimes. He testifies that Valerie was a lousy wife, and that she even cheated on him with the local minister, Reverend Blake (Anthony Steel). Her parents weren't exactly winners either. Valerie, for her part, testifies that John was violent to her well before the shooting; indeed he has a history of violence as he served in the Civil War and was given the task of getting information from Confederate POWs. And then it comes time for the reverend to testify. Maybe all three are giving the truth as they see it, but really happened. Interesting material that could just as easily have been made contemporary with a World War II vet and a foreign war bride.
TCM is running a bunch of Jacques Tourneur movies on Thursday morning and afternoon. For football fans, an interesting little movie is Easy Living, which comes on at 11:15 AM Thursday. Victor Mature stars as Pete Wilson, the star quarterback of a professional football team in the era before the NFL became the king of professional sports in the US, so Wilson is by no means wealthy. That's not good enough for his wife Liza (Lizabeth Scott), a grasping woman who wants the good things in life and doesn't want to deal with the washed-up. There's already a lot of conflict between them, but it's about to be upped because Pete is diagnosed with a heart condition that even today might spell trouble for his career, but back in the late 1940s when medicine was less advance, they thought that continuing to play football might just kill him. Sonny Tufts plays Tim, a former teammate who is now coaching in college and could get Pete a job. Also sympathetic to Pete is Anne (Lucille Ball showing she was good at drama, too), the widowed daughter-in-law of the team's owner (Lloyd Nolan) who has a flame for Pete.
We've got any number of family-friendly movies this week, such as the 1973 version of Charlotte's Web, at 7:45 AM Thursday on Epix2. Based on the book by E.B. White, this animated movie tells the story of Wilbur (voiced by Henry Gibson), a runt of a pig who is destined to be slaughtered for food. The farmer's daughter doesn't like this idea, so the farmer sends Wilbur away to another farm where Wilbur finds one of his few friends in the world in the form of Charlotte the spider (Debbie Reynolds). Together, they come up with a plan to have her spin webs that look like they've got messages about what a prize pig Wilbur actually is, kind of like finding the image of Jesus in your breakfast toast. Some of the other animals on the farm get involved, notably Templeton the rat (Paul Lynde) and the Goose (Agnes Moorehead). But of course life goes on and Charlotte's going to get old and die. What's going to happen to Wilbur then?
A movie that's returned to the FXM lineup is Stowaway. This week it makes an appearance at 6:00 AM Friday. Shirley Temple plays the titular stowaway, an orphan named Barbara and in war-torn China (a popular setting for 1930s movies) with the nickname Ching-Ching being taken care of by missionaries. She gets sent to Shanghai where she's fleeced, but makes the acquaintance of wealthy Tommy Randall (Robert Young), who takes her under his wing. She hides in the trunk of her car, which is being put on board a ship bound for America, although Barbara doesn't realize this, only waking up in the trunk after it's too late to do anything. So she and the dog decide to hide out in the stateroom of equally wealthy Susan (Alice Faye, Fox's musical star of the day), who also takes her under her wing. You can guess where the plot is going to go with orphan Shirley Temple and a man and a woman who have both met her and fallen in love with her charms. A bunch of character actors show up, such as Arthur Treacher and Robert Greig, neither of whom play butlers; or Eugene Pallette.
Saturday is August 1, which as you probably know by now is the beginning of Summer Under the Stars on TCM. Every day in August, TCM will be spending 24 hours with the movies of a different star. For this first day in the month, we get the movies of Barbara Stanwyck, including this week's TCM Essential, Ball of Fire at 8:00 PM Saturday. Gary Cooper plays Prof. Bertram Potts, who is working on creating a new encyclopedia with a group of eight bachelor professors who live together. They're getting to the S's, and these cloistered professors don't know much of anything about the topic of slang. So Potts gets the idea of going to a nightclub to pick up the latest slang, which is how he meets Sugarpuss (Stanwyck). She knows the slang, and Potts thinks she'd be great to teach the guys about slang and help with the article. What Potts doesn't know is that Sugarpuss is a gangster's moll, being in a relationship with Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews in a very early role), who gets the bright idea that Sugarpuss could use the professors' house as a place to hang out to keep her from testifying against him. Of course, Potts and Sugarpuss begin to fall in love, hugely complicating things. Cooper shows once again that he was quite adept at comedy.
For an animal story that's not quite as family-friendly as Charlotte's Web, try Willard, at 4:34 AM Saturday on Action Max (part of the Cinemax package). Bruce Davison plays Willard, a man with not much of a life. He lives with his widowed mother Henrietta (Elsa Lanchester) in a decaying house, while working in what used to be his father's business, which was taken out from under family control by nasty boss Martin (Ernest Borgnine) when Willard's dad died; Martin considers Willard lucky to have a job. The house has a bunch of rats on it, and when Willard tries to exterminate them for Mom he finds that the rats are actually quite intelligent and decides to start training them. The rats are quite good at doing Willard's bidding at first, but Willard becomes overly friendly with one of the rats, Socrates, while another one, Ben, doesn't want to be left alone while Willard goes to work. And if Ben doesn't get his way, he might just stop doing what Willard wants….
Sunday's star on TCM is Rock Hudson. He appeared in a couple of the lush but trashy melodramas that Douglas Sirk directed in the 1950s, such as Magnificent Obsession, which is on at 10:00 PM Sunday. Hudson plays Bob Merrick, a wealthy playboy who dropped out of medical school to live the good life. He gets in a boating accident that requires the use of Dr. Phillips' heart resuscitator, and wouldn't you know, Phillips then suffers a fatal heart attack, leaving Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman) a widow. Helen hates Bob for obvious reasons, and he tries to make things up with money, which doesn't work, and his pushy attempts cause a car accident that leaves Helen blind. Helen, not recognizing Bob's voice, falls in love with him as he offers to send her away to Europe to see if an operation can restore her sight. When that doesn't work, Bob decides to become a doctor himself and perhaps he'll be able to do the operation. Yeah, it's nonsense, and amazingly it had already been put to film in the 1930s, so somebody decided to do it again.