Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of March 15-21, 2021. Your Wisconsin Badgers are going to find out where they go in the NCAA basketball tournament. But for those who don't care so much about basketball, there are a lot of interesting movies on. There's more from Doris Day on Monday in prime time, as well as a bunch of fun movies on channels not named TCM. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
There are some World War I movies on TCM on Tuesday, including A Woman of Experience at 8:15 AM. Helen Twelvetrees plays the titular woman, a “registered woman” (a euphemism for a prostitute) named Elsa in Vienna in the early days of the war. She wants to do her part for the war effort by becoming a nurse, but because she's a prostitute, the authorities won't let her. But they make her an offer: because of her looks, she'd make a natural spy, as male military officers would definitely fall for her. Do that, and they'll take her name off the registry. Army officer Otto von Lichstein (Lew Cody) may be a spy, and it's Elsa's job to find out whether he's stealing secrets and, if so, who he's sending them to. During the mission, however, she meets Count Karl (William Bakewell), who falls head over heels in love with Elsa and thinks she's wonderful and pure. Elsa doesn't want to tell him the truth, and finds that her love for Karl is putting her mission in jeopardy. What will Elsa do?
Up against A Woman of Experience is a different sort of 1980s teen comedy, Teen Wolf, at 7:40 AM Tuesday on Showtime 2. Michael J. Fox plays Scott Howard, a high school student who's not having much luck in his social life. He's on the school's terrible basketball team and is the worst player on that team. He also can't get Pamela (Lorie Griffin) to notice him. Of course, the fact that she's already got a boyfriend doesn't help. But strange things start happening to Scott that aren't just puberty. He has a distressing tendency to turn into a werewolf, of all things! Naturally he doesn't want people to find this out, because then he'll have even more problems at school. But turning into a werewolf actually also has the effect of making him better at basketball, becoming the star of the team and leading them to victories. But do they love Scott for what he is, or just the whole werewolf thing? After all, there is that trope of the one girl who's loved him all along and doesn't need him to become a werewolf.
Unsurprisingly, TCM is running a bunch of Irish-set movies for St. Patrick's Day on Wednesday. Among them is Flight of the Doves at 3:30 PM. Finn and Derval Dove (Jack Wild and Helen Raye) are two kids who lived with their mother until she died, so they became wards of their cruel stepfather in Liverpool. They know of a grandmother in Ireland, Grandma O'Flaherty (Dorothy McGuire), and would like to see her because Stepdad is fairly mean to them, not knowing that they are heirs to the family estate and will have a secure financial future once they grow up. Someone who does know about the inheritance is their uncle Hawk (Ron Moody), who is in line to get that inheritance if the kids can't be found. The kids run away from their stepfather to try to get to grandma, and Uncle Hawk chases after them so that he can get to the children first and get that inheritance. Making things more dangerous for the kids is that Hawk is an actor and as such a master of disguise, so the kids may not know they're dealing with Hawk again and again.
If you liked Al Pacino in Scarface, then you might like him in Carlito's Way, which you see at 11:00 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Suspense. Pacino plays Carlito, a man who served five years in prison in the 70s but got out on a technicality with the help of his corrupt alcoholic lawyer Kleinfeld (Sean Penn). Carlito vows to stay straight, but he goes back to his family in Spanish Harlem since that's about all he knows. All those bad influences are going to make it difficult to avoid criminality, and sure enough it happens almost immediately as Carlito gets involved in a drug deal gone wrong, although he winds up running a nightclub with his dead cousin's money. His hope is to save up enough money to go into retirement away from New York, with some help from his girlfriend Gail (Penelope Ann Miller). But gangster Benny (John Leguizamo). Also, the district attorney really wants to put Carlito back in prison. In small roles are a young Viggo Mortensen as a wheelchair-bound friend, and director elsewhere Paul Mazursky as a judge.
If you've read enough of these posts, you'll know that Technicolor was already in use in the 1920s, although this was the more primitive “two-strip” technique. Many movies had one or two sequences done in color since the cost was so high, but the Technicolor company did help get a couple of features made, such as The Viking, which is on TCM at 9:45 AM Thursday. Leif Ericsson (Donald Crisp) winds up with English slave Alwin (LeRoy Mason) after a group of Vikings raided the English coast and took him captive. Alwin had been sold to Helga (Pauline Starke), but she couldn't handle Alwin, hence his ending up with Leif. Leif has converted to Christianity and hopes to marry Helga, but she's also being pursued by Leif's second-in-command Egil. Leif goes off to Greenland to see his father Eric the Red, and then heads off further west in search of new lands, but there's the religious conflict as well as the fear of the unknown among Leif's crew.
