Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of June 21-27, 2021. Apparently the Bucks did not sh!t the bed last night, so there’s still going to be some more basketball for you to enjoy. On the other hand, I’ve selected a basketball movie this week, and if you don’t care so much for basketball, there are a lot of good movies about other topics. So many, in fact, that I didn’t get to mention Star of the Month Cyd Charisse on Tuesday night on TCM, or any movies from the current century. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Katharine Hepburn won her first Oscar before she became “box office poison” in the late 1930s. That Oscar win was for Morning Glory, which will be on TCM at 9:30 AM Monday. Hepburn plays Eva, a young woman from Vermont who moves to New York City with dreams of becoming the next great stage actress, taking the stage name Eva Lovelace. So she goes to the office of a well-known Broadway producer, Louis Easton (Adolphe Menjou) and basically camps out there until he’ll see her. Not that he’d give the time of day to her, but with the help of an old actor friend of his, Hedges (C. Aubrey Smith), Eva does get to see Easton and the playwright Joseph Sheridan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Eva gets by on personality alone at first, but that’s not going to get her into starring roles or earn her a living for very long. But then Rita (Mary Duncan), cast as the star of a new play, makes ridiculous contract demands and threatens to walk out. A producer could save a lot of money by casting an unknown like Eva….
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 27 years since the documentary Hoop Dreams was released. You can see it this week at 2:30 AM Monday on SHOxBET. A stinging commentary on inner-city America and the idea that young black men can rise above the social pathologies of the inner city by being good enough at basketball, the movie looks at two young men, Arthur Agee and William Gates, as they start high school in Chicago, with hopes of getting to college and then the NBA. Both young men get recruited by the same parochial school that had recruited NBA star Isiah Thomas, but going to a mostly-white school a long ways away from home causes all sorts of stress, and that combined with injuries and problems at home threatens to derail the two players’ careers. Eventually, both do get to college if not the NBA, but the ending isn’t exactly happy.
On Tuesday morning and afternoon, we’re getting several crime movies from 1939 on TCM. One that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before is They All Come Out, at 10:00 AM. Tom Neal plays Joe, a mechanic who can’t do normal labor because of an industrial accident. He meets Kitty (Rita Johnson) when her car breaks down and helps her. Kitty happens to be a woman who cases banks for robberies, and she tells the leader of the gang Reno about his ability. They rob banks until the feds get them, sending the members to various prisons. Kitty and Joe fell in love along the way, and although both try to let the federal prison system rehabilitate them, things conspire to try to prevent this. The press reports on Kitty’s new job, while Reno wants Joe to get the money that Reno buried from the last bank robbery, which Joe doesn’t want to do. The movie is presented by Homer Cummings, then US Attorney General. His time as a prosecutor was also the subject of the later movie Boomerang!
A movie that was put back in the FXM rotation recently is The River’s Edge. It’s going to be on again this week, at 7:15 AM Tuesday. Ray Milland plays Nardo Denning, who shows up at the New Mexico ranch owned by Ben Cameron (Anthony Quinn). Nardo is looking for an overland path into Mexico that will bypass the border checkpoints, which should be a red flag that he’s up to no good; Ben is a guide who has the ability to do it. But getting back to that red flag, there are actually a couple of them. First off, Nardo is a criminal on the run, having committed murder and carrying a bag full of money he’s trying to smuggle into Mexico with him. And then there’s Ben’s wife Margaret (Debra Paget). It seems that back in the day, she was Nardo’s partner in crime, but after getting out of prison married Ben to start anew. But with Nardo back and carrying a bunch of money, she might just dump her current hubby for him. So of course, Ben takes Nardo up on trying to get him into Mexico, in part because he wants to win back his wife.
I’ve always really enjoyed Glenda Farrell, who brings so much energy to a bunch of B movies of the 1930s. An excellent example of this is Girl Missing, on TCM at 7:45 AM Thursday. Glenda is Kay, one of a pair of gold diggers in Florida along with June (Mary Brian) trying to get money out of sugar daddy Kenneth (Guy Kibbee). He stiffs them in one of the film’s more shockingly humorous moments, but the pair meet a man Henry (Ben Lyon) who’s the fiancé of another woman Daisy that Kay and June knew back in the chorus in New York. Gigolo Raymond (Lyle Talbot) offers to pay Kay and June’s fare back to New York, but they stay in Florida one more night, waking up the next day to find that Daisy has gone missing. Obviously, Kay’s reaction to this is to play amateur sleuth and figure out what happened to Daisy. As with all of these amateur detective movies, things get more complicated but Kay’s energy saves the day. Fans of 1930s movies will see lots of recognizable character actors here.
