If you want to see some good movies, you’re in luck! It’s time for another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of July 5-11, 2021. I didn’t mention TCM’s Star of the Month for July last week; that’s Elvis Presley, whose movies will be on TCM on Thursdays in prime time. Interestingly enough, I came up with enough other good movies both last week and this that I didn’t need to mention any of the Elvis movies. We even have a recent movie; if by recent you mean from the current century. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
If you want to escape the heat waves that have been affecting parts of North America over the past few weeks, perhaps you might like a snowbound movie like Petticoat Fever, airing on TCM at Monday. Robert Montgomery plays Dascom Dinsmore, who's been working as a wireless operator in the middle of nowhere in Labrador. Being isolated, he hasn't had much face-to-face contact with civilized folk. But then a plane develops mechanical problems and is forced to land near the station. It's carrying a high-class couple, businessman Sir James Felton (Reginald Owen) and his fiancée Irene (Myrna Loy). Dascom puts them up until another plane can come, and as you can guess, Dascom falls for Irene since she's the first woman he's seen in years. He schemes to keep Irene and Sir James there. But Dascom has an ex-fiancée in Clara, figuring she's dumped him over his not having been around in years. In fact, she still holds a flame for him, and picks now as the perfect to to re-enter Dascom's life.
If you want to introduce people to foreign films, you could do a lot worse than to show them Elevator to the Gallows. It’s on this week, at 4:15 PM Tuesday on TCM. Maurice Ronet plays Julien Tavernier, assistant to arms dealer Simon Carala and in love with Carala’s wife Florence (Jeanne Moreau). The two plan to deal with Simon by having Julien kill him to look like suicide. This involves climbing up a story along the outside of the building where Simon works (the whole locked-room mystery thing). But Tavernier leaves the rope outside, and when he goes to retrieve it, he gets stuck in the elevator when the night watchman turns it off. Meanwhile, things go wrong in a bunch of other ways. First, Florence gets stopped by the police without her ID papers on her, which gets her detained. Meanwhile, a young pair of lovers steals Julien’s car and goes on a spree of their own that results in a German couple winding up dead. Julien has an obvious alibi for that, of course, but then he’d be implicated in Simon’s death. The movie also has a notable jazz score by Miles Davis.
If you want a documentary, then perhaps you could try Spellbound, over on HBO Family at 11:06 AM Tuesday. Not to be confused with the Alfred Hitchcock movie, this one tells the story of eight of the contestants in the 1999 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. (The producers were exceedingly lucky to get the winner among the eight they chose.) The first half of the movie is spent profiling each of the contestants more or less at home and winning their local bees. There’s a broad mix of geography, both boys and girls, and social class, from rural Missouri, inner-city Washington DC, and wealthy southern California, among others. There’s also some commentary from past winners about the American ethos of how educating oneself and putting in hard work can help you get ahead in life. And then we get to Washington DC in May and the actual bee which is more dramatic than anything that could be scripted. (Watch the girl who gets the word “lycanthrope” and has a very obvious reaction that she’s not at all certain how to spell it.) In the end, the kids turn out to be much more well-adjusted than the parents.
If you want to see the problems Hollywood during the Production Code era had dealing with sex, a good example of this is seeing how a movie like The Chapman Report tries to do it. You can watch the movie at 5:15 PM Wednesday on TCM. Dr. Chapman (Andrew Duggan) and his assistant Paul Radford (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) are a pair of sexologists, doing research on the sex lives of suburban California women. Among the women who volunteer is Kathleen (Jane Fonda), a widow who was married to an all-American test pilot and who finds herself falling in love with Radford, in violation of all of the test protocols. There are two currently married women. Sarah (Shelley Winters) feels trapped in her marriage, so she’s having an affair with a community theater director. Teresa (Glynis Johns) is in a happy marriage, but she thinks the researchers will find it boring. So when she meets a hunky football player (Ty Hardin), she thinks she’ll have an affair with him, but doesn’t quite get what she’s expecting out of it. And then there’s Naomi (Claire Bloom), the divorcée who seems like she’d hop into bed with everybody, and the Production Code has to punish her for that.
If you want a movie that’s recently been put into the FXM rotation, you could try Squad Car, on FXM at 6:00 AM Wednesday. One of those ultra-B movies that Fox was distributing while the Liz Taylor Cleopatra was hemorrhaging money, this one looks at the murder of a mechanic at a crop-dusting company out in the Phoenix area before it became a megacity. Jay Reinhart (Don Marlowe) is an obvious suspect but has an airtight alibi. Another possible suspect is the dead man’s girlfriend, nightclub dancer Cameo (Vici Raaf). Further investigation by police detective Lt. Beck (Paul Byar) reveals that there’s counterfeit money involved, and that brings the federal authorities into the case. Beck is convinced that Jay and Cameo must have had some sort of involvement in the case, and since this is a short B movie with a limited number of characters, he’s probably right. There’s a reason the actors in this one never became big names.
