Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 8-14, 2015. This is an important week because everybody's favorite movie blogger here celebrates another birthday this week. Congratulate me on not having dropped dead. There's more pin-up girls on Wednesday night on TCM, more noir on Friday, and a bunch of other interesting stuff in between. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Our first selection for the week is Conflict, which you can catch on TCM at 5:00 PM Friday. Humphrey Bogart stars as Richard Mason, an engineer who is married to Kathryn (Rose Hobart). However, it's an unhappy marriage. Worse, Richard has fallen in love with beautiful Evelyn (Alexis Smith) which would be a big problem as is, but is made even worse by the fact that Evelyln is Kathryn's sister! So Richard comes up with a brilliant idea: figure out a way to get rid of Kathryn so that he can be with Evelyn. Richard and Kathryn are preparing to go on a trip to a mountain resort, except that it's really an excuse for Richard to kill Kathryn, as she dies in what is really a phony car crash. Enter psychologist Dr. Hamilton (Sydney Greenstreet), who suspects that all is not as it seems, and is determined to get into Richard's mind to prove it. Humphrey Bogart made so many great movies that this seems much lesser by comparison, but compared to other movies from the 1940s it's still pretty good.
What happens when you pair a brilliant but insane director with an Oscar-winning screenwriter who's also producing the movie? You get something like Wind Across the Everglades, airing at 12:14 PM Tuesday on TCM. The movie is set at the turn of the last century, when there was a craze for feathered hats and boas that led to a large demand on natural bird feathers. Well, there were lots of birds in Florida's Everglades, which at the time was even more inaccessible than it is today. So you could get a pretty penny for the feathers of the birds that populated the Everglades, which Cottonmouth (Burl Ives) and his family try to do. On the other hand, there were a lot of bird lovers up north who were horrified with what was happening. They formed the Audubon Society, and got the federal government to send in wildlife rangers to protect the birds. Christopher Plummer plays Murdock, the ranger who winds up fighting Cottonmouth and his family. Nicholas Ray directed for the most part, but he constantly butted heads with Budd Schulberg (Oscar-winner for On the Waterfront), who eventually fired Ray and directed the rest of the film himself. Figure out for yourself which parts are Ray and which parts Schulberg.
On Tuesday night, TCM is looking at New York City as it was in the 1970s. One of the movies that I don't think I've recommended before is Going in Style, at 8:00 PM Tuesday. Joe (George Burns), Al (Art Carney) and Willie (Lee Strasberg) are three old men living together in Astoria Queens. The reason they're living together is because they're all on Social Security, and that doesn't pay enough for each of them to live alone. As it is, it barely pays for the three of them to live together. Because of that and because of the fact that they all find retirement boring, Joe on day comes up with the idea that perhaps the three of them should rob a bank! Sure, it's daft, but what else is there for these guys to do? Figuring out how to do it does, after all, fill their days with something to do. This is a comedy, but it's got a fair bit of drama, too.
The pin-up girls return to TCM on Wednesday night. One of them, Ann Sheridan, was known as the "Oomph Girl", and she's being spotlighted in Torrid Zone, airing at 3:30 AM Thursday. Pat O'Brien plays Steve, who is a manager for a banana company in one of those Central American banana republics. Unfortunately, there are revolutionaries trying to disrupt the banana plantations, and the manager of one of the distant plantations is ineffectual. So Steve tries to get old friend and competent man Nick (James Cagney) to work for him again just this once, even though Nick wants to get back to America. Complicating matters is the presence of bad-girl Lee (Ann Sheridan), who the authorities are trying to send back to the States but who decidedly doesn't want to go. She winds up following Nick out to the distant plantation, and sparks fly. Unfortunately, the good cast assembled here doesn't quite add up to as much as some of the other work they'd done.
A movie that hasn't shown up on FXM Retro in quite some time is The Reward. It's going to be on twice this week, at 11:40 AM Thursday and 4:00 AM Friday. Max von Sydow of all people plays a crop-duster pilot who gets in trouble in Mexico when he gets into a flight accident and destroys a water tower as well as his plane. Local police chief Gilbert Roland gives him a way out of his troubles, however: work for the police. They've got a fugitive they're looking for (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.), a man who kidnapped and killed a boy. Our kidnaper, for his part, has a girlfriend (Yvette Mimieux), and is driving across the Mexican countryside in her convertible, because everybody in those days seemed to drive convertibles. And then the police discover that the capture of Zimbalist comes with a hefty reward. The lure of big money changes everybody's outlook.
