Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of June 4-10, 2018. We're in the first full week of a new month, so we're going to be getting some new features. There's a new Star of the Month, a new Spotlight, and some movies that have been taken out of the Fox vaults to run on FXM Retro which, amazingly enough, is still going six and a half years after they started showing only new movies broken up with commercials in the evening half of the schedule. All times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month: Leslie Howard. His movies are going to be on every Monday in prime time. You'll probably best remember Howard from the epic Gone With the Wind, in which he plays Ashley Wilkes, who is lusted after by Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), although he marries Scarlett's cousin Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) instead. This leaves Scarlett to try to rope Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) into marriage. All of this is against the backdrop of that pesky war between the states, and its aftermath. That movie is going to be on at 9:45 PM Monday. But the night actually kicks off with a documentary about Howard, Leslie Howard: The Man who Gave a Damn, at 8:00 PM. Howard did a lot for the British effort in World War II, promoting the British cause and making multiple movies supporting the war effort, two of which at least will be on on the 25th. (I don't see the short From the Four Corners scheduled yet, although that may get put in later.) Even though Howard didn't fight, he ultimately gave his life for the cause when his plane was shot down in 1943.
A movie that's back on FXM Retro after a long, long absence is The Flim-Flam Man, which will be on at 3:00 AM tomorrow. George C. Scott plays the title character, an elderly con artist named Mordecai Jones who goes around the Carolinas looking to scam greedy suckers. One day he's noticed by Ft. Bragg deserter Curley (Michael Sarrazin) who, having no place else to go, ultimately winds up falling in with Mordecai and joining him on his con games. Then Mordecai comes up with the idea to scam a local wealthy family, the Packards, and stealing one of their cars. But at the Packards, Curley meets their adult daughter Bonnie Lee (Sue Lyon) and falls in love with her, and the feeling is pretty clearly mutual. It leads to Curley beginning to question whether he should be scamming people like Mordecai does. Meanwhile, the cops, led by Sheriff Slade (Harry Morgan), is on their tails, although as a southern sheriff he's portrayed as stereotypically incompetent.
This month's spotlight on TCM is “Mad About Musicals”, which means that every Tuesday this month we're getting a whole bunch of musicals. Ont that I don't think I've mentioned before is Strike Me Pink, which you can catch at 2:30 PM Tuesday. The story has Eddie Cantor playing Eddie Pink, a meek tailor in a college town where the students constantly bully him. Eddie helps one particularly dull student, Butch, graduate, and the agreement is that the two of them are going to go to Dreamland, an amusement park that Butch's mother runs. However, Butch leaves to join the navy, leaving Eddie to run the park by himself. A bunch of gangsters led by Vance (Brian Donlevy) are trying to muscle in on Ma's territory and think with a meek guy like Eddie in charge they've got it made. But Eddie has been taking assertiveness training, which is going to help him deal with the gangsters. Ethel Merman plays a nightclub singer Eddie has always admired, but she's friends with the gangsters.
I see that RoboCop is on a bunch of times this week, including at 12:45 PM Wednesday on Showtime Extreme. Detroit is a bankrupt hellhole, and to help make ends meet, the mayor has privatized the police service. In order to turn a profit the company tries android police, with the company's chairman (Dan O'Herlihy) eventually picking a cybernetic police officer model. One of Detroit's police officers, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is gunned down and the company uses him for their cybernetic procedure, turning him into RoboCop. RoboCop and his partner Lewis (Nancy Allen) proceed to set about cleaning up the city, and RoboCop does a good job at it. Too good, in fact, as an executive who had championed a type of android not selected by the chairman was hoping for the project to fail so that the company's plans to turn all the depopulated parts of Detroit into a planned town could go into effect. The movie spawned a couple of sequels and a reboot, although the listings services all say it's the original that's going to be on.
Three months have passed since the last installment of Treasures from the Disney Vault, so it's time for another, and that comes up this Wednesday in prime time. This time out, there are a lot of dog movies, most of which I'd never heard of before. We don't get the better-known stuff like Old Yeller, and Disney is certainly not about to release things like 101 Dalmatians or Lady and the Tramp to TCM to air. Instead, we get stuff like a 1980s Benji movie at 3:00 AM Thursday, and Walter Pidgeon hiring an orphan to train his dog in Big Red (1:15 AM Thursday). In and among the features are a couple of one-reelers.
