Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of March 20-26, 2017. Amazingly, your Wisconsin Badgers are still in the basketball thing, so I know you're all waiting for the next match in nervous anticipation. Why not deal with the nervousness by watching some movies? Once again, I've used my impeccable taste to select a bunch of movies I know you'll all like. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
You probably think of Richard Pryor for his stand-up comedy and his comedic movies. (Well, that and the cocaine.) He was actually a good enough actor to do drama, too, and shows this in Blue Collar, which StarzEncore Classics is running at 3:20 AM Monday. Pryor plays Zeke, an assembly-line worker at a car factory along with Jerry (Harvey Keitel) and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto). They work hard, and unsurprisingly the bosses treat them like dirt. But, of course, the union treats them like dirt, too, and so one night out on the town they decide to rob the union safe. They only get $600, which isn't much, but they also get some important documents. Those documents reveal how corrupt the union is (what a shocker). The union, for their part, tries to turn the three men against each other, and states publicly that the men cost the union $10,000, which is of course balderdash and makes it easier for the men to decide to come out with the real scoop about their union. Except that the federal government is on to them, too….
TCM is running its monthly Spotlight six straight nights this week, a miniseries billed as March Malice that looks at villainous characters from all sorts of angles, grouping them into double bills. We start off with repressed killers, including Peeping Tom at 10:00 PM Monday. Karlheinz Böhm stars as Mark, a young camerman who works for the respectable film industry by day and photographing porno shoots as a second job. However, his real obsession is filming fear, which he does by raping and killing women and filiming their reactions to their inevitable doom. And then he gets closer to the girl downstairs Helen (Anna Massey) who with her mother is renting the lower floor of Mark's house. He begins to fall in love with her, to the point where he feels he can trust her with part of the reason why he is the way he is, which is that he was the subject for his father's experiments in filming fear. She's repulsed. And meanwhile, the police are beginning to close in on the killer in all those murders Mark has committed. This was an extremely controversial film when it was released in 1960, and effectively ended director Michael Powell's career.
The Desert Rats is back on FXM Retro, and you can catch it at 7:45 AM Tuesday. The desert here is the Sahara, in the early part of World War II when it was the British Empire alone against the Nazis, who are trying to push the British back to the Suez Canal, having reached Tobruk in Libya. Erwin Rommel (James Mason) is heading the siege, and the Empire's forces have a commander in young Scottish Captain MacRoberts (Richard Burton). MacRoberts is leading a ragtag bunch of Anzac troops, from Australia and New Zealand, and the siege conditions are difficult on everybody, especially a young commander like MacRoberts who doesn't have much experience and is learning through trial by fire. Thankfully for him, he's got an ally in his former school headmaster Bartlett (Robert Newton) who emigrated to Australia and is part of the Anzac battalion. Unfortunately, however, Bartlett is also an alcoholic.
You may remember Richard Widmark pushing a wheelchair-bound old woman down a staircase in Kiss of Death. For those of you who like more recent movies, Kiss of Death was remade in the 1990s and that remake will be on Starz in Black, at 1:20 AM Wednesday. David Caruso, who at the time was being groomed for movie stardom after leaving the TV series NYPD Blue, plays Jimmy, the small-time con trying to go straight who makes the mistake of doing a job for Junior Brown (Nicholas Cage). He gets arrested for it, and it leads to his wife (Helen Hunt) starting to drink again, with her eventually sleeping with his cousin and driving the cousin's car head-on into a train! The authorities, led by DA Zioli (Stanley Tucci) realize Jimmy is a little fish, and offer him parole in exchange for naming names. Jimmy is so desperate that he takes up the offer and becomes an informant, but not telling his new wife, who just happens to be his first wife's sister.
The term “gaslighting” has come into vogue recently, for reasons I don't quite get. It takes its name from a play and later movie called Gaslight; the 1944 movie version will be on TCM at 11:30 AM Wednesday. (There was also a 1940 British movie.) Ingird Bergman stars as Paula, a young woman whose aunt, a famous opera singer, was murdered in her fashionable Victorian London home. Paula is sent to Italy to get away and study music, and that's where she meets pianist Gregory (Charles Boyer). The two fall quickly in love, although some people have qualms. They get married and move back in to that London home. It turns out that Gregory had ulterior motives for marrying Paula, as he's trying to get at something. Every evening, the gaslight dims just a bit, but Gregory and the hired help tell Paula that no, it really didn't happen. And Gregory seems to be trying to drive Paula insane. But why? Joseph Cotten is miscast but does OK as a London detective, and Angela Lansbury, in her debut role, plays a saucy maid.
