Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of July 30-August 5, 2018. We're at the beginning of August, which means the annual Summer Under the Stars on TCM, where each day brings the movies of a different star. (So no Star of the Month this or the next several weeks.) There are some good stars this week already and more to come. You'll also be able to catch some interesting movies on the other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is spending Monday morning and afternoon with producer Val Lewton, including a documentary TCM premiered several years back. The morning kicks off with the odd film Mademoiselle Fifi at 6:00 AM. Simone Simon, from Lewton's earlier Cat People, is in a costume drama as laundress Elisabeth. She's returning to her home town after the Prussians have attacked France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In addition to the snobby French aristrocratic types in her coach, there's a Prussian officer Lt. von Eyrick nicknamed Fifi (Kurt Kreuger). When the coach stops in town, von Eyrick insists on holding it up and will only let it go on if Elisabeth surrenders to him. Elisabeth has no desire to do this, but the other passengers aren't going to stand up for her, because they don't want to stand up to the victorious Prussians for fear of what he could do to them. Considering this was released in 1944, there are some obvious parallels. Based on two Guy de Maupassant stories.
Immediately after Mademoiselle Fifi you can switch over to StarzEncore Westerns and watch The Canadians, at 7:10 AM Monday. After the Sioux defeated Custer at Little Big Horn, they fled north into what is now Saskatchewan in Canada, which unsurprisingly causes problems for the Canadians. Robert Ryan plays RCMP officer Gannon, who is sent to negotiate with Sioux chief Four Horns (Michael Pate) on the conditions under which the Sioux will be allowed to stay in Canada, one of which is no massacres, please. Enter into all of this a bunch of American ranchers, led by Frank Boone (John Dehner). Frank and his fellow ranchers aren't particularly jolly when you consider that a bunch of their horses have gone missing and presumed stolen by the Sioux. So Boone leads a raid on the Sioux, killing a bunch of them and taking back a white woman (opera singer Teresa Stratas who wasn't much of a movie actress) who was held by the Sioux for five years. Standard complications ensue.
I love recommending pre-Codes, and one of the more interesting ones is She Had to Say Yes, which will be on TCM at 8:45 AM Tuesday. Loretta Young plays Flo, a member of the steno pool at a fashion company. Traditionally, when the out-of-town buyers com in for a visit, they've been "entertained" by the models, w9th the expectation that the night will end with sex. But the buyers want something more, so Flo's fiancé Tommy (Regis Toomey) suggest using the steno girls. Well other than Flo. But Tommy has a girl on the side which might tick Flo off when she finds out. Meanwhile, buyer Danny (Lyle Talbot) sees Flo and decides it's love at first sight, not that she feels that way. But going out with Danny could mean a big bonus for her and Tommy, so she does it, only for Danny to get much more serious than anybody else would want.
A movie that will be back on FXM Retro after a long absence is A Bell For Adano, which you can catch at 7:50 AM Tuesday and 7:15 AM Wednesday. John Hodiak plays US Army Major Joppolo, leading a bunch of soldiers through Italy, which of course was defeated before Nazi Germany. So there were a lot of places that needed military government to deal with the matters of day-to-day administration of a defeated country. Maj. Joppolo has been given the task of looking after the small fishing village of Adano. Among the locals is Tina (Gene Tierney), here a bleach blonde whose boyfriend went off to fight in the war but whom she hasn't heard from in a while so she wants to find out from the Major what happened to him. She'll wind up finding out from a returned POW played by Richard Conte. Meanwhile the town's citizens always used the church bell to time their daily lives, but that was destroyed in the war, so they really need a new one. Elsewhere in the cast are William Bendix as an army sergeant and Harry Morgan as a captain.
Wednesday is August 1, which means the return of Summer Under the Stars on TCM. Each day in August, there will be 24 hours of movies featuring a different star. First up is Frank Sinatra, whose day includes Some Came Running, at 10:15 PM. Sinatra plays Dave Hirsh, a writer who served in World War II who, a few years after the war, decides he's finally going to return to his home town in Indiana. He's not sure why, since he doesn't get along with his brother Frank (Arthur Kennedy). But he meets Gwen (Martha Hyde) a teacher and fan of his writing, and he could start a relationship with her if he gets his life in order. Following Dave from Chicago is Funny (Shirley MacLaine), who's escaping her past and could fall in love with Dave too. Dave also meets gambler Bama (Dean Martin), who isn't a particularly good influence on Dave. And then Ginny's past comes to Indiana to find her....