Speaking of FXM Retro, a little movie that showed up a few weeks ago that I hadn't seen before is The Terrorists. It's on again at 10:30 AM Friday and again at 8:35 AM Saturday. The titular terrorists are a group of people who have a beef with the UK government, as they've set off a bunch of bombs in London, and have also kidnapped the UK ambassador to Norway! If that's not bad enough, Tahlvik, the Norwegian security man who has to deal with terrorists (Sean Connery) has another problem on his hands: a plane has been hijacked and landed at the airport in Oslo. It turns out that the two are related, of course. Anyhow, Tahlvik has to deal with the hijackers (led by Ian McShane), with representatives of the British who aren't exactly pleased with the way Tahlvik is handling things, and with the ambassador's wife, who is understandably panicking since her husband isn't just kidnapped, he's very ill. It's interesting and very atmospheric, but a bit muddled at times.
I'm very pleased to see that this summer's salute to noir on TCM is including the Fox film Nightmare Alley. You can catch it at 1:15 AM Saturday. Tyrone Power plays Stan, a carny in a traveling sideshow. The acts include mentalist Zeena (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic husband, and a geek in the original sense (that being somebody who bites the heads off of animals) and his assistant Molly (Colleen Gray). Zeena's husband drinks wood alcohol and kills himself; Stan learns the mentalism act and he and Molly get married and run off to Chicago. In Chicago, they set up a nightclub act until Stan meets wealthy psychologist Lilith (Helen Walker). Stan finds that Helen is making recordings of her clients' sessions, which is highly unethical of course. So Stan figures he can use those recordings to fleece some wealthy people. But perhaps trying to con somebody like Lilith is just a little too much for him. This is an amazingly dark film with Tyrone Power very much cast against type as he rarely got to play characters like this. However, he shows just how good an actor he was by taking this role and making a great movie out of it.
For those of you who like traditional westerns, you might enjoy Pony Express, airing multiple times this week on Encore Westerns, including 4:35 PM Saturday. The Pony Express was established in 1860 with the aim of getting mail across the country more quickly then possible before, by having lone riders go by horse between stations 24 hours a day. The system ran for 18 months until the first transcontinental telegraph line was completed; the transcontinental railroad at the end of the decade completed the process of getting across the country more quickly. Anyhow, this movie look at the subject has Charlton Heston as Buffalo Bill Cody and Forrest Tucker as Wild Bill Hickok, who are given the task of setting up the Pony Express. Meanwhile, stagecoach operator Rance Hastings (Michael Moore) doesn't want the Pony Express to succeed, for reasons which should be obvious. Complicating matters is that Rance's sister Evelyn (Rhonda Fleming, as hot as ever) falls in love with Cody. The thing is, he's already got a girlfriend (Jan Sterling). Oh, and the Indians want to sabotage the Pony Express too.
The unintentionally hilarious film The Manitou graces TCM Underground this week, at 2:00 AM Sunday. Tony Curtis plays Harry Erskine, a San Francisco man who works as a phony psychic. Back into his life comes former girlfriend Karen Tandy (Susan Strasberg), who has some sort of lump on her neck and worries that it's something serious. She goes to the hospital, and finds that yes, it's serious. The doctors' attempts to remove it end in disaster, as though the lump were trying to prevent them from removing it! A little investigation leads Harry to believe that the lump is harboring a "manitou", a 400-year-old spirit that if it gets birthed, will be a terrible demon that will wreak havoc on everybody! So the shaman John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara) is called in to help. The result is a battle royale with some of the cheesiest special effects imaginable, and a plot that strains all credulity. Burgess Meredith has a small role as an expert on native American cultures, and Ann Sothern plays an unfortunate client of Harry's.
The last feature for this week is Mr. Bug Goes to Town, at 8:00 PM Sunday on TCM. This is an animated feature, produced by brothers Dave and Max Fleischer, who had done Gulliver's Travels a few years earlier. The plot here involves a grasshoper named Hoppity who has returned home, "home" meaning a garden of a human house in a big city. Unfortunately, the human occupants of the house aren't in the best of financial shape, and it's possible that their house could be sold to a property developer, which would mean doom for all the insects. The Fleischers' animation is quite interesting, but the brothers didn't get along and that, combined with the fact that this film had the bad timing to open just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, mean that the Fleischers wound up losing control of their studio to Paramount.
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