Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of March 13-19, 2017. As of this writing, we don't know where your Wisconsin Badgers will be playing in the big basketball thing, so instead of waiting for that, why not relax with some interesting movies? Once again, I've used my impeccable taste to select a bunch of movies I know you'll all like. No TCM Star of the Month this time, but there are a lot of special features including a tribute to recently deceased TCM host Robert Osborne. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Before he became best known for being a child rapist, director Roman Polanski made movies in Hollywood such as Chinatown, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 7:03 AM Wednesday. Jack Nicholson plays J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a private detective in 1930s Los Angeles who is approached by a Mrs. Mulwray to investigate her husband's alleged infidelity. Mr. Mulwray is head of the water commission, which makes him a very powerful person in the city. After taking some photos of Mr. Mulwray in a compromising position, he's approached by the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). J.J. investigates further, only for Mr. Mulwray to wind up murdered, and that there are powerful forces both behind the murder and behind setting him up to take the fall in the case of uncovering Mulwray's trysts. And is Mrs. Mulwray even being truly honest with him? John Huston, normally a director, acts this time, playing one of the villians, Noah Cross.
A movie that's coming out of the Fox vaults after a long absence is The Street With No Name, which you can watch on FXM Retro at 1:25 PM Monday. Fox made a number of underrated docudramas in the late 1940s, of which this is one. The title refers to the fact that pretty much any main street in America could be the one on which organized crime is taking a hold. So the FBI, in the form of Inspector Briggs (Lloyd Nolan), trains people to be undercover agents, in this case Gene (Mark Stevens) who becomes George to try to infiltrate the gang. That gang is run by Alec (Richard Widmark), who has no compunction about going after anybody who might put the gang (especially him) in danger. Apparently Alec has inside knowledge, but where is he getting it from? That's what Gene is trying to figure out. And he needs to find out before Alec figures out that he's an undercover agent. There's a thrilling climax, and Widmark is once again excellent as a gangster.
Remember the early 1970s song “I Can See Clearly Now”? Its singer, Johnny Nash, actually made a movie in the 1950s as an 18-year-old, and that movie, Take a Giant Step, will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Monday. Nash plays Spence, a black teenager living with his parents who are part of the first generation of blacks to make it, in a mostly white middle-class neighborhood in the suburbs. Adolescence is a tough time for everybody, but especially for this lone black kid who is now feeling alienated from his white friends, as well as his parents who would rather he assimilate than be the more militant civil rights type. Spence gets suspended from school for smoking in the boys' room, eventually runs away and spends an evening with a hooker, and then tries to start a relationship with the family's maid (Ruby Dee)! The movie ends up feeling a bit too pat, but this was back in 1959 when material like this wasn't making it to the screen at all.
This week we get our TCM Guest Programmer, crime writer Michael Connelly. He's selected four crime movies from the 1970s that he saw when he was young and which had a profound influence on him:
Klute, with Jane Fonda as a call girl, at 8:00 PM;
The French Connection, with Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider investigating a drug deal, at 10:00 PM;
Night Moves, in which Gene Hackman follows a young nymphet from Los Angeles to the Florida Keys, at midnight Wednesday (ie. 11:00 PM Tuesday LFT); and
Shaft, with Richard Roundtree playing a black private chick who's a sex machine to all the chicks, at 2:00 AM Wednesday.
Movie characters tend to do stupid things that, if they didn't do, would make the pictures not work. A good example of this is Too Late for Tears, which TCM is showing at 7:30 AM Wednesday. Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy play husband and wife Jane and Alan Palmer, living slightly above their means in a Los Angeles apartment across the hall from Alan's nosy sister Kathy (Kristine Miller). One evening when the husband and wife are taking a road in the Hollywood Hills to a party, they find that somebody has thrown a satchel into the back seat of their car. More surprisingly, when they open up the satchel, they discover it's loaded with cash! Alan obviously understands that somebody had good reason for throwing that satchel in their car, and that the people who did it weren't altruists. He thinks they should turn the money over to the police. Jane would rather use that money to free themselves from their parlous financial situation and live the good life. And then there's Danny (Dan Duryea), who comes along looking for the money. Also investigating is Alan's old army buddy Don (Don DeFore), who may know more than he's letting on.
Barbara Stanwyck is always worth a watch. One of her lesser known movies, Jeopardy, is coming on TCM at 5:00 PM Wednesday. Here, she plays Helen, a mother on vacation with her husband Doug (Barry Sullivan) and son Bobby (Lee Aaker). Their vacation has taken them to an isolated part of the coast on Mexico's Baja California. There's not much there except for a beach house without telephone or electricity, and a dilipidated old pier that should have been torn down years ago. So it should come as no surprise that part of the pier collapses, trapping Dad below it. And of course the tide is coming in, which means that Dad is going to be drowned in several hours! Helen goes out to the main road to try to flag somebody down to get help since she and the kid can't get Dad unstuck by themselves, and she's in luck when she finds a man named Lawson (Ralph Meeker). Well, she's somewhat in luck. What she doesn't know is that he's a fugitive from justice, and that he may not be so willing to help. At least not for something in return.
