Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, week of June 23-29, 2014

Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 23-29, 2014.  It's the last full week of June, so we're going to get one final night of Rock Hudson films and one final night of pirate movies on TCM.  But there are some other fun things, and good movies on other channels.  We're also getting to the point in the World Cup where the knockout matches begin, so while you're tensely waiting for the US to play its elimination game, why not enjoy some good movies?  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

Monday morning and afternoon bring a bunch of movies about Satan to TCM.  Probably the oddest of them all must be The Devil With Hitler, at 9:45 AM.  It's produced by Hal Roach, who by this time was making short B movies (most run just under an hour; this one is only 45 minutes) that were supposed to be wacky comedies.  Here, the comedic premise is that Satan (called "Gesatan" and played by Alan Mowbray) is going to lose control of Hell, unless he can get Adolf Hitler to do a "good" deed -- otherwise Hitler is so evil that after he dies he'd be perfect to take over Hell.  (The movie was made in 1942, when Hitler was still very much alive and the general American audience wouldn't have known the full extent of the Holocaust.)  So Gesatan goes up to earth and gets involved in a bunch of broad gag sequences with Hitler (Bobby Watson), Mussolini (Joe Deviln) and substituting for Tojo, a Japanese stereotype named Suki Yaki -- and of course not played by an Asian, making parts of this movie uncomfortable in retrospect.

You probably remember "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia", but do you remember The Night They Raided Minsky's?  If not, you have a chance to discover it at 9:45 PM Monday on TCM.  Britt Ekland plays Rachel, a young Amish woman in the early 20th century who, feeling constricted by Amish life, runs away to New York City, where she meets "Professor" Spats (Bert Lahr in his final role; he died during production of this movie).  He gets her a job at Minsky's, run by son Elliot Gould and dad Joseph Wiseman.  Minsky's, it turns out, is a burlesque house with Jason Robards doing vaudeville comedy, and dancing girls wearing skimpy outfits!  Speaking of those skimpy outfits, Rachel's father eventually finds her, and tries to get her out of that outfit, leading to the invention of the strip-tease, while reformers try to get this place closed down, and Robards tries to pursue Rachel.

A movie showing up on FXM Retro for the first time in a while is Pickup on South Street, which actually has two airings: one at 10:00 AM Monday, against The Devil With Hitler, followed by another at 4:30 AM Tuesday.  Richard Widmark stars as a pickpoket who one day, on the subway, takes the wallet from the purse of one Jean Peters.  He soon discovers that there's something more important in the wallet than money: microfilm, which turns out to contain some secret formula that Peters was going to deliver to Communist agents on behalf of her boyfriend Richard Kiley.  So of course the baddies want to know who's got the microfilm, Peters is trying to get it back herself, and the police are trying to find Widmark too.  Thelma Ritter earned yet another Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, for playing "Moe", a police informant who sells information on the various pickpockets.

Bette Davis gets a chance to chew the scenery in the fun, if flawed, film Another Man's Poison, airing at 9:45 PM Tuesday on TCM.  Davis plays a mystery writer living in a country house in northern England who's about to have some mystery come into her real life.  A man (Gary Merrill, Davis' real-life husband at the time) comes to the house, asking to see her husband.  He's not around, she says, because he's managing their rubber-plantation investment in Malaya.  Nonsense, says Merrill, and he should know, since the two men robbed a bank together and the husband shot a guard but left Merrill holding the bag.  Davis knows it's nosense too, since her husband showed up at the house and Davis poisoned him!  So Merrill plays the charade of being Davis' husband, back from Malaysia, while friends of Davis' show up for the weekend and local townsfolk show up, especially character actor Emlyn Williams playing the veterinarian.  Meanwhile, Davis and Merrill are trying to figure out ways out of their predicaments....  The plot kind of veers all over the place, but it's a fun ride.

TCM puts the spotlight on actor Lawrence Tierney for one night on Wednesday, starting with Tiernery in a biopic as Dillinger, at 8:00 PM.  John Dillinger was a small-time thug who, according to the movie, did a spell in prison where he would meet the men who would become his gang.  After breaking out of prison, the gang goes on a spree of bank robberies, with Dillinger eventually taking over leadership of the gang.  Of course, the gang members eventually get killed until only Dillinger is left, and he would die famously outside a Chicago theater in 1934 after a showing of Manhattan Melodrama.  In this fast-moving B picture, Tierney excellent plays Dillinger as a cold-blooded calculating killer, assisted by a bunch of fine character actors like Edmund Lowe (the doctor from Dinner at Eight) and Elisha Cook Jr. (Wilmer the gunsel in The Maltese Falcon).

