Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of March 1-7, 2020. With a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month; more on that in a bit. There's also a lot of other interesting stuff this week, from 1930s comedies to a Best Picture winner from fairly recently. That, and a couple of tributes to recently-deceased actors. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
A movie that would be at home on St. Patrick's Day later in the month but shows up now is Tonight's the Night, at 11:45 AM Monday on TCM. In the stereotypically Irish village of Rathbarney, a general owns all the land and everybody survives basically thanks to his largesse. However, the elderly general dies in a horse riding accident, and inheriting the lands is his great-nephew, Jasper O'Leary (David Niven). O'Leary decides to make changes in town, such as by calling in all the debts even though the general verbally cancelled them on his deathbed. It's enough to make people like the general's servant Thady (Barry Fitzgerald), or second-tier landowner Major McGluskey (Michael Shepley) and all the local working-class types put off. So the locals decide they're going to do something to get rid of Jasper, even if that means killing him. Meanwhile, one of McGluskey's daughters Serena (Yvonne DeCarlo) returned from Canada after her husband died, to a doctor who had an unrequited love for her. But Jasper falls in love with Serena too.
So many people did a western during the genre's heyday back in the 1950s. An example of this can be seen in the movie Fort Yuma, which is on StarzEncore Westerns at 2:38 AM Monday. Peter Graves plays Lt. Ben Keegan, on an impossible mission from Fort Apache to Fort Yuma together with his half-Apache girlfriend Francesca (Joan Taylor); her brother Sgt. Jonas (John Hudson), who doesn't know about Francesca's relationship with Ben; Melanie Cowan (Joan Vohs), a missionary; and several others. Meanwhile, at Fort Yuma, one of the settlers killed an Apache chief, so the chief's son Mangas (Abel Fernandez) is going to seek revenge by killing as many whites as possible. The scout assigned to take a message to Keegan fails and gets killed, so Keegan's is ambushed, with most of them killed. Will anybody be able to stop Mangas from leading a massacre on Fort Yuma? And what's the point of trying to gin up a relationship between Sgt. Jonas and Melanie?
We're into the first week of a new month, which on TCM means a new Star of the Month. This time out it's Doris Day, who was both a very popular singer in musicals of the late 1940s and early 1950s, before transitioning to a comic actress later in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet she also had dramatic chops when she got an appropriate script. Day's movies will be on TCM every Monday in prime time leading into Tuesday morning, 30 films in all. This first Monday in March brings seven of Day's earlier films.
Christopher Plummer died at the beginning of February, and he just happens to appear in one of the movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation. That movie, Eyewitness, will be on again at 3:10 AM and 1:15 PM Tuesday. William Hurt plays Daryll Deever, a Vietnam vet who works as a janitor in a Manhattan office building. One of the tenants is Mr. Long, who emigrated from South Vietnam after the war and has a connection to everybody else in the movie from his time in the war. Long gets murdered, and TV journalist Tony Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver), whom Daryll has always lusted after, shows up to cover the story, which starts a romantic relationship between the two. This even though Tony already has a relationship with Joseph (Christopher Plummer), who is working with Tony's immigrant parents to get refusenik Soviet Jews out of the country. Meanwhile, suspicion in the murder is focusing on Daryll's former coworker Aldo (James Woods), who also served in Vietnam with Daryll and has been trying to hook his sister up with Daryll. Investigating for the police are a pre-stardom Morgan Freeman and character actor Stephen Hill.
It's thanks in no small part to me that you uncultured lot know about the 1930s comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey. Another of their movies is on this week: Hips, Hips, Hooray!, at 5:30 PM Tuesday. Wheeler and Woolsey play Andy Williams and Dr. Robert Dudley respectively. Andy's girlfriend Daisy (Dorothy Lee) works for a cosmetics company run by Amelia Frisby (Thelma Todd), who is trying to market a new sort of flavored lipstick. That's where Andy and Dr. Robert come in, with some good promotional ideas. But due to a mix-up, a bag containing the lipsticks is replaced by a bag containing bank bonds, which gets the two accused of embezzlement. Meanwhile, one of the promotional ideas involves a cross-country car race, with the cosmetics company sponsoring one car and a major rival sponsoring another. Andy and Dr. Robert get in one of the cars both to take part in the race and to stay ahead of the authorities.
For those who want more recent movies, I've actually picked out one this week that's less than a decade old: Argo, airing at 8:00 PM Wednesday on HBO (or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). In 1979, the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and students stormed the American Embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage. However, six Americans escaped and made their way to the Canadian embassy, where Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber) gave them refuge. However, the Iranians are certain to find out that some Americans escaped, so back in the US, plans are requested to get these Americans out of Iran. After some thought, CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) comes up with a ridiculous plan: pretend to be a Canadian film producer scouting for locations for a film called Argo, and have the Americans play the part of Canadian location scouts to get out of the country. This is going to require a fairly elaborate back story, with a real Hollywood producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) pretending to finance the movie with a make-up artist (John Goodman) providing disguises. But will the Americans be able to remember their part of the back story before the Iranians discover the identities of the six escapees, or before the Canadian ambassador's Iranian maid figures out something odd is going on?
