Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 17-23, 2019. This week sees more from TCM's Star of the Month Jane Powell, as well the spotlight on hair and some interesting B movies. There is also a bunch of stuff worth mentioning on the other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM's spotlight on hair in the movies continues on Monday night. One of the memorable hairdos of the 1940s was that of Veronica Lake, which is being shown in The Glass Key, at 11:45 PM Monday. Lake plays Janet Henry, daughter of a reform-minded candidate for governor (Moroni Olsen). Corrupt politician Madvig (Brian Donlevy) falls in love with Janet, which gets him to decide he'll throw in his lot with the reformers. Madvig's right-hand man Ed (Alan Ladd) thinks there's something fishy going on, and frankly, Janet much prefers Ed to Madvig. Meanwhile, Madvig has a sister Opal (Bonita Granville) who is in love with Janet's brother Taylor, who is a big-spending gambler. Taylor is eventually found murdered, which greatly pleases underworld leader Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia) because Madvig was about to deny him protection and now he can pin the murder on Madvig unless Madvig leaves the reformers. It's up to Ed to save the day, despite having split with Madvig.
Fox distributed a whole bunch of short B movies in the late 50s and early 60s, which I've always thought had to do with the money that Cleopatra was hemorrhaging. Young Jesse James is back on the FXM schedule this week at 4:45 AM Thursday, and another one that I haven't mentioned before, Blood and Steel, can be seen on FXM at 4:55 AM Tuesday. John Lupton stars at Lt. Jenson, heading a group of four Seabees who come ashore on Gizo Island somewhere in the South Pacific. Their job is to see whether the island would be suitable for a US air base, but the problem is that the island is still held by the Japanese. The first time the get seen by the Japanese, one of the soldiers, George (James Edwards) gets shot in the leg, forcing the other three to go on without him. George eventually sees a native islander (played by Israeli-born Ziva Rodann), while the other three are miraculously able to avoid and outwit the Japanese. To be fair, however, the Japanese here are portrayed more as bored and not caring than stupid. The movie has the feel of an episode of a TV show.
Speaking of B movies, Warner Bros. put out a bunch of really fun ones in the 30s, with another good example being Mary Jane's Pa, which will be on TCM at 11:45 AM Tuesday. Guy Kibbee plays the Pa, a man named Sam Preston who with his wife Ellen (Aline MacMahon) runs a print shop and small local newspaper. But he has wanderlust, and one day up and leaves, not returning home for ten years. When he does get home, he finds out his family has left because the financial security he left them wasn't so secure after all, forcing him to become an itinerant carnival barker. That allows him to keep traveling, and amazingly, in one of the towns he runs into a lost girl who just happens to be his daughter (Nan Grey). Ellen has started up a new paper and has suitors, but she lets Sam stay as a housekeeper since she told the children he died. The new paper is getting involved in political intrigue in town, with Sam not trusting the candidate the paper is endorsing and a bunch of gossips wanting Sam out of town
Wednesday morning and afternoon's lineup on TCM concerns a bunch of troubled children, including juvenile delinquents. One of the movies I haven't recommended before is Boy Slaves, at 1:15 PM Wednesday. Roger Daniel plays Jesse, second son in a family where the mother works the graveyard shift and the eldest son has just lost his job due to the Depression. So Jesse goes out to get a job, but gets robbed by a gang. Jesse decides to join in with the gang, however, riding the rails like hoboes and engaging in petty crimes. One of those gets them arrested in a corrupt little town reminiscent of the later Mamie Van Doren movie Untamed Youth: the judge sentences the members of the gang to work at a local factory making turpentine. What they don't know until it's too late is that the factory's owner Albee (Charles Lane) basically uses the juvenile delinquents he gets as child slave labor, holding them in a barbed-wire camp. There's also one girl, Annie (Anne Shirley), in the camp, and she's lusted after by one of the camp guards.
Since I know how much you all like 80s movies, I've got another silly one this week: Red Sonja, at 7:33 PM Wednesday on StarzEncore Action. From the same guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian, the movie tells the story of Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), a woman who gets in trouble with Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman), for which Sonja's family gets killed. Gedren steals a talisman that is supposed to give great power to the one who possesses it, but Sonja wants to get it back because that great power is actually destroying the world. To do that, however, she's going to have to learn to become a great warrior, getting some help from Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and meeting comic relief Prince Tarn (Ernie Reyes Jr.) before heading off to the Land of Perpetual Night to find Gedren and the talisman, ultimately leading to a climactic fight in the castle that could destroy all of them. This isn't a particularly good movie, but if you want to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and be entertained, you could do far worse.
