Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of March 16-22, 2020. Normally I'd make a comment or two about sports here, but everybody's been quarantined so there are no sports to talk about. But if you're stuck inside, then watching a bunch of good movies is a good way to pass the time. Naturally, I've picked out a lineup of such movies for all of you. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Mondays in March on TCM have the theme of “Movies at Sea”. One of this week's odder selections is the 1930 version of Moby Dick, at 10:15 AM Monday. The reason it's odd is that it's not really an adaptation of the Melville novel, but of an earlier silent movie called The Sea Beast, with character names rechristened with those from Melville. So you've got John Barrymore playing Ahab, who in this story is a ladies' man who in New Bedford falls in love with Faith Mapple (Joan Bennett), daughter of Rev. Mapple (John Ince) and already loved by Ahab's brother Derek (Lloyd Hughes). Eventually, Ahab, Queequeg, and Starbuck go out to sea, losing a leg to Moby Dick. He thinks this means Faith will never love him, so he feels he has to go back to sea in order to kill the whale and redeem himself! And amazingly enough, Ahab doesn't die in this telling of the story, but returns home triumphantly with a dead whale! The movie actually isn't bad, as long as you know you're not really getting the Melville story.
Monday on FXM means a movie that only showed up recently in the channel's rotation, The Model and the Marriage Broker. It comes on at 6:00 AM Monday. Thelma Ritter plays the modern marriage broker, named Mae Swasey. She's basically running a dating service with the exception that she makes more money when the couples get married. One day while at the optometrist to talk to client Wixted (Zero Mostel), she accidentally winds up with the purse of model Kitty (Jeanne Crain), who's in an unhappy relationship to a married man. Meanwhile, another client in the Kuschner daughter who's about to get married to X-ray technician Matt (Scott Brady). Matt doesn't think he's ready to marry, though, so he stands his fiancée up at the altar. And then Kitty comes back to Mae to ask for help in breaking up that relationship. Mae helps, but also gets the devious idea of trying to put Kitty and Matt together. Interesting enough, although I can't imagine that sort of marriage broker still existing in 1950s New York.
Tuesday is St. Patrick's Day, when lots of people pretend to be Irish and get rip-roaring drunk. TCM is spending the day as usual with a bunch of Irish-themed films, with one of the better ones being The Rising of the Moon at 4:30 PM. What makes it more worthwhile is that it's an anthology of three earlier short stories by Irish writers, so it's not quite as much Hollywood's (well, really John Ford's) doe-eyed view of Ireland or especially Irish-Americans. The first story, “The Majesty of the Law” stars Cyril Cusack as a policeman who has to arrest an old traditionalist for assault, a man who feels he's done nothing wrong. Next up is “A Minute's Wait”, about a train on a rural Irish line that stops at a small town for the titular minute's wait, only for things to spiral out of control and the wait to become much longer. Finally is “1921”, about a condemned man during the Irish War of Independence who is broken out of prison, and the search for him. The stories are presented by Tyrone Power, with everything filmed on location in Ireland.
We've got a couple of movies this week based on true stories. One of them is The Untouchables, airing at 9:07 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Classics. Prohibition led to a massive rise in organized crime, which in Chicago was dominated by Al Capone (Robert De Niro). The federal government, then as now pissed that people are altering their brain chemistry in a way the state doesn't approve, decides they're going to crack down more and send in federal agents led by Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) to try to bring down Capone, since the Chicago police are more or less in the pocket of Capone and the other mobsters. (To be fair, we've seen that the feds are utterly corrupt too, they're just on a different side from the local police in this case.) Ness doesn't succeed at first, until he meets the stereotypical Irish-American cop who's actually not corrupt, this one being named Jimmy Malone and played by famous Irishman Sean Connery. (Wait. Connery's Irish now?) Ness ultimately brings down Capone on income tax charges.
Wednesday brings another night of films featuring Star of the Month Joe E. Brown. Among them is the very silly comedy Earthworm Tractors, on at 9:30 PM. Brown plays Alexander Botts, a salesman in love with Sally. She has another suitor, and her dad doesn't like salesman, so Alexander decides to claim he can sell anything and if he can, perhaps this will get Dad to relent. Botts winds up writing to the Earthworm tractor company claiming to be able to sell tractors even though he knows nothing about them. With that, he gets sent to a small town where the highway department led by Sam Johnson (Guy Kibbee) is going to be building a new road – and Johnson hates tractors. Predictably, things go wrong with Johnson winding up on a runaway tractor. But Botts persevers, and has even met Johnson's daughter Mabel (June Travis) and begins to fall in love with her. Fortunately, she believes in the efficacy of tractors and might be able to convince Johnson to buy some.