If you want a romantic comedy, then you can tune in to The Bride Goes Wild, on TCM at 2:15 PM Thursday. Van Johnson plays Uncle Bumps, the author of a popular series of children’s books published by the company run by John McGrath (Hume Cronyn). The company needs a new illustrator for the book, and ultimately selects Martha Terryton (June Allyson), a very prim and proper young women. The only thing is, Uncle Bumps isn’t all he’s made out to be by the publisher; in fact, it’s a pseudonym for Greg Rawlings, a playboy who likes to chase skirts, and immediately starts pursuing Martha. Meanwhile, the company made up a story about Bumps being a widower with a child, so McGrath and Greg have to borrow little Danny (Butch Jenkins) from the orphanage, who turns out to be quite the hell-raiser. More romantic complications ensue as each of them has a partner from the past: Greg has Tillie (Arlene Dahl) and Martha has Bruce (Richard Derr).
If you want a movie with religious themes, then this week brings a showing of The Chosen, at11:17 PM Thursday on Cinemax. In Brooklyn in 1944, two Jewish teens meet over a softball game. Reuven Malter (Barry Miller) is the son of a somewhat secular college teacher, Professor Malter (Maximilian Schell), who is also a committed Zionist, having lost his wife to the Nazis in the early days of the Hitler regime and hoping to resettle in a Jewish state in the Palestine. Danny Saunders (Robby Benson) is the son of a rebbe (Rod Steiger), a Hasidic Jew who comes from a long line of rabbis and community leaders. The two young men become friends despite their very different backgrounds. Danny has a secret, however, which is that he really doesn’t want to become a rebbe in the family tradition, having been brought up all his life to study the Torah and follow in his father’s footsteps. Rebbe Saunders is also vehemently opposed to the idea of the Jewish state, since in his view it would be much too secular. It causes all sorts of heartache for both teens and their fathers.
If you want a nice, family-friendly movie, then you probably don’t want to show the kiddies Get Carter, which will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Friday. Michael Caine plays Jack Carter, who’s been living in London for the past several years as an enforcer for some gangsters. He’s thinking of getting out of the game and escaping with boss’ girlfriend Anna (Britt Ekland), but he’s heard that his older brother died up north in the Newcastle area in a drunk-driving accident and wants to attend his brother’s funeral. What he finds when he gets up to Newcastle is that not everything is as it seems. The “help” he gets from his brother’s girlfriend and daughter doesn’t seem to be much, and as he begins to poke his nose around and ask questions of local gangsters like Kinnear (John Osborne), he discovers that there’s a lot more going on up here than he bargained for, and that the folks up here really don’t want Carter around. Why can’t he just go away, and if he won’t, maybe they’ll do so by force. It’s fairly brutal by the standards of the early 70s, and gained a cult following in the ensuing decades.
If you want to watch the early 1950s sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World, you’re out of luck. But it was remade in the 1980s as The Thing, and that remake will be on StarzEncore at 1:05 AM Saturday. Kurt Russell stars as MacReady, the helicopter pilot at a US research station in Antarctica. A helicopter from a nearby Norwegian station comes over trying to kill one of the Norwegian huskies, and that eventually leads the Americans to fly over to the Norwegian station to find out what’s going on there. They find all the Norwegians dead, and some strange-looking organism that’s apparently also dead. They make the stupid mistake of bringing the organism back with them. An autopsy led by Dr. Blair (Wilford Brimley) eventually reveals that this organism is actually some sort of alien life form that has the power to change shape and assume the form of whatever earth life it’s inhabiting – and that it’s got an appetite for destruction, such that nobody can tell whether the person they meet is actually that person of the alien taking on its form.
If you want another movie with a teen at the center, then you might want to try Running on Empty, on TCM at 5:45 PM Sunday. River Phoenix plays Danny Pope, living down south with his parents Arthur and Annie (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti) and kid brother. One day on coming home, he sees a couple of black sedans that are clearly federal agents, which he knows means big danger. It turns out that when Danny was an infant, his parents were anti-war radicals. One of their attempts to stop some military research accidentally killed a night watchmen, and the feds have wanted them ever since. Danny, meanwhile, has become quite gifted on the piano, but his being forced to move from city to city and never really getting a good formal music education is going to come back to haunt the entire family when he’s up for a music scholarship. If he accepts it, he’ll have to be separated from his parents forever, or at least until they’re caught by the authorities. Danny also falls in love with Lorna (Martha Plimpton), daughter of the music teacher at his new school.