We have another round of Treasures from the Disney Vault this week, and those are airing on Thursday in prime time. There are a lot of animal-themed movies, including a block of Chip and Dale shorts at 11:30 PM. If you want something not so animal related, Fred MacMurray leads a troop of Boy Scouts in Follow Me, Boys, at 8:15 PM.
For some reason I thought I had recommended Air Patrol before, but a search of the site claims I haven't. It's showing up on FXM Retro at 4:45 AM Friday. The movie starts off with somebody stealing a valuable painting, panning to a secretary (Merry Anders) who's been knocked out, and then the thief absconding from the Los Angeles high-rise office building by helicopter. It's up to helicopter-flying cop Sgt. Castle (Robert Dix) to investigate and find out who did it. The thief, meanwhile, is threatening to destroy the painting if he doesn't get a substantial ransom. This was one of a series of ultra-low-budget B movies made by Maury Dexter for Fox in the era when Fox was otherwise hemorrhaging money on the production of Liz Taylor's Cleopatra. Even the bad Maury Dexter movies are worth a look, and this is one of the better ones. The climax involves location shooting at the empty Hollywood Bowl, followed by a chase through the concrete culverts of the Los Angeles rivers.
Friday is St. Patrick's Day, when everybody pretends to be Irish. TCM is showing a bunch of Irish-themed movies, a lot of which take Hollywood's doe-eyed view of the island and its people. One that doesn't is the British movie Odd Man Out, which will be on at 2:15 PM. James Mason plays Johnny McQueen, member of a cell of a republican terrorist organization in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In order for them to carry out their activities, they need money, and their latest plan to get more money is to rob a payroll. Johnny gets shot and wounded when the robbery goes wrong, and that drives the action of the movie. The British police start a massive manhunt for him, while his fellow cell members try to get him to safety, all the while having to avoid keeping too close to him because of the possibility that the police will get them, too. And it's not just his friends who face this dilemma, but ordinarily people Johnny deals with him. They don't want to incur the wrath of the police for helping him, or the wrath of the terrorists for not helping him.
Long-time TCM host Robert Osborne died last week at the age of 84. TCM is doing a 48-hour tribute in his honor this weekend, starting at 6:00 AM Saturday. There are a bunch of the Private Screenings interviews he did, including the one where he was the interviewee, with Alec Baldwin asking the questions. That one will be airing multiple times, including 1:30 PM and 8:00 PM Saturday and 5:30 PM Sunday. Of the other Private Screenings interviews they're showing, you can see the recently-deceased Debbie Reynolds at 9:30 PM Saturday, as well as Ernest Borgnine at 3:30 AM and 3:00 PM Sunday. There are also some interviews from past TCM Film Festivals; 100-year-old Luise Rainer shows up at 11:30 AM Saturday while Eva Marie Saint probably gives the best interview, at 7:00 AM Sunday.
While TCM is busy with its tribute to Robert Osborne over the weekend, there are some interesting westerns over on StarzEncore Westerns. First, at 4:38 AM Saturday, is Hell Bent for Leather. Audie Murphy plays Clay Santell, a man who does the Good Samaritan thing for a man who comes into his camp on the verge of collapse. Unfortunately, the other man drops his gun and steals Clay's horse. Meanwhile, in town, it turns out they're looking for an outlaw. That outlaw, of course, was the man who stole Clay's horse, and since Clay has the man's gun, the town marshal (Stephen MacNally) naturally tries to pass Clay off as the outlaw. Nobody in town will know that Clay is innocent, and the marshal doesn't care, since he just wants a big conviction to boost his career. Clay escapes, taking a young woman (Felicia Farr) with him, in pursuit of the real outlaw while of course the marshal is trying to capture him and save his own career. Audie Murphy generally doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.
The other western is the higher-budget The Great Man's Lady, on at 12:45 PM Sunday. Barbara Stanwyck plays the lady, one Hannah Hoyt, and the movie starts off closer to the present day (well, present from the time the movie was made in 1942) and a statue of Ethan Hoyt is about to be unveiled in Hoyt City. Hannah, now 100-something years old, is Ethan's widow, and she grants an interview to the press to tell them her story…. Flash back to the California gold rush era; Hannah was the daughter of a rich man (Thurston Hall) and going west with her beau Ethan (Joel McCrea) to make a new life for themselves in the west. Ethan wants to build a big city, and eventually strikes silver, but he needs more money, and Hannah gets it from a gambler (Brian Donlevy) with the proviso that she not follow Ethan to the mines. A big flood comes and Ethan and Hannah each believes the other dies, and all sorts of complications ensue. The story is a bit of a mess, but Stanwyck is excellent as always playing a woman across 80-plus years of her life, and Joel McCrea is another one of those actors who doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.