Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of June 14-20, 2021. Tomorrow is one of the most important days of the year, as everybody celebrates Fedya’s having completed another trip around the sun. (It’s also the birthday of Oscar-winning actor Burl Ives.) There’s also the Star of the Month salute to Cyd Charisse on Tuesday night; a programming tribute to a recently deceased actor, and a lot more, including a movie that’s less than 15 years old. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned the movie Stargate before. You’ve got multiple chances to see it this week, starting at 4:05 PM Monday on Flix. Viveca Lindfors, in one of her last roles, plays Catherine Langford, whose Egyptologist father found some odd stones near the pyramids back in the 1920s. In the present day, she invites Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader) to decipher the hieroglyphics on them. It turns out that it’s really the military who wants to know. Jackson discovers that Langford’s stones refer to a “stargate”, and oh so conveniently, the military has discovered one of the stargates. Under the command of Col. Jack O’Neil (Kurt Russell), they use the coordinates Jackson deciphered to enter the Stargate, which is a portal to an ancient world based on ancient Egyptian society and mythology, the people there believing in the god Ra (Jaye Davidson). But are our present-day earthlings in danger, and how will they be able to get back to the present day?
Norman Lloyd died last month at the tragically young age of 106. TCM is giving him a prime-time programming salute on Monday in prime time, starting off at 8:00 PM with Saboteur, which gave him one of his best roles. Lloyd isn’t the star, however; that honor goes to Robert Cummings. Cummings plays Barry Kane, an aircraft factory worker in the early days of the US involvement in World War II. When a fire breaks out at the plant, Barry gives his best friend a fire extinguisher to help, but the extinguisher was filled with gasoline, leading Barry to be suspected of sabotage. Barry, in fact, was given the canister by Frank Fay (that’s Norman Lloyd), so Barry begins a quest to find Fay to exonerate himself and find the real killer. What he eentually gets into is a ring of fifth columnists led by Tobin (Otto Kruger) planning to bomb a ship’s christening in New York. Along the way, Barry meets model Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane), who doesn’t believe Barry at first until she sees first-hand plans to sabotage a dam, at whch point she becomes a resourceful helper, leading to the climax atop the Statue of Liberty with Frank.
A movie that recently returned to the FXM rotation after a long absence is Violent Saturday. It’s got another airing this week, at 10:10 AM Tuesday. Or, as I like to think of it, “The Day They Robbed the Bank of Peyton Place”. A small town in California has a bunch of people with dirty secrets, from bank manager Harry Reeves (Tommy Noonan), who is a Peeping Tom; to librarian Elsie Braden (Sylvia Sidney), a kleptomaniac; Shelley Martin (Victor Mature), who didn’t serve in World War II and feels like the town coward for it; and the Fairchilds (Richard Egan and Margaret Hayes), an alcoholic husband and a wife willing to find love with any man she can. Into all of this come two groups. One is a trio of bank robbers (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, and J. Carroll Naish), who plan to rob the bank on the titular Saturday. The other is an Amish farming family, the Stadts, led by… Ernest Borgnine, in one of the more hilarious casting decisions you’ll ever see. You know from the beginning that non-violent Stadt is going to wind up confronted by the three robbers, but the movie is just such a fun mess.
For those of you who like more recent movies, you have a chance to catch No Country for Old Men, at 3:45 PM Tuesday on Showtime (and three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). In Southwest Texas in 1980, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) goes hunting, and in tracking a wounded animal comes across a drug deal gone wrong, with everybody having shot everybody else dead except for one fatally wounded guy. However, the money never got transferred, and Llewellyn makes the stupid decision to try to take the money for himself and his wife (Kelly Macdonald). Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a brutal thug who kills people with a cattle bolt gun, wants the money, and decides he’s going to hunt down Moss to get the money back. Meanwhile, the local sheriff, Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) has found the drug deal as well as a couple of other strange murders, and investigates, realizing he’s stumbled onto something quite big. Will Anton ever stop? And can Llewellyn ever get away no matter how far he runs?
On Wednesday, TCM is giving us a series of Ruth Hussey movies, including Tennessee Johnson at 11:45 AM. Hussey plays Eliza McCardle, the future wife of one Andrew Johnson (Van Heflin). Johnson came to McCardle’s small town in Tennessee functionally illiterate and in need of a trade, eventually becoming a tailor. Now if you know your history, you’ll know that Johnson was nominated as Vice-President in 1864 as an attempt by Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans to try to bring the country together in the midst of the Civil War. Lincoln won the election and was assassinated, so Johnson became President. But as a poor southerner from the wrong class and not even a Republican, he had no political base in Washington, an the establishment despised him much like they did Donald Trump. Johnson wanted to continue Lincoln’s idea from the Second Inaugural Address to govern with malice toward none and charity for all, but powerful interests led by Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Lionel Barrymore) waited for Johnson to make a mistake so they could impeach him on trumped-up charges.