If you want something decidedly non-Irish after St. Patrick's Day, you could try Booty Call, airing on Showtime Next at 6:35 PM Thursday. Rushon (Tommy Davidson) is going on a date with his girlfriend of seven weeks Nikki (Tamala Jones), and thinks seven weeks is long enough to wait for sex. For moral support on the date, he's making it a double date, having set up his friend Bunz (Jamie Foxx) on a blind date with Nikki's girlfriend Lysterine (Vivica A. Fox), who it seems at first is not quite compatible with Bunz. But they all go back to Nikki's apartment and, sure enough, the mood hits, so the couples go to each woman's apartment for some nookie. But Nikki insists that they have safe sex, forcing Rushon to get Bunz and go out to get condoms. One thing leads to another, and the two men have all sorts of difficulty getting everything just right so that they can finally get some sex. As you can probably guess from the title, this is not a family movie, but for people who have a raunchy sense of humor, it's very funny.
It's only March, but there are several showings of October Sky this week, including 7:55 AM Saturday at on Flix. A young Jake Gyllenhaal plays Homer Hickam, who lives in the town of Coalwood, WV, in 1957, where his father John (Chris Cooper) is a foreman at the local coal mine, and expects his sons to go into working at the mine simply because it's what everybody in town does. But this being 1957, the Soviets launch Sputnik, and the space race is on. Homer is intrigued by the satellite and would like to launch rockets of his own, something that's not exactly easy and is fraught with all sorts of problems, as he and his friends learn when not all of their initial attempts launch properly, leading at one point to the police trying to arrest them for the damage they cause. But they've got a teacher in Miss Riley (Laura Dern) who supports them, and even encourages them to try to qualify for the science fair where they might even get a scholarship to college, which is a way out of the coal mines. It's all based on a true story; Homer is still alive and turned 78 last month.
Spring starts this weekend so Saturday night's TCM schedule includes some movies that are at least appropriate in terms of the title. I don't think I've mentioned A Walk in the Spring Rain before; it airs at 9:45 PM Saturday. Ingrid Bergman plays Libby Meredith, a relatively educated woman who's married to college professor Roger (Fritz Weaver). He's about to take his sabbatical to write a book, and that means going from university to a much more isolated place in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains; in some ways, it might be nice for Libby to get away from it all as well. The farm that borders the property where the Merediths are staying is run by Will Cade (Anthony Quinn), who's trapped in an unhappy marriage with his wife Ann (Virginia Gregg). It's not too difficult to guess what happens next, which is that Will and Libby start to develop feelings for each other. But there are complications, with both Libby and Will having kids who want their parents for their own needs and the severe culture clash.
A movie that's back in the FXM rotation is The Day Mars Invaded Earth, at 9:55 AM Sunday. Kent Taylor plays Dr. Fielding, a NASA scientist who's been having trouble with his wife Claire (Marie Windsor) and kids. That's because the rest of the family is still living in California as caretakers for a mansion while Dad has been in Florida working on the space agency's Mars probe. The probe lands on Mars and sends out a rover-like device, but at that point something strange happens as Dr. Fielding is momentarily paralyzed, taken over by some sort of hazy electrical field. In fact there's life on Mars and that life, not liking having their world invaded, sent the electricity back ot Earth. But they also sent something more than that, as the good doctor and his family learn when Dad heads back to California to try to patch things up with the rest of the family. They all start to get the distinct feeling that each of them has a doppelgänger running around the grounds of the mansion.
Finally, we'll end with My Favorite Year, at 6:00 PM Sunday on TCM. Mark Linn-Baker plays Benjy Stone, an assistant writer for one of those early-1950s TV sketch shows that went on the air live, starring King Kaiser (Joseph Bologna). Benjy has been trying to advance in his career and get the girl he loves, production assistant KC Downing (Jessica Harper), interested in him, without much success. His job is about to become a little more difficult, however, when the show schedules Alan Swann (Peter O'Toole) as this week's guest star. Swann is a notorious drunk, and having him show up drunk for the show would be a catastrophe, so it's Benjy's job to make certain that Swann stays sober, chaperoning Swann around the city. Swann is only taking this job for the money, as he's got child support and back taxes to pay. Back on the show, real-life gangster Karl Rojeck (Cameron Mitchell) is agitated with the show's sketches that are thinly-veiled attacks on him, and wants the show to cease and desist, or else. It all comes together as the show goes live….