For western fans, I tend to pick a movie from StarzEncore Westerns each week. This week, it's a comic western: The Hallelujah Trail, at 10:09 AM Thursday. The scene is late 1867 in Denver, when Colorado was still a territory and Denver was a mining town. The forecast, such as it is, is for a tough winter which might close off all the trails to Denver, which is a problem, since that would leave the miners without any whiskey! So the miners get together and led by Oracle Jones (Donald Pleasance), put in an order with businessman Wallingham (Brian Keith) back east for a large load of liquor that's going to require an entire wagon train. Wallingham informs the cavalry, and in the persons of Col. Gearhart (Burt Lancaster) and Capt. Slater (Jim Hutton) are sent to guard the wagon train. Unfortunately, a newspaper has published news of the train and its cargo, which enrages the temperance leaders, led by Cora Massingale (Lee Remick). But they're not the only ones to hear about it, as the Indians do too. Martin Landau is oddly cast as Chief Walks-Stooped-Over, but then this is a parody. Everybody tries to get their hands on that liquor.
We've got a second western this week, this one beting Wichita, on TCM at 10:00 PM Thursday. Wyatt Earp was a popular character in westerns, considering how many versions of the gunfight in Tombstone have been made. But this film looks at Wyatt (played by Joel McCrea) several years before that. He had been a buffalo hunter, which is where he met Bat Masterson (Keith Larsen), and in the mid-1870s shows up in the relatively lawless town of Wichita KS. The town fathers ask for help, and Earp reluctantly accepts, imposing a strict law-and-order regime to bring the town to heel. But having done so, the bigwigs want Earp to relax a bit so the town can have some prosperity. Earp says hell no, and saloon owner Doc Black (Edgar Buchanan) plots to have Earp killed with the town fathers presumably looking the other way. But the banker's daughter, Laurie McCoy (Vera Miles) sides with Wyatt and his brothers (Peter Graves playing Morgan Earp) come to town to help deal with Black's hired guns (including Lloyd Bridges).
Another movie based on an interesting true story is The Catcher Was a Spy, which you can see at 12:45 PM Friday on Showtime Next. Paul Rudd plays Moe Berg, a MLB catcher who had graduated from Princeton and was considered one of the smartest men in baseball in the 1920s and 1930s. When MLB sent a delegation to Japan in the mid-1930s, he was on it despite being a backup player. He was also under contract to the Movietone newsreel, but in fact was taking photos for US intelligence (the other players had their film commandeered by US intelligence, too, and received the negatives in very meticulous order, so they must have known something was up). After Berg's playing and coaching career, World War II broke out, and Berg was called upon again by US intelligence. This time, his task was to go to Switzerland, and try to ascertain from Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) whether or not the Nazis were going to be able to make a nuclear bomb – and to kill Heisenberg if that would prevent the Nazis from getting the bomb. This stuff all came to light in a biography in the mid 1990s, but it took two decades for a movie to get made about it.
We're going to wind up this week with a couple of murder suspense stories. First up is Dial M for Murder, at 8:00 PM Saturday on TCM. Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) is a former tennis player living in London who married wealthy American Margot (Grace Kelly). It's not a happy marriage, though, as she had an affair with writer Mark (Robert Cummings) which Tony discovered. She's being blackmailed over a letter from that relationship, and Tony, unhappy with this, decides that he's going to have Margot killed. So he blackmails an old school friend Swann (Anthony Dawson) to do the deed one night while she's home and he's at the theater. But, when Swann goes to their flat to kill Margot, a scuffle ensues and Margot is able to get a pair of scissors off the desk and kill Swann. An investigation ensues, and all roads point to Margot's story of self-defense not being true…. Alfred Hitchcock directed and the movie was supposed to be in 3-D, as was the craze at the time, but the only real 3-D sequence involves those scissors. Oh, and there's a really bad finger-in-phone prop.
The other murder suspense movie is this week's Noir Alley selection: Elevator to the Gallows, on TCM at 10:00 AM Sunday. Maurice Ronet plays Julien Tavernier, a World War II veteran working for an arms dealer and having an affair with his boss' wife Florence (Jeanne Moreau). They decide to kill the man, making it look like a suicide. So far, so good, but of course the murder plot doesn't quite go according to plan. In this case, the rope Julien uses to climb up a floor is forgotten, and when he goes back to get it, he gets trapped in the elevator after hours. Meanwhile, a couple of young lovers at street level steal Julien's car and use it in the commission of crimes of their own, while Florence gets arrested for not having her ID on her. The police are eventually going to be able to piece everything together and find out what happened, aren't they? This was Louis Malle's first feature film, and it's astonishing to see how good he already was as a director.