Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of July 3-9, 2017. It's the first full week of a new month, so we're going to get a new Star of the Month on TCM, as well as a new TCM Spotlight. There's also a holiday on July 4, and some movies appropriate for the theme. I've used my good taste to select a series of movies I know you'll all like. And, as always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM will be showing a bunch of movies about immigration on Monday in prime time. I'm not certain if I've recommended The Emigrants before; it will be airing at 3:45 AM Tuesday. The scene is Småland, a region in southern Sweden, in the 1850s. It's a tough life for peasant farmers like Karl-Oskar (Max von Sydow) and his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann), who have faced years of poor harvests, including one that left one of their sons dead. Eventually, Karl-Oskar decides that he's not going to be able to make a living in Sweden and, having heard that America is apparently a rich place, he wants to go there to farm. What he doesn't realize is that he's far from the only person who's thought about leaving. Among them are his brother Robert, who doesn't own any land of his own and is forced to labor for other farmers. There's also Kristina's uncle, who has his own views on religion that don't quite agree with the official Lutheran teachings of Sweden. So they all set off on the difficult sea passage to America, and find out that America isn't quite as rich for newcomers as they might have hoped.
It's been a while since I've recommended The Great Train Robbery, but it's going to be on StarzEncore Classics at 10:14 AM Tuesday. Sean Connery plays Pierce, a gentleman in 1850s England who gets an audacious idea. With the Crimean War going on, the British soldiers need to get paid, and they get paid in gold, which is shipped from a bank in London to the port for sea transport to the soldiers. Pierce decides it would be possible to steal the gold from the moving train, something which had never been done before! First, he needs to get the four keys to the strongboxes holding the gold, which requires four separate robberies since they're kept separate. He does this in part with help from his girlfriend Miriam (Lesley-Anne Down), and his other accomplice Agar (Donald Sutherland), who is really in on the heist to crack the safe on board the moving train. Getting the keys moves at a leisurely pace, with the heist on the rails going rather more energetically, but both halves work to make a highly entertaining movie and one that's good to look at.
For something completely different, there's Son of Robin Hood, over on Fox Retro at 7:15 AM Monday and 4:35 AM Tuesday. In this low-budget look at the Robin Hood story, Robin has died some time back and the Merry Men are relatively peaceful in Sherwood Forest, at least until a usurper, the Duke Des Roches (David Farrar) wants to take over the English throne from the rightful heir, the Earl of Chester (Marius Goring). The Merry Men decide to put up resistance to free the Earl and need a leader. They hear Robin and Marian had a son who is now living in Spain, but when they bring the son Deering back from Spain it turns out that Derring is actually a daughter. Thankfully, it turns out that the Earl of Chester also has a brother James (David Hedison) and Jamie presumably wants his rightful place in the order of succession, and he shows up back from the Crusades just in time to help the Merry Men in their quest to free the Earl. Needless to say, this one isn't quite as good as the Errol Flynn movie.
The TCM spotlight in July will be a look at the 50 year career of Alfred Hitchcock, every Wednesday and Friday in prime time. Of course, you all know the many great movies that he directed in Hollywood, but this first Wednesday includes several of Hitchcock's silent movies, including The Farmer's Wife at 11:45 PM. This is utterly different from what we're all used to when we think of Hitchcock. Farmer Sweetland (Jameson Thomas) is a widower, but with a female housekeeper in Minta (Lillian Hall-Davis). Sweetland decides that it's time to remarry to have a wife help run the farm, and he proceeds to investigate all of the eligible women in the area. Well, except for one, Minta, and the audience just knows that Minta would be exactly right for Sweetland. Still the good farmer pursues each of the local women only to find that they aren't quite what he had hoped for. Will he ever learn that he's got the right woman for him right next to him already? Although Hitchcock would later do the screwball comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith as a favor to Carole Lombard, light comedy isn't what we expect from Hitchcock, even though he shows himself to be adept at it.
As for the movies on Friday, most of them are better known, with the exception of Number 17 which kicks off Friday night at 8:00 PM. A man shows up at an unoccupied house in London, only to find a hobo squatting, and then a dead body. But that's not all that's going on. A woman comes in through the roof, and then it turns out that the dead body is not dead at all. And these aren't the only people in the house. There's another woman claiming to be a deaf-mute who turns out to be neither, and a whole bunch of guys who are the reason everybody's here, as they're involved in a jewel heist. The bad guys' ultimate plan is to get to Dover and take the boat-train across the Channel to safety, and the eventual good guys have to chase it in a bus to the ultimate climax. It's all an interesting idea, but unfortunately I've only seen poor prints of the movie that make the dialog hard to follow and thus also make the convoluted plot even harder to follow. Still, it's worth a watch.