MGM had both Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin under contract in the mid 1930s. They kept Garland of course, leaving Durbin to go to Universal. They promptly put her in Three Smart Girls and made her a star. Three Smart Girls will be on TCM at midnight Friday (ie. 11:00 PM Thursday LFT). Durbin plays Penny Lyons, one of three sisters along with Kay (Barbara Read) and Joan (Nan Grey) living in Switzerland with their mother (Alice Brady). Mom and Dad have been divorced for ten years but Mom has always thought she probably made a mistake, while the kids haven't seen Dad. So when the kids learn that Dad (Charles Winninger) is planning to get married to “Precious” (Binnie Barnes), a gold-digger, they immediately head for the States to see Dad and stop him from getting remarried. Their scheme involves finding another rich man for Precious to pursue, or at least someone who can pretend to be rich (Mischa Auer), pretending to be a Hungarian count. And then they meet a real British aristocrat, Lord Michael (Ray Milland), and things get really complicated really quickly. It's easy to see why Durbin became a star.
It's been a while since I've mentioned Jumpin' Jack Flash, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 9:29 AM Friday. Whoopi Goldberg plays Terry, a currency trader who uses vintage Sperry computers to communicate with the traders in the other financial centers around the world. (They're still better than the computers where I work.) One day, she has a glitch that results in a man claiming to be a spy trapped behind the Iron Curtain (remember that) showing up on her computer claiming that she's the only person who can help him. She doesn't believe it at first, but eventually goes along, which gets her involved with international intrigue with the British Consulate who claim to know nothing but clearly know more than they're letting on, and a bunch of other spy types who want her dead. This is pretty much a vehicle for Whoopi Goldberg, so if you don't like her humor this may not be the movie for you. If you do, the movie is a gas gas gas.
I've mentioned King Solomon's Mines before, but that was the 1950 version. There was an earlier version in 1937 and I'm not certain if I've recommended that one yet. TCM says it's airing at noon on Saturday, so now is your chance to catch it. There's a legend about a mine full of diamonds in an impenetrable part of Africa, and Patrick O'Brien (Arthur Sinclair) has heard about the legends and want some of those diamonds for themselves. Patrick's daughter Kathy (Anna Lee) is worried about him so she hires famed guide Allan Quartermain (Cedric Hardwicke) to take her on the difficult journey to get to where the mines supposedly are and find Patrick. Along with them is Kathy's African guide Umbopa (Paul Robeson). Umbopa, however, has his own reasons for going on the trek, which will become clear when they go through land controlled by tribal chieftain Twala. He's in the midst of a civil war and captures Quartermain's party. But Umbopa has a past with Twala.
Since we were just talking about the incompetence of Don Knotts recently, I figured I'd mention a good example of that incompetent character. This time, it's The Shakiest Gun in the West, airing at 6:09 AM Saturday on StarzEncore Westerns. Knotts plays Dr. Jesse Heywood, who graduates dental school in Philadelphia in 1870 and goes west because he figures the West needs dentists. Once he gets out west, he meets Penelope Cushings (Barbara Rhoades), who starts to put the moves on him and offers to marry him. In fact, it's because she needs a marriage of convenience. She used to be an outlaw, but she was given a pardon in exchange for helping the authorities find a ring of smugglers. So she figures a change of name is a good idea. That, and nobody would suspect Heywood of working for the authorities because he just doesn't have the ability for it. Indeed, although he gets a reputation as a gunfighter, it's she who's doing the shooting.
The week concludes with what I believe is the TCM premiere of No Down Payment, at 8:00 PM Sunday. Jeffrey Hunter plays David Martin, a World War II veteran who's just gotten married to Jean (Patricia Owens), and is buying a house in one of those new Los Angeles suburb because the developers offer special deals just for veterans. They're hoping it will be the start of a great new life, and when they get there they find three other couples where the husband was a World War II veteran, so everything is going to be wonderful. Except, of course, that the other couples have their own problems. Troy Boone (Cameron Mitchell) is married to a woman who wants more action (Joanne Woodward); Jerry Flagg (Tony Randall) is a used-car salesman who doesn't want to give up his dreams of bigger things, married to Isabelle (Sheree North); and Herman Kreitzer (Pat Hingle), married to Betty (Barbara Rush), can't let the war go. Interesting premise, although the movie winds up feeling like it's going through a laundry list of social issues.