Star of the Month Rock Hudson returns for one final Thursday night of his movies on TCM, starting at 8:00 PM with A Fine Pair.  Rock plays a police detective in New York who meets Esmerelda, the now grown-up daughter of an old friend, played by the lovely Claudia Cardinale.  He could fall in love with her, but there's a small problem: she's a jewel thief.  And she's got some jewels from a villa in the Austrian Alps that she's stolen.  What's a cop to do?  How about going back to Austria with Esmerelda, and breaking back into the villa so that they can return the jewels, and there goes the evidence of the crime.  Somebody must have seen the ending of Joseph Cotten's Jack of Diamonds before coming up with this plot.  The plot is daft, but Cardinale is nice to look at, and the copious amount of location shooting is also a nice touch.

You might think the idea of Marlon Brando delivering the lines of William Shakespeare sounds ludicrous.  Yet he did do a Shakespeare film: the 1953 version of Julius Caesar,which you can catch at 2:15 PM Friday on TCM.  The title role is played not by Brando but by Louis Calhern, since the play is as much about the conspirators around Caesar as it is about the leader himself.  Brutus (James Mason) gets a bunch of Roman Senators to plot with him to stab Caesar to death on the ides of March because Julius is no longer the Caesar who saved the Republic, they think.  Marc Antony (Brando), on the other hand, is still loyal to Caesar, and gets to deliver the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" soliloquy after the assassination of Caesar.  The rest of the cast is full of stars, with renowned Shakespearean actor John Gielgud playing Cassius; Greer Garson playing Caesar's wife Calpurnia; and Deborah Kerr playing Brutus' wife Portia, among others.

Actress Ruby Dee died a week and a half ago at the age of 91.  TCM is finally getting around to honoring her, with Ben Mankiewicz introducing two of her movies on Saturday afternoon.  The second of these is the film version of the stage play A Raisin in the Sun, at 5:45 PM Saturday.  Dee plays Ruth, the wife of Walter (Sidney Poitier), a chauffeur who's sick of his lot in life, being a servant and living in a cramped Chicago apartment with his mother (Claudia McNeil) and sister (Diana Sands).  The patriarch of the family has just died, and there's an insurance payout of $10,000, which was a fairly substantial sum in the 1950s.  The only question is, what to do with that money?  Mom wants to move the family out of the apartment and into a house in a nice neighborhood, although there's the question of whether the whites in these "nice" neighborhoods want to live with a black family.  Sister wants to go to college and become a doctor, and $10,000 would do nicely in paying all the tuition.  Walter, for his part, wants to open a store and go into business for himself.  It's this conflict over what to do with the insurance money that drives the movie, filled with good performances from all involved.

If you've got the Cinemax high definition channels, you can catch Diamonds Are Forever several times: at 12:05 PM Wednesday, 6:00 AM Saturday, and 5:20 AM Sunday.  Sean Connery returns for one last official film as James Bond (the less said about Never Say Never Again the better).  Somebody's stealing diamonds: who and for what reason isn't knwon, and that's for 007 to investigate.  That investigation takes him first to Amsterdam, which is where he meets the Bond Girl, this time named Tiffany Case (Jill St. John).  Eventually, the case goes to Las Vegas, where casino magnate Willard Whyte (sausage magnate Jimmy Dean) seems to be involved in the case.  It turns out, however, that it's really Blofeld behind it all -- but Bond thought he had finally killed Blofeld in the pre-opening credits scene!  Watch bond get in a fight with two female killers named Bambi and Thumpre, and watch for the clearly gay hired guns Wint and Kidd who show up over and over.

And now for the shorts on TCM.  For the ladies, there's one called Gym College, a little after 3:30 AM Tuesday, or just after Gypsy (1:00 AM Tuesday, 143 min).  This short from the mid-1950s presents the NCAA champion Florida State men's gymnastics team in those skimpy outfits gymnasts wear, doing various gymnastics stunts outside with what looks like not enough matting on the ground.  I have no idea why this one got made.
One that's clearly an advertisement is listed in the TCM schedule as King Solomon's Mines Featurette, which is on at 4:19 AM Saturday, or just after Raiders of the Seven Seas (2:45 AM Saturday, 88 minutes).  This one isn't about the movie King Solomon's Mines, but about the fact that MGM used Dodge trucks to get to all the location shooting, and that Dodge converted their trucks into a variety of uses.  Presumably they paid a pretty penny to have this short made.
For those of you who like the Traveltalks shorts (who doesn't?), you can see how those wacky Canadians lived in Quebec in Summertime at about 4:10 PM Tuesday (just after A Summer Place at 2:00 PM).  Alternatively, you can visit Fort McHenry in Historic Maryland, at about 12:20 PM Friday.