Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of March 2-8, 2020. We're in the first full week of a new month, so were going to get a new Star of the Month and some returning features, like Noir Alley and the Saturday matinée block on TCM. But there continues to be a bunch of interesting movies on other channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Last week I mentioned having recommended Foreign Correspondent several times already. Another Alfred Hitchcock movie that's always worth mentioning when it shows up is Strangers on a Train, which TCM is showing at 4:00 PM Monday. Farley Granger plays Guy Haines, a tennis player in love with Senator Morton's (Leo G. Carroll) daughter Anne (Ruth Roman). But he's trapped in a loveless marriage to Miriam. One day on a train, Guy runs into Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), who claims to be a big fan of Guy's. Bruno has a problem in the form of his overbearing mother and, when he learns about Guy's marital woes, makes a remark to Guy that perhaps the two could swap each other's crimes, with Bruno doing away with Mrs. Haines and Guy offing Mrs. Antony. It's nuts and Guy thinks nothing about it. But then Bruno really does kill Mrs. Haines. And dammit, he expects Guy to return the favor and, if he doesn't, is going to frame Guy for the murder of Guy's wife. A lot of great scenes such as the tennis match and the carnival finale, and the plot was recycled for the 1980s comedy Throw Momma from the Train (not on this week as far as I can tell).
A movie that started showing up in the FXM lineup recently is the ultra low-budget B movie Backlash. It's going to be on again at 4:45 AM Tuesday. John Eldredge plays John Moreland, a prominent attorney who's been defending a gangster. One day, Moreland's car is found having gone off a mountain road, burning him beyond normal recognition. As the police led by Det. McMullen (Larry Blake) investigate, they find that John wasn't getting along well with his wife Catherine (Jean ******), who is also carrying on an affair with the District Attorney, Conroy (Richard Travis)! The crash wasn't an accident but murder, and most of the evidence points to Catherine. But as McMullen keeps investigating including Moreland's law partner, the gangster, and the gangster's girlfriend, he finds that things don't quite seem to be adding up. But who did it and why? There are interesting ideas here and the movie is certainly worth a watch, but thanks to the B budget it doesn't work out quite as well as it otherwise could have.
You know the Humphrey Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon, and probably know that there was a version in the early 30s starring Ricardo Cortez. But in between, there was a third version, this one called Satan Met a Lady. You can see it at 6:00 AM Wednesday on TCM. All the names are changed, so instead of Sam Spade, we get Ted Shane (Warren William) as the detective, who shows up in a new town to work with his old partner. Into Shane's office one morning comes Valerie Purvis (Bette Davis), looking for a tail to be put on a man following her. This results in Shane's partner being killed, Shane's apartment being searched, and his learning about a “Horn of Roland” that's extremely valuable and the, uh, stuff that dreams are made of. The interesting casting has the Sydney Greenstreet character being replaced by a woman (Alison Skipworth), and the Peter Lorre character being played by Arthur Treacher of all people. Very different casting, but as long as you're not expecting anything like the Bogart version, it all still works.
If you want something rather different from what I normally recommend, perhaps you could watch Bloodsport, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 9:25 PM Wednesday. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Frank Dux, who learned martial arts from a sensei growing up, and got quite good at it. Now grown up, he's a captain in the US Army, but gets invited to compete in the Kumite, a big martial arts tournament in Hong Kong. Well, there's a problem with this, which is that the tournament is really rather illegal. That and it's also quite dangerous as fighters have been known to die in the ring. Unsurprisingly, the Army doesn't let Frank go off to Hong Kong; also unsurprisingly, Frank goes AWOL in order to compete. He shows himself to be a pretty good competitor, but his ultimate rival, Chong Li (Bolo Yeung), isn't above fighting dirty. The Army is still looking for Dux too, and there's a subplot involving a female journalist investigating the competition.
With 31 Days of Oscar at an end, we get a new Star of the Month from TCM. This time it's Joe E. Brown, the comic actor whose rubbery face graced movies for some 30 years. His movies are showing on TCM every Wednesday in prime time. This first Wednesday includes the early talkie On With the Show!, at 1:30 AM Thursday. This is a backstage musical, looking at a struggling production which the producers would like to stage on Broadway, except that they don't have the money to do so, so this last preview just has to be a success. Hat-check girl Kitty (Sally O'Neil) is in love with usher Jimmy (William Bakewell). She could be a star, but it doesn't look like she'll get a break with the female lead Nita (Betty Compson) getting injured. (The male lead in the show-within-a-show is played by Arthur Lake.) Meanwhile, the night's take gets stolen, and Jimmy gets wrongly accused of it. Joe E. Brown is there for comic relief, both onstage and off. The movie was originally filmed in two-strip Technicolor, but as far as is known only black-and-white prints survive.
