Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of July 29-August 4, 2019. It's the start of a new month, and August as usual means Summer Under the Stars on TCM. But before that we get one more night of Glenn Ford movies, the other TCM spotlights, and a lot of interesting stuff on other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
On Monday in prime time we get one more night of Glenn Ford movies as part of his turn as TCM's Star of the Month. I'm extremely happy to see that among the movies included is the excellent Experiment in Terror, at 8:00 PM. Lee Remick plays Kelly Sherwood, a bank teller in San Francisco living with her adolescent sister Toby (Stefanie Powers). One evening as she's getting out of her car after coming home from work, she's accosted by a shadowy man, Red Lynch (Ross Martin). He tells her that he knows she's a teller, and that if she doesn't rob a whole bunch of money from her bank for him, he's going to kidnap Toby. Of course Kelly doesn't know who this man is or get a good look at him, although she can recognize his asthmatic wheeze. So she goes to FBI agent Ripley (Glenn Ford), quite reluctantly because of the threat to her sister. Ripley begins to investigate and figure out who's threatening Kelly, leading up to the finale, which is wonderfully filmed at the old Candlestick Park during a Giants/Dodgers game, with Vin Scully's voice being heard doing the play-by-play.
StarzEncore Westerns likes to run a bunch of 50s B westerns. The one that I'll mention this week is Robbers' Roost, which will be on at 3:33 AM Monday. Bruce Bennett plays Bull Herrick, a rancher running a ranch with sister Helen. Bull needs to get a bunch of cattle to market, but he's now crippled and in no condition to do it himself. So he gets the brilliant idea to hire two groups of outlaws to take the cattle to market, on the grounds that since the two groups hate each other so much, they'll be too busy worrying about what the others will do to them to actually try to rustle any of the cattle. The groups are led by Hays (Richard Boone) and Heesman (Peter Graves). Into all of this comes Tex (George Montgomery). He claims to be an outlaw himself, joining Hays' gang, but is really a man looking for the guys who raped his wife, and thinks he'll find it on the cattle drive. Making things even more complicated is the fact that all of the guys fall for Helen.
Two of the TCM spotlights for July come together this week, thanks to the TCM premiere of a movie you all know. On Tuesday nights, TCM has been running a salute to science fiction movies, while last Wednesday and this one, there's a tribute to 20th Century Fox. The movie that the two themes have in common is Star Wars, which, although we associate it with Lucasfilm, was distributed by Fox (which is of course now part of the Disney conglomerate). Star Wars (well, technically, Episode IV: A New Hope) is going to be on TCM twice in prime time, at 10:30 PM Tuesday and again at 8:00 PM Wednesday.
I've actually got two movies from the 90s this week, and neither of them is from the 1890s. The first of them is Ladybugs, which will be on The Movie Channel at 9:05 AM Tuesday (and three hours later if you only get the west coast feed). Rodney Dangerfield plays Chester Lee, a man who's trying to get ahead at work. In his private life, he's got a new fiancée Bess (Ilene Graff; remember her from Mr. Belvedere?) who's a single mom with a teenage son Matthew (Jonathan Brandis) who doesn't respect his new stepdad-to-be at all. The big company Chester works for needs a coach for the all-girls' soccer team needs a new coach, and in part to please his bosses and in part to show soccer-loving Matthew they have something in common, Chester agrees to coach the team. The only problems are that Chester knows next to nothing about soccer, and that the team is terrible. That is, until Chester gets the insane idea of having Matthew dress up as a girl and play "Martha", who will become the new star of the team, and get a lot closer to the girls. In addition to Graff, another 80s TV star in this one is Jackée (last name Harry; remember her from 227?) as Chester's assistant.
A World War II movie that I don't think I've recommended before is China Sky, which you can see on TCM at 12:30 PM Wednesday. Randolph Scott plays Dr. Dr. Thompson, a missionary doctor at a clinic in a village in western China when the war with Japan was still raging. He works there with fellow missionary Dr. Durand (Ruth Warrick). Thompson is able to get to America to do some fundraising, and returns with new equipment as well as a wife Louise (Ellen Drew). The presence of a romantic interest brings tension between the two women, because Dr. Durand liked Dr. Thompson in more than just a professional way, while Louise is surprisingly unready for all that being dropped into the edge of a war zone entails. That war comes to the village, in the form of Chinese guerrilla Chen Ta (Anthony Quinn), who brings a Japanese commander Yasuda (Richard Loo) in to be healed so that Yasuda can be tried for war crimes. Yasuda spots all the tension going on, and tries to set everybody against each other to all him a chance at escape.
Thursday is August 1, which means the start of another edition of Summer Under the Stars on TCM. Each day in August, TCM is showing 24 hours of movies all having one particular star in them, a different star each day. On this first day of August, the star in question is Henry Fonda, and we'll start off with Fonda in The Mad Miss Manton at 7:45 AM Thursday on TCM. Fonda obviously doesn't play Miss Manton; that honor goes to Barbara Stanwyck. Melsa Manton is a New York socialite who with a bunch of her socialite friends engages in the merriment of mild pranks. At least, until Melsa discovers a dead body in the empty apartment of some wealthy friends. However, when the police in the form of Lt. Brent (Sam Leven) show up, the body has gone missing! Fonda plays Peter Ames, a newspaper editor who decries Manton's pranks. Anyhow, with everybody thinking this is another prank, Manton goes into detective mode to prove there really was a murder, and to solve the murder, roping Ames into the case. Of course, Manton and Ames fall in love along the way.