Thursday's star on TCM is Myrna Loy. One of her movies that doesn't show up all that often is Too Hot to Handle, which TCM is showing at 1:00 PM Thursday. Loy plays aviatrix Alma Harding, back in the days when it was actually a big deal to be an aviatrix. Her brother has gone missing on an expedition in the Amazon, so she's taking whatever money she can to raise the money for a whole search party to go down to the Amazon and find the brother. One job involves flying serum in to a Chinese village that's threatened by the disease, and by the invading Japanese. What she doesn't know is that this is all a fake, having been hired by Bill (Walter Pidgeon) who's trying to get a story. He's making up stories in response to the made-up stories from rival newsreel photographer Chris (Clark Gable). Chris' actions inadvertently force Alma to crash land, and wouldn't know know it, but Chris and Alma fall in love, although there are going to be the usual complications before the last reel. 80 years on and news outlets are still churning out fake sh*t.
For those of you who prefer more recent movies, I've got one this week that isn't even a quarter-century old: Twelve Monkeys, at 1:45 AM Thursday on Starz Cinema (not to be confused with plain old Starz). A strange virus was released on Earth in the 1990s, killing 99% of the humans and forcing the remainder to live underground in the indeterminate future. Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a prisoner who gets sent first to try to recover some dead animals from the surface in the hopes that they'll contain the virus so the scientists can research it, and then gets sent back in time to just before the virus was released in order to try to get an unmutated version of it. But he gets sent to the wrong time and nobody believes his apocalyptic rants, so he gets put in an insane asylum with fellow paitent Goines (Brad Pitt), whose father is a virologist, and treated by Dr. Railly (Madeleine Stowe). Can Cole get anybody to believe him? And does Cole even want to leave the 1990s and go back to his own time?
On Friday, TCM's Star is Lionel Atwill, who is probably best remembered for the horror pictures he made in the 1930s. One of his non-horror roles is in the B movie Absolute Quiet, which will be on at 12:30 AM Saturday (that's still late Friday evening LFT and the other more westerly time zones). Atwill plays businessman Axton, who suffers a heart attack and has to go west to his ranch to take a rest cure. However, the cure isn't going to be particularly restful considering that a bunch of people crash the place. Literally, as a plane is forced to crash land. There's Axton's mistress Zelda (Ann Loring), who's in love with a fading Hollywood star Gregory (Louis Hayward). There's also Governor Pruden (Raymond Walburn), with whom Axton has been at odds for years. Finally, there's a pair of criminals on the lam, Jack and Judy, who would really like to go back to their old life in vaudeville. Perhaps Axton can help things work out for everybody and find some new life in that old body of his.
I'm happy to have another chance to recommend The Poseidon Adventure, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 1:05 PM Saturday. Various people are taking a Mediterranean cruise on the Poseidon over New Year's. Among the passengers are cop Ernest Borgnine and wife Stella Stevens; bachelor businessman Red Buttons; elderly couple Jack Albertson and Shelley Winters; and a teenage girl and her bratty kid brother. Unfortunately, at the stroke of midnight on New Year's, a rogue wave hits the Poseidon and capsizes it. Unorthodox ship's chaplain Gene Hackman wants passengers to go turn the hull since, with the ship upside down that's the part of the ship closest to the surface, but only the few aforementioned passengers join him. It's not going to be an easy journey, of course, and even then who knows if the rescuers will find them. Leslie Nielsen has a small role as the doomed ship's captain. The movie also won an Oscar for the song "The Morning After".
Clint Eastwood is the Summer Under the Stars nominee on Saturday. One of his movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Coogan's Bluff, which you can catch at 10:15 PM Saturday. Eastwood plays Coogan, who is an Arizonan, although this movie isn't a western. Instead, Coogan is a deputy sheriff out in modern-day (well, 1968 when the movie was released) Arizona who doesn't get along with his boss McCrea (Tom Tully). So McCrea gives him the thankless job of going to New York City to pick up the criminal Ringerman (Don Stroud) who is going to be extradited to Arizona. When Coogan gets to New York he finds our from Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb) that Ringerman is still in the psychiatric hospital and it's going to be a few days before Ringerman gets released. Coogan tries to expedite matters, but this results in Ringerman being able to make an escape, so Coogan stays on in New York to try to catch Ringerman himself and set matters right.