I've mentioned the Glenda Farrell movie Life Begins. In Hollywood's annus mirabilis of 1939, it was remade as the B movie A Child Is Born, which you can see at 1:00 PM Thursday on TCM. Geraldine Fitzgerald plays Grace Sutton, who is checking in to a maternity hospital to give birth. However, she's also a prisoner, having been convicted of a murder she insists was in self-defense and which she may get a pardon for. In any case, her husband Jed (Jeffrey Lynn) is understandably nervous, as are all the husbands. The husbands, however, are decidedly secondary characters here, as the story focuses on the mothers. Spring Byington, 52 years old here, is pregnant with her umpteenth child; Nanette Fabray, about 18, eloped and is worried her parents won't approve of the marriage; Gladys George doesn't want her baby and is drinking her way through pregnancy; and Gloria Holden is worried about losing her child. Eve Arden is here but not as the comic relief; she plays one of the nurses. While Life Begins may be better because it was a pre-Code and could be a bit more explicit, this one isn't bad.
One of those movies that always deserves a mention when it shows up is The 39 Steps. This week, it will be on at 8:00 PM Friday on TCM. Robert Donat plays Richard Hannay, a Canadian in London who sees a “Mr. Memory” music hall show and gets accompanied back to his apartment by a strange woman Annabella (Lucie Mannheim) who claims to be in danger. She tells him her secret, but gets killed overnight in such a way that suspicion is obviously going to be on Richard. So he has to escape and, at the same time, figure out what Annabella was looking for, which is some sort of industrial military secrets being taken out of the country by a ring of spies. This takes him to Scotland and the evil Professor Jordan (Godfrey Tearle), and meeting Pamela (Madeleine Carroll). She of course doesn't believe Richard's predicament at first, but as Richard tries to extricate himself she learns things that make her realize Richard is telling the truth, and the fall in love on the way to the climax back in London. One of Alfred Hitchcock's earlier films in the style of suspense that would become his hallmark over the next 40 years.
Most people, when they think of Jim Henson, think of the Muppets. But he also did some rather darker stuff with puppetry, such as the movie The Dark Crystal, airing on StarzEncore Classics at 2:14 PM Friday. On the planet Thra, 1,000 years after the magical Crystal of Truth was shattered, there are now two races, the evil Skeksis and the good Mystics. A conjunction of the planet's suns, one of which is dying, is about to occur, and the leader of the Mystics realizes that now is the time to find the missing shard from the Crystal and put it back together. So the Mystic leader, on his deathbed, calls the Gelfling Jen in to tell her about this and send her on a dangerous journey to find that shard and put it back into the Crystal and heal the planet Thra. Meanwhile, the Skeksis leader is also dying, bringing more chaos to Thra and making the mission more dangerous. The puppets in this movie were much more complex than the Muppets, and a prequel was made on Netflix a few years back.
If you're already itching for baseball, well, I suppose there's something wrong with you. But you can scratch that itch by watching the movie Big Leaguer at 6:30 AM Saturday on TCM. The New York Giants (they hadn't moved to San Francisco yet) have an instructional winter camp in Florida for their young players, run by former third baseman Hans Lobert (Edward G. Robinson), with the intention of picking players to sign to minor-league contracts and perhaps tryouts for the big leagues. Among the players this year are Adam (Jeff Richards), “Julie” (William Campbell), and Bobby (Richard Jaeckel). In addition to their attempts to make the team, they also have personal lives. In Adam's case, this gets more complicated when Hans' niece Christy (Vera-Ellen) comes down to Florida and falls for Adam. Old-timer Carl Hubbell plays himself, and there's also Al Campanis, decades before the infamous comments he made on Nightline.
Sean Connery died last year, and many of his non-Bond films are always worth watching. This includes The Great Train Robbery, which airs at 8:00 PM Sunday on TCM. Connery plays Edward Pierce, who seems to be an upstanding member of the Victorian-era upper class, but he's got a secret. With the Crimean War going on and the British soldiers fighting there getting paid monthly in gold, Edward decides that he's going to rob a shipment of gold going by train from London to the port at Folkestone, even though at the time nobody thought it could be possible to rob a moving train. The gold will be stored in a safe that has multiple keys held by multiple people, so first Edward is going to have to get access to those keys to make copies. With the help of mistress Miriam (Lesley-Anne Down) and safe-cracker Agar (Donald Sutherland), they get the keys. But then when they get on the train they find that things are more complicated than they had planned. Based on a true story and directed in Ireland (at least the railway scenes) by Michael Crichton, it's a fun adventure yarn.