We've got more Henry Fonda coming up, but if you want to take a break from the Fonda films on Thursday, you could do far worse than to watch My Cousin Vinny, at 2:35 PM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Bill (Ralph Macchio) and Stan (Mitchell Whitfield) are two yutes from New York driving to college through Alabama. They get arrested after leaving a convenience store, because the store was robbed and the proprietor shot dead. Facing murder charges and not having the money for a lawyer, they'd be at the mercy of the public defender. Except that Bill remembers he has a cousin back in New York named Vinny (Joe Pesci) who's a lawyer; perhaps he could come down and defend them. Vinny comes down with his long-suffering girlfriend Mona Lisa (Marisa Tomei in her Oscar-winning role). But there's a catch: Vinny isn't admitted to the Alabama bar, and he hasn't even passed the bar exam back in New York. And the jury isn't particularly likely to be sympathetic to a bunch of northerners. Fred Gwynne plays the judge who has to deal with all this.
A second movie in Fonda's day in Summer Under the Stars is The Grapes of Wrath, airing at 2:00 AM Friday on TCM. Based on the novel by John Steinbeck, Fonda plays Tom Joad, an Oklahoman who gets out of prison after several years, right in the middle of the Dust Bowl. Tom arrives home to find preachers like Casy (John Carradine) having lost their faith, while all sorts of farms are foreclosed, be it friends like Muley (John Qualen) or even the Joads' farm themselves. So the Joads load up a rickety old truck and decide like a lot of Okies to head out to California where they've heard that there's a more promising life available. Grandma and Grandpa Joad both die on the migration west, and eventually the Joads make it to California. But they find out that life isn't as good as they'd been led to believe, as there are a lot more people than jobs. Tom reacts badly to the employers' bad treatment, leading to his being wanted by the law and the family having to move on and on.
Friday's star on TCM is Ruth Hussey, who is probably best known for her supporting role in The Philadelphia Story as the tabloid photographer who accompanies James Stewart to Katharine Hepburn's society wedding. That movie is going to be on at 8:00 PM Friday. It's followed at 10:00 PM by another really good Hussey movie, The Uninvited. This one stars Hussey and Ray Milland as a brother and sister who come into possession of a house on the English coast that's supposedly haunted.
According to a search of the site, it's been quite a long time since I recommended The Raid. It's back on FXM Retro this week, airing at 4:35 AM Saturday. Based on a true story of the Confederate raid on St. Albans, VT in 1864, the movie stars Major Benton, the commander of a group of Confederate POWs who leads them on an escape north to Canada, from where they plan to rob the banks in the northern Vermont town of St. Albans for the money, and then burn as much of the town as possible. Benton takes a small handful of them into town where they worm their way into becoming respected visitors, Benton in particular becoming friendly with his landlady, Katy Bishop (Anne Bancroft), a widower thanks to the war with an adolescent son (Tommy Rettig). Confederate Lt. Keating (Lee Marvin) is a hothead and threatens to bollix the whole operation. Peter Graves plays another confederate, while Richard Boone plays a disabled Union soldier who finally gets his chance to become a hero. In real life, the raiders escaped to Canada but the Canadian/British (Canada didn't officially become a dominion until 1867) returned the money, not extraditing the soldiers because Britain was officially a neutral.
Saturday on TCM is given over to the films of Marlon Brando. His acting style isn't my favorite, but you certainly can't go wrong with On the Waterfront, which will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Saturday. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a failed boxer now working on the docks. His brother Charley (Rod Steiger) is the lawyer for the union, a corrupt organization run by a man with Mob ties, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). When one of the workers rats to the government attorneys investigating, Charley gets Terry to lure the man to the roof, where a couple of thugs push the guy off to his death. The dead guy's sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) is pissed, and when Terry sees her, he immediately develops an animal attraction to her. The parish priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) tries to organize the people to stand up to the corrupt union, but they have the power to pick who works, and as we've seen they're also perfectly willing to use violence to intimidate people. Terry with his connections is the only person the other workers respect, but can he take the lead and stand up to Johnny?
Finally, on Sunday we're getting 24 hours of Shirley Temple movies on TCM. A really fun one is The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, at 6:00 PM Sunday. Shirley Temple plays Susan Turner, a high school student who has such an infatuation with the artist Dick Nugent (Cary Grant) that she even sneaks into his apartment. Susan's much older sister Margaret (Myrna Loy), the local judge, is none too happy with her sister and wants to stop her from seeing Dick. So she comes up with the brilliant idea that if she can make her sister spend more time with the older man that she'll grow out of the infatuation. And the judge can threaten Dick with jail time since, after all, he had an underage girl in his apartment. Dick is none too happy with the arrangement, but as he sees more of Susan, he finds himself falling in love with Margaret, despite her already having a man pursuing her in the form of district attorney Tommy (Rudy Vallee). Sidney Sheldon won an Oscar for his screenplay and would go on to create I Dream of Jeannie and write trashy novels like Rage of Angels.