The films of TCM Star of the Month Jane Powell return on Wednesday in prime time, including one that's slightly odd: Athena, at 2:00 AM Thursday. Louis Calhern plays Ulysses, a grandfather and patriarch of the Mulvain family. He has seven granddaughters, including Athena (Jane Powell) and Minerva (Debbie Reynolds), and rather odd ideas about physical fitness and diet, which the granddaughters share. Grandma Salome (Evelyn Varden) is into astrology and numerology. Ulysses is also in the midst of training young Ed (Steve Reeves) for the Mr. Universe competition. Into all of this come a couple of normal men. One is lawyer Adam Shaw (Edmund Purdon), who falls in love with Athena and is willing to go along with the bizarre diet; the other is singer Johnny Nyle (Vic Damone), who falls in love with Minerva. But then Adam and Ed get in a fight, and everything goes wrong. This is definitely a lesser-tier MGM musical, but ladies will probably enjoy all the bodybuilders here. Guy might rather listen to this:
It's been a couple of years since I recommended Night Passage. It's' going to be on again this week, at 7:35 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. James Stewart plays Grant, a man who used to work for the railroad but lost his job and is now reduced to busking with his accordion. The railroad is in trouble, however, as they're trying to build a line but every time the payroll is supposed to come, the gang led by Whitey (Dan Duryea) holds up the train and steals the money. So a lot of people think Grant should become a troubleshooter for the railroad and catch Whitey. Grant reluctantly agrees. But a couple of things complicate the job. One is that he picks up the orphan Joey (Brandon De Wilde) from another group of bandits; another is that among Whitey's gang is Grant's brother the Utica Kid (Audie Murphy). Whitey has kidnapped the daughter (Elaine Stewart) or the head of the railroad in an attempt to get the latest payroll, and taken her to an abandoned mine where the climax occurs.
If you want to see old stars embarrassing themselves trying to look hip, you could do worse than to watch Marriage on the Rocks, which TCM is running at 6:00 PM Friday. Frank Sinatra plays Dan, a staid advertising executive who has been married to Valerie (Deborah Kerr) for 19 years, and goes home to his well-appointed house every night to watch TV and be a family man. His best friend Ernie (Dean Martin) works with him and is a womanizer who had a thing for Valerie all those years ago but gave it up when she married Dan. Valerie, for her part, wants some spice in her life. Meanwhile, their daughter Tracy (Nancy Sinatra) is growing up and wants to move in with a much more worldly friend. Things get much more complicated on an anniversary trip to Mexico that ultimately results in Valerie getting kinda-sorta divorced from Dan and kinda-sorta married to Ernie, in what's really an attempt to save the marriage. It's cringeworthy seeing Kerr trying to act hip; in fact the biggest highlight of the movie is Dino's fabulous beach house:
StarzEncore Classics is offering a marathon of Jaws movies on Sunday, starting with the 1975 original at 6:22 AM Sunday, with the original repeating at 1:41 PM and 9:00 PM Sunday. Of course, you know the story. Amity Island is a beach resort, at least until there's a shark sighting one summer as Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) discovers a victim. The town fathers try to keep it secret, but when more people get killed, it's realized that the shark has to be killed. Quint (Robert Shaw) offers to do so for a hefty bounty, while oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) might be able to offer expert insight on how to do it. That is, if they have a big enough boat. This was the movie that created the concept of the summer blockbuster (not intentionally); over the next dozen years there were three sequels which will all be on StarzEncore Classics. Michael Caine is in the last, Jaws: The Revenge, having taken the part for a big payday and filming in the Bahamas, and said of the movie, "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
If you thought that Athena was odd, how about a movie that's really strange: Strange Interlude, at 6:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Norma Shearer stars as Nina, a woman who was in love with a World War I flyboy her father (Henry B. Walthall) wouldn't let marry, which is just as good since he died in the war. Dad has a friend Charlie (Ralph Morgan) who loves Nina, but he's to shy to tell her and the feeling isn't mutual anyway. She marries Sam (Alexander Kirkland), but it turns out that he's got mental illness running in the family, so he can't have any children. Nina responds to that by having an affair with Ned (Clark Gable) so that she can get knocked up. It works, but her relationship with all three men is quite complicated. This is based on a Eugene O'Neill play that ran over four hours but is cut down to just under two for the movie. It keeps the play's gimmick, however, which dingbat it focuses on the characters' internal monologues which are presented using extensive voiceovers. (Since they couldn't do that on stage, they used asides with the characters not making the aside freezing on stage.)