When March Malice gets to “Western villians”, one of the movies is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, at 8:00 PM Wednesday. James Stewart plays Ransom Stoddard, a US Senator from the west who, at the start of the movie, is returning to his home state with wife Hallie (Vera Miles). His good friend Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) has just died, and Ransom thinks about Tom and what happened between them to change the course of Ransom's life…. Many years ago, when the state was still a territory, Ransom was a young attorney and newspaperman who get in trouble with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Ransom and the newspaper want the territory to become a state, while the cattlemen don't, and they've hired Valance to dispose of enough statehood supporters to put the rest of them off the idea. Ransom thinks something should be done, but he's a very meek man, and terrible with a gun, so there's no way he can. Tom has become a close friend, and sees that Ransom is setting himself up for disaster, but what can Tom do about it? When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
I don't think I mentioned The War Wagon during its last go-round on StarzEncore Westerns. It's showing up again at 9:50 PM Thursday, and is a really entertaining western. John Wayne plays Taw Jackson, who shows up in the town of Emmett, NM, after having spent three years in prison. Nobody's happy about it, because the man who owns the town, Pierce (Bruce Cabot) has a thing with Taw. Well, it's more the other way around in that Taw is justified in being angry at Pierce because Pierce stole Taw's ranch while Taw was in prison, and then struck gold on the land. Taw has decided that he's going to get back at Pierce by robbing a gold shipment. Except that the gold is shipped in an armor-plated coach with a Gatling gun on top (hence the name “the war wagon”). Taw assembles a team of people for the heist: gunman/safecracker Lomax (Kirk Douglas); explosives expert but inveterate drunk Billy (Robert Walker Jr.); inside man Fletcher (Keenan Wynn); and Kiowa liaison Levi Walking Bear (a hilariously miscast Howard Keel). Problems include the fact that Lomax doesn't like the idea of a drunk guy handling explosives, while Billy falls for what he thinks is Fletcher's daughter but is actually Fletcher's wife; she doesn't particularly care for her husband, however. A fun heist set out west, with good comic touches.
A Clockwork Orange doesn't show up all that often, but it's on TCM at 1:30 AM Saturday. Set in a future dystopic Britain (as if the current one isn't dystopic enough), the movie stars Malcolm McDowell as Alex, the leader of a gang of “droogs”, people who commit ultra-violence just because it's a fun thing to do. One time, though, Alex goes too far, And gets convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to a long time behind bars. However, he's given a chance to shorten that sentence after the government develops a new rehabilitation technique that theoretically gets rid of all those violent impulses. Who would want to become a pod person, but then Alex doesn't want to be stuck in prison for another decade. So he goes through with the therapy and gets released from prison. Except that he finds perhaps he doesn't want to live in a world which is still ultra-violent. It didn't help, either, that the treatment itself is dehumanizing, even if it didn't “work”.
It's been a while since Suddenly has been on, but I get the chance to recommend it again, on TCM this Saturday at 8:30 AM. The title refers to a small town somewhere in northern California. The President is going to be travelling through on his way to a fishing trip, and it's going to be partly up to Sheriff Shaw (Sterling Hayden), with help from the Secret Service to make certain nothing happens to the President. Shaw is in love with Mrs. Benson (Nancy Gates), a widow who lives with her young son and her father-in-law (James Gleason) in a nice house overlooking the train station where the President will be transferring from train to limo. Somebody else thinks it's a nice house: John Baron (Frank Sinatra), who has decided with his gang to assassinate the president. So he and his men stage a home invasion and terrorize the Bensons, until the appointed time for the president to show up at the train station. But perhaps the Bensons are more resourceful than they're given credit for. Watch this and you can see why it went out of circulation for years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
If you're sick of retread CBs, or ill-tempered doctors, don't worry. House, airing at 2:00 AM Sunday on TCM, has none of those. Describing what it does have is no easier. Zardoz on acid meets the Amityville Horror might begin to be a comparison, but even that doesn't begin to do justice to the movie. Japanese TV director Nobuhiko Obayashi asked his pre-teen daughter what frightened her, and turned her answers into the kernel of a story, announcing that he was going to make a film about all this. He promoted it enough that the studio decided to give him a budget, presumably to shut him up. He then hired a bunch of teenage girls and put them in a story, such as it is, about a girl who takes her friends with her to her aunt's house out in the country for a summer vacation. What they don't know is that the house is malevolent, having become haunted after the aunt died. And the house tries to kill all of the girls in increasingly bizarre ways. You may have a different view of pianos and cats after watching this one.