TCM’s salute to Guest Programmer teachers continues on Wednesday in prime time, including the movie The Maltese Falcon at 10:15 PM. Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, private detective in San Francisco with Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan). A woman claiming to be Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor) comes in looking for health, and soon enough Archer gets murdered, and other people wind up dead. Wonderly is really Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and she and a bunch of other people have been traveling around the world looking for a statue called the Maltese Falcon, made hundreds of years ago and encrusted with jewels, making it extremely valuable. Supposedly the Falcon was on a ship bound for Frisco, and O’Shaughnessy, along with Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and his gunsel Wilmer (Elisha Cook), and others. Can Sam figure out what’s going on and who’s been doing the killings before he gets bumped off himself?
On Thursday, we get a bunch of Ralph Bellamy on TCM, including a supporting role in a really fun James Cagney movie, Picture Snatcher at 6:00 AM Thursday. Cagney plays Danny Kean, who just got out of prison and is looking for honest work. He decides to try his hand at photojournalism, getting a job at a tabloid everybody else in the city thinks isn’t real journalism, with J.R. McLean (Ralph Bellamy) as his editor. Kean’s criminal past actually makes him perfect at conning his way into situations where he can get the picture and the story, eventually leading him to get the job of trying to get an illicit photo of an execution in the electric chair (which is actually based on the true story of the execution of Ruth Snyder). Along the way, Kean falls in love with the daughter Patricia Nolan (Patricia Ellis) of the cop who arrested him. Kean gets one more big assignment, getting the story from a gangster he formerly knew who has since shot two policemen and is barricading himself in his apartment. Breezy little pre-Code, but a hell of a lot of fun.
Comic westerns were a thing back in the 1960s. One that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before is Texas Across the River, at 10:29 AM Friday on StarzEncore Westerns. Alain Delon plays Don Andrea Baldasar, a Spanish nobleman who is set to marry Louisiana debutante Phoebe Naylor (Rosemary Forsyth). But the wedding is interrupted over a matter of honor, forcing Don Andrea to flee to Texas. There, he meets Sam Hollis (Dean Martin), who is running arms to the town of Moccasin Flats along with his Indian sidekick Kronk (Joey Bishop). Sam and Kronk are trying to stay one step ahead of the Comanche, led by Iron Jacket (Michael Ansara), while Don Andrea is trying to flee the cavalry, led by Capt. Stimson (Peter Graves), and the two could help each other despite their fundamental differences. Things also get more complicated when young Comanche woman, Lonetta (Tina Marquand), and Phoebe, both show up, and love triangles develop.
The juvenile delinquent movies continue on Thursday night into Friday morning on TCM, including Stakeout on Dope Street at 4:15 AM Friday. A drug deal goes bad, as the cops catch the perpetrators in the act. One of them throws away a briefcase with a canister inside that contains two pounds of uncut heroin, and in the confusion, nobody’s able to retrieve it. Not long after, a teenager, “Vas” Vaspucci (Jonathan Haze) finds the briefcase, and opens it up with two of his friends, Jim Bowers (Yale Wexler) and Nick Raymond (Morris Miller). When the three teens find the heroin, they make the astoundingly idiotic decision that they’re going to deal the stuff themselves. Needless to say, everybody and their brother, both in the underworld and among the cops, wants that heroin, and is willing to resort to violence to get that heroin back. One addict the teens talk to gives a rather harrowing depiction of what withdrawal is like. Future Knots Landing star Abby Dalton plays Jim’s girlfriend Kathy.
It’s hard to believe, but Sunday is already Father’s Day. TCM is giving us a bunch of Dad-themed movies in the morning and afternoon. Some, like Life With Father(4:00 PM) are perennials; one that I don’t think has shown up before is Vice Versa, at 6:00 AM Sunday. Roger Livesey plays Paul Bultitude, a Victorian gentleman who has a son Dickie (Anthony Newley) who is about to be sent off to another term at boarding school. One of Paul’s friends, Marmeduke (David Hutcheson) brings the Garuda Stone, which supposedly grants a wish to people who wish on it. Paul wishes that he could be younger again, while Dickie wants to be more grown up. You can guess what happens next, which is that father and son each wind up in the other’s body, which causes all sorts of predictable problems both among the servants who see their boss acting strangely, and likewise at the boarding school. British character actor James Robertson Justice plays the headmaster of the boarding school, and the part of his daughter is played by future pop star Petula Clark, who was an adolescent actress in the UK.