Ward Bond played a lot of bad guys in westerns. A character who is rather different is the one he plays in Pillars of the Sky, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 10:29AM Wednesday. It's the late 1860s, just after the end of the Civil War, and the Army is forcibly resettling the Indians onto reservations. Bond plays Dr. Holden, a Christian missionary who believes it's his calling to bring Christianity and civilization to the Indians. The Army, for their part, doesn't care, and is trying to build a road on the reservation in blatant violation of the treaty. Naturally, the Indians are pissed, so one of the chiefs, Kamiakin (Michael Ansara) decides he's going to rebel against the Army. Meanwhile, you've got a hard-ass commander in Col. Stedlow (Willis Bouchey), and a couple of subordinates with problems of their own. Captain Gaxton (Keith Andes) is married to Calla (Dorothy Malone) and has his wife with him, while Sgt. Bell (Jeff Chandler) used to be engaged to Calla.
Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month, that being Ronald Colman. His career spanned the silent era to the 1950s, and his movies will be running on Thursdays in prime time on TCM. This first Thursday in July brings several of Colman's silent movies, including The Winning of Barbara Worth at 10:30 PM Thursday. Barbara (Vilma Bánky) is a foundling rescued from the desert by Mr. Worth (Charles Lane), who becomes his adopted daughter. Cut to when she's an adult, and Mr. Worth wants to irrigate the desert. So he hires engineer Willard Holmes (Ronald Colman) to head up the project, and when he comes out to the desert, he meets Barbara and immediately falls in love with her. However, she already has a beau in cowboy Abe (a young Gary Cooper). Making matters worse for Holmes is the fact that his partner Greenfield has been embezzling money that should have been spent on reinforcing the dam providing the irrigation water, and then trying to get the townsfolk to blame Holmes for any problems with the dam!
If you think of Khaaaaan! and Fantasy Island when you think of Ricardo Montalbán, then you'll want to see Border Incident at 9:30 AM Friday on TCM. This one is set in southern California in the late 1940s, while the Bracero Program, a legal system for employing temporary Mexican labor in the agricultural sector, is going on. They didn't set the quotas high enough, so other people bring in illegal immigrant workers, and the authorities on both sides of the border want to stop that as well as people robbing the legal braceros. George Murphy plays Jack, an American agent who goes undercover, while Montalbán plays Pablo, a Mexican agent who for obvious reasons is able to get work as an immigrant farm laborer. They investigate, specifically the people smugglers Parkson (Howard Da Silva) and Amboy (Charles McGraw). The result is a riveting movie that's suspenseful and at times quite brutal, and shows that Montalbán could actually be a fine actor given the right material.
Earlier in the day Friday, there's Grumpy Old Men, at 6:30 AM on HBO Signature. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are John Gustafson and Max Goldman respectively, a pair of widower neighbors in a small town in northern Minnesota who have had a rivalry of sorts going on for decades, although you feel that deep down inside, they really understand each other. However, the rivalry is about to get worse. Moving into the house across the street from them is widow Ariel (Ann-Margret) and, needless to say, both men are attracted to her. Of course, the guys have other problems, specifically Gustafson, who had a problem on a tax return from a mistake when his wife was still alive. The IRS, in the form of agent Buck Henry, wants its pound of flesh, and they're willing to take Gustafson's house to get it. The cast includes a bunch of great actors, notably Burgess Meredith as John's dirty-old-man father, Ossie Davis in a small role as a store owner, and Darryl Hannah as John's daughter.
Another movie I haven't mentioned in ages is David and Lisa, which TCM will be showing at 9:45 PM Sunday. Keir Dullea plays David, a young man who has some serious problems. He's arrogant, but worse, he's an OCD neat freak who in addition to needing everything to be immaculate, has a severe fear of being touched. So for this his mother is putting him in a facility for mentally disturbed teens. It's there that he meets Lisa (Janet Margolin). Lisa's problems are something like schizophrenia in that she has a split personality as Lisa and Muriel. But she also has difficulty communicating with the world around her, speaking backward and in cryptic rhymes. The two troubled teens meet, and begin to form a bond that slowly begins to ameliorate each other's mental anguish, although dealing with the outside world is still difficult for them. Howard Da Silva plays the psychologist at the facility who has the difficult task of trying to help the teens.