Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of July 6-12, 2020. With politicians determined to keep us all under house arrest because they're drunk on the power they arrogated unto themselves courtesy of the coronavirus, there's still a lot of time to watch interesting movies. There's a new Star of the Month on TCM, and a lot of worthwhile stuff on other movie channels too. There are even movies as recent as the 1980s! As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We're in the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, that star is Tony Curtis, and his movies will be airing on TCM every Monday in July. Curtis received an Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones, which is running at 10:00 PM Monday. Curtis plays Joker, a prison who is being transported with a bunch of others, with the prisoners being handcuffed in pairs to make escape more difficult. The truck they're in has an accident, allowing Joker to escape together with the man he's cuffed to, Noah (Sidney Poitier). The problem is that Joker is a racist, this being the 1950s south, and Noah is rather obviously black. Of course, Noah, having dealt with racism, doesn't exactly like white people himself. But the two have to work together to try to escape. Chasing them, meanwhile, is the sheriff, Max Muller (Theodore Bikel). The two convicts are able to get to a farm where they get the cuffs cut which offers the possibility of escape, but what if only one of them can escape?
A movie that's showing up again in the FXM rotation is Francis of Assisi, which you can see at 10:55 AM Tuesday. Bradford Dillman plays Francis, who grew up at the end of the 12th century in Assisi, son of a wealthy merchant (Eduard Franz). But Francis clashes with his father's plans for his life, and after a crisis of faith, decides to become a monk. His crisis deepens to the point that he tries to found his own order which takes a vow of poverty, but he has all sorts of struggles with the Pope (Finlay Currie) in trying to get the order recognized. Along the way, Francis has a woman Clare (Dolores Hart) who loves him and is returned in exchange by Count Paolo (Stuart Whitman). Moved by Francis' piety, Clare decides to take the vows herself and become a nun, starting an order of her own. Francis is known today as the patron saint of animals, so we get some ridiculous scenes positing why, notably one with some cheetahs while Francis is in the Middle East searching for the sultan. The movie is certainly reverential, but still competently made.
On Tuesday night, TCM is running a night of movies directed by Sam Fuller, a maverick whose films are always interesting. That includes one of Vincent Price's most atypical performances, in The Baron of Arizona, at 4:45 AM Wednesday. This one is based on a true story, with Price playing James Reavis. After the US won what is now Arizona from Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo specified that land claims from before the war would still be valid. Reavis learns this, and hatches an elaborate scheme to claim that what is now the entire state of Arizona was deeded to one man – and that he's married to one of the descendants of that nobleman. Ellen Drew plays the wife, a woman whom Reavis found as an orphan and raised as a phony noblewoman. Also Reavis engages in a variety of disguises, such as pretending to be a monk, to get to the places where the old archives are kept so that he can change them and make the claim look legitimate. Despite the changes from the true story, this is still a fascinating movie.
Max von Sydow died in March at the age of 90. TCM is honoring him this week by running several of his films in prime time on Thursday, including one of his best, The Seventh Seal, at 10:00 PM. Von Sydow plays Antonius Block, a Swedish knight who went off to fight in the crusades and is now returning home along with his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand). They return to a country where the Black Death has hit and everybody is powerless to do a damn thing about it. As with Francis above, this causes Antonius to have a loss of faith, and when Death (Bengt Ekerot) comes along, Antonius challenges Death to a game of chess, taking place in fits and starts since Death is busy with the plague, and Antonius is busy seeing all the misery that's befallen his homeland, with the only respite being a couple of actors he meets. Antonius never saw War Games (on Monday at 9:22 AM on StarzEncore Family), so he didn't realize that the only winning move is not to play. A bit of trivia: the closing shot was serendipity. Director Ingmar Bergman saw an interesting cloud formation and wanted to film something against it, but the actors had finished shooting for the day, so he used crew and some tourists he paid to play in that scene.
Elsewhere on Thursday, there's the appropriately titled The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday, at 10:45 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. Lee Marvin stars in the comic western as Sam Longwood, a miner turned scout who one day runs into his old friend Jack Colby (Robert Culp). Sam had had a girlfriend Nancy Sue (Elizabeth Ashley), but Jack ran off with her, as well as a bunch of money from when Sam and Jack were mining together. Sam sees a chance for revenge, so he gets a couple of fellow miners from those days, Billy (Strother Martin) and Joe Knox (Oliver Reed) about Jack's present whereabouts. The three, along with a prostitute named Thursday (Kay Lenz), come up with a plot to kidnap Nancy Sue and ask Jack for a large ransom, in part to pay back for all the trouble that Jack caused them all those years ago. Nancy Sue, however, hasn't aged all that well, much to Sam's chagrin….