Actor Kirk Douglas died last month at the age of 103, and with 31 Days of Oscar finally over, TCM now has the time to get around to a proper tribute to Douglas. They'll be showing eleven of his films in a 24-hour salute starting Thursday morning. One of the movies that I think I've never recommended before is The Story of Three Loves, at 10:00 AM Thursday. Douglas only shows up in the final third of the movie, but that's by design since this is an anthology movie. A transatlantic liner is heading back to America, and we get the stories of three different people who knew love in Europe but lost their loves. First up is James Mason as a ballet choreographer and producer who meets Moira Shearer. She was a budding ballerina who had to give up dance because of illness, but is determined to dance again even if it kills her. She gets her chance to dance for Mason. Second is Leslie Caron, as a governess to a child whose family is vacationing in Rome. The kid meets alleged witch Ethel Barrymore, leading to a spell that makes the kid temporarily an adult (Farley Granger) and falling in love with… his governess. In the last story, Douglas plays a trapeze artist whose previous partner dies and who meets a new potential partner (Pier Angeli).
Up against Kirk Douglas is a throwback movie: The Rocketeer, at 9:00 AM Thursday on Flix. In 1938, gangsters steal a rocket pack from Howard Hughes (Terry O'Quinn) and, in the getaway, hide it in an airplane. Pilot Cliff Secord's (Billy Campbell) plane gets destroyed since everybody thinks the pack is in his plane. He and his mechanic Peevy (Alan Arkin) eventually find the rocket pack, and, Peevy being mechanically inclined, figures out how to make it work. Cliff uses it to save somebody's life, which makes him a national figure called the “Rocketeer”. But everybody wants that rocket pack. Obviously it had belonged to Hughes, but the FBI want it as well since it's technically stolen goods and crimes have been committed. But it was stolen as part of a Nazi plan, with the Nazis using actor Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) to steal it for their own nefarious purposes. Cliff's girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) is an extra in Sinclair's latest film, so he's going to overhear Cliff and Jenny talking about the rocket pack, making him know where it is.
For another early talkie, try Lights of New York, which is airing at about 8:25 AM Saturday on TCM as part of their Saturday matinée block. In fact, this is the first feature-length all-talking movie, earlier films like The Jazz Singer only having some talking and singing scenes. Of course, since the movie is known for that distinction, the plot isn't all that much to write home about. A pair of small-town barbers, Gene (Eugene Pallette!) and Eddie (Cullen Landis), go to the big city to open a barbershop, but wind up being the front for a gang of bootleggers led by Hawk (Wheeler Oakman). If that's not bad enough, Eddie has a nice girlfriend in Kitty (Helene Costello) – but Hawk eyes her and decides that Kitty is going to be his. The fact that Hawk already has a girlfriend in Molly (Gladys Brockwell) isn't going to stop him. When a cop gets shot by bootleggers, Hawk decides that he can pin it on Eddie and get rid of one of his problems. Have fun looking for the microphones, since the boom mike wasn't invented for another few months.
You may not have thought of Buster Crabbe as having been a western star. But you can see him in the western Gun Brothers, which airs at 10:04 AM Saturday on StarzEncore Westerns. Crabbe plays Chad Santee, an officer in the cavalry who is finally getting out and going to join his brother Jubal (Neville Brand) on his ranch in Wyoming. Along the way to meet Jubal, he saves a woman Rose (Ann Robinson) from a gambler. But when he gets to Wyoming, he finds out that his brother isn't really a rancher, but a member of a gang along with Jubal's friend Shawnee (Michael Ansara). Jubal wants Chad to join the gang, but Chad is horrified, and he and Rose decide to go ranch honestly. Jubal eventually decides that the outlaw life isn't for him, and goes off to live with Chad. But Shawnee isn't about to let Jubal escape the outlaw life so easily, leading to the sort of climax you can expect from a programmer western like this.
Finally, on Sunday, I'm going to mention a pair of Leslie Howard movies. Well, only one of them has Howard playing a character, and that's Pygmalion, at 6:00 AM Sunday. Based on the play by George Bernard Shaw, the movie tells the story of upper-class diction teacher Henry Higgins (Howard), who gets in a bet with a friend over a Cockney girl who sells flowers on a street corner, Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller). Namely, they bet over whether Henry can turn her into a high-class woman, which involves completely changing her accent and vocabulary since nobody's going to accept a Cockney into the upper crust. The problem, of course, is that the two fall in love with each other along the way, even if they don't want to admit. Thankfully, nobody breaks into song like in My Fair Lady.
Pygmalion is followed at 8:00 AM by Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave a Damn. Howard is probably best known for playing Ashley Wilkes, but unlike Rhett Butler's “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn” line, in real life Howard did, doing a tremendous amount for the war effort after 1939 until the plane he was in was shot down over the Bay of Biscay in 1943. But Howard's life was also very complicated, and this fine documentary covers it all.