It’s been a good five years since I mentioned the western Cattle Empire. StarzEncore Westerns has it this week, at 6:50 AM Wednesday, so I’ll plug it again this week. Joel McCrea plays John Cord, a trail boss with a past, in that one of his cattle drives led to the men laying waste to a town and Cord’s going to prison over it. Cord has gotten out of prison, however, and needs to earn his keep, so he goes back to being a trail boss since it’s what he knows and is good at it. The old town that his men had destroyed is still struggling financially, and is depending upon the next cattle drive to turn their fortunes around, but they need somebody to get the cattle to the rail line on time, and the only person around to do that is Cord. Complicating things is that the man hiring Cord, Ralph Hamilton (Don Haggerty), married Cord’s old girl Janice (Phyllis Coates) while Cord was in prison. And there’s another cattleman who would like to hire Cord away from Hamilton.
You probably remember Hayley Mills from those old Disney movies like The Parent Trap. She’s much more grown up in The Family Way, which TCM is running at 6:00 PM Thursday. Hayley plays Jenny Piper, a shop clerk in love with movie projectionist Arthur Fitton (Hywel Bennett). They get married, with a plan to go on a honeymoon and figure out where to live on getting back from the honeymoon. But Arthur’s father Ezra (Hayley’s real-life father John Mills) brings the raucous reception back to his cramped apartment, this being northern England in the 1960s, and that combined with a practical joke played by the groomsmen means Arthur is unable to consummate the marriage on their wedding night. Worse, the travel agent has run off with the money for the honeymoon, so the couple is stuck in the Fitton apartment for two weeks, with very thin walls. How are Arthur and Jenny going to be able to enjoy adult married life? Despite the overarching theme of sex, it’s all handled in a tastefully mature way with good performances all around. The part of Arthur’s kid brother Geoffrey is played by Murray Head (yes, the “One Night in Bangkok” singer).
I don’t recall whether I’ve mentioned The Witches of Eastwick before; at least, I certainly haven’t done so in a long time. It’s on this week, at 8:35 AM Friday on HBO2. The “witches” are three women in Eastwick, one of those stereotypically conservative small New England towns that populated movies a couple of generations before this movie was released. Alex (Cher), a sculptor; Jane (Susan Sarandon), a cellist; and Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer), a writer, all find that life in Eastwick isn’t all that it could be as none of the men are particularly satisfying. So they all wish for an exciting and satisfying man to come into their lives. And wouldn’t you know it, but one does: Daryl (Jack Nicholson), who may or may not be a personification of the devil, at least according to one of the town’s more prominent citizens, Felicia (Veronica Cartwright). Daryl proceeds to seduce each of Alex, Jane, and Sukie, and shows them that they have a power within themselves which, when women use it, gets them called witches. But will the women find happiness?
The juvenile delinquent movies continue on TCM on Thursday in prime time, with this week including a British entry into the genre: Violent Playground, at 1:30 AM Friday. Stanley Baker plays Jack Truman, a Liverpool police detective in the pre-Beatles days who’s been investigating an arson case. He gets reassigned to be a Juvenile Liaison Officer, a program designed to keep kids from becoming recidivists. Working in the slums of Liverpool, this is where he meets the Murphy family of four siblings and no parents around. Elder sister Cathie (Ann Heywood) falls in love with him, while elder brother Johnny (David McCallum before becoming a TV star in the States) is the one in danger of falling into a life of crime thanks to his listening to rebellious American rock-and-roll music. Wouldn’t you know it, however, but that arson case he’d been working on rears its ugly head again. The climax of the movie involves a classroom siege. Peter Cushing plays a priest trying to work with the troubled youths.
TCM is running an Alfred Hitchcock marathon over the weekend, starting at 6:00 AM Saturday with Sabotage, one of his British movies involving a woman (Sylvia Sidney) who realizes her husband (Oscar Homolka) is a saboteur. It’s a good movie, but since the marathon continues into the early hours of June 28 I’ll have one of Hitch’s British movies next week. Instead, I’ll mention a really fun black comedy, The Trouble With Harry, which is on at 6:00 PM Sunday. Edmund Gwenn plays Capt. Wiles, a Vermont hunter who comes across a dead body and thinks he might have accidentally shot the guy. Wiles, however, isn’t the only person who runs into the body. There’s a struggling artist, Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe); the town spinster Ivy (Mildred Natwick); and Arnie Rogers (Jerry Mathers), the young child of single mother Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine in her movie debut) who seems to be the one person to know who this dead man is, and doesn’t really mind that he’s dead. However, the law, in the form of Deputy Wiggs (Royal Dano) is on the case, and so the four have to figure out what to do to keep themselves out of trouble. This ultimately involves repeatedly burying, exhuming, and reburying the dead man. Along the way, the four form the predictable romantic bonds.