The panic mongers are doing everything they can to get the college football season shut down, so if that should happen, why not watch a college football movie instead. This week, there's the creaky So This is College, at 6:00 AM Friday on TCM. Robert Montgomery plays Biff, one of the stars of the USC football team, going into his senior year. He's rooming with his best friend and fellow star teammate Eddie (Elliott Nugent), and the two vow they're going to make this season all about football. You just know that's not going to happen, when co-ed Babs (Sally Starr) comes into the picture. Both men fall in love with Babs, and the rivalry may scuttle both their friendship and the team's season. They desperately need to make up before the Big Game that's the climax of all of these movies. Comic actress Polly Moran plays the team's cook, suffering abuse at the team dinners; Joel McCrea has a bit part, and future three-time Oscar nominated director Sam Wood plays one of the radio announcers at the big game.
It's been a while since I've recommended Stripes. It's going to be on again this week, at 8:10 AM Saturday on Showtime. Bill Murray plays John, a down-on-his-luck man who's lost both his job and his girlfriend. He's got a best friend Russell (Harold Ramis) whose life is in a similar mess, and John comes up with the brilliant idea that perhaps they should get their lives in order by joining the army, something the probably learned from Private Benjamin (not on any time soon as far as I can tell). The two are rather incompetent, driving drill sergeant Hulka (Warren Oates) nuts, but they're still better than everybody else in the platoon, so they're more or less the default leaders. After somehow making it through basic, the whole platoon gets sent to Italy as part of a training mission for a new type of assault vehicle. Along the way John and Russell had gotten into relationships with a couple of female MPs who were stationed in West Germany, so John and Russell take off after them, with the rest of the platoon following and getting stuck behind the Iron Curtain.
TCM is running a couple of Yul Brynner movies on Saturday afternoon, including Westworld at 6:00 PM. James Brolin and Richard Benjamin play John and Peter respectively, a couple of rich friends who take their next vacation at a futuristic amusement park that has a whole bunch of robots in various historical periods. The two go to Westworld, an old west-themed park where the highlight is a Gunfighter (Yul Brynner) who challenges the patrons to a duel that he can't win. But something begins to happen with the robots, as they start having malfunctions to the point that some of the patrons even get killed. John and Peter don't realize this as they sleep through the glitches, waking up to find nobody able to help them and a Gunfighter whose shots are now lethal, with the Gunfighter killing Peter in a duel and then setting off after John, who has to try to make an escape against a relentless pursuer. Recently remade as an HBO series.
Another sport that's been in limbo because of the Coronavirus Freakout is hockey, but there are a lot fewer hockey movies than football movies. One of the better hockey movies is Slap Shot, which is on this week at 2:55 AM Sunday on StarzEncore Classics. Paul Newman plays Reggie Dunlop, the aging player-coach on a minor league hockey team in a Pennsylvania mill town. Both the town and the team are failing, with the team's widowed owner planning to suspend the team's operations at the end of the season. Reggie's personal life is a mess too, with him trying to reconcile with his wife Francine (Jennifer Warren). To try to renew interest in the team and possibly get it to keep going or at least have the owner sell to another owner, Reggie and the GM McGrath (Strother Martin) try all sorts of gimmicks, most notably bringing in the thuggish Hanson brothers, whose violent style of play immediately becomes popular with the fans but also brings victories to the team. But what will happen if the owner doesn't want to sell and just fold the team?
Finally, I'll mention Penny Serenade, which is running at 6:15 AM Sunday on TCM. Irene Dunne plays Julie, a wife who is about to be divorced from her husband Roger (Cary Grant). As she's going through some records the couple accumulated during their marriage, she starts to think about the past…. Julie married Roger and the two went to Tokyo when he was assigned there as a newspaper correspondent. She was going to have a baby, but then the Kanto earthquake of 1923 struck, injuring Julie to where she lost the baby and became unable to get pregnant again. So the couple tries to adopt a baby while Roger tries to keep a small-town newspaper running, which isn't exactly a lucrative job that will pay for a baby. But they do get a baby since the lady at the adoption agency (Beulah Bondi) realizes they're actually good parent material. They go through the highs and lows of child-rearing, until tragedy strikes. Cary Grant got an Oscar nomination for this, in part thanks to his scene in front of a judge begging him to let the couple keep the child.