Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of March 23-29, 2020. I hope that you're not stuck inside due to government edict and are in a place where society isn't panicking for no good reason and trying to create a worldwide bankruptcy. We can't rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic since it already sank, but we can watch some good movies instead. There's a lot of interesting stuff on TV this week, and I've used my good taste to select some of them for you. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off with this week's TCM Import, Death of a Cyclist, at 2:00 AM Monday. Juan (Alberto Closas) is a university professor who isn't particularly happy with his job or life. He's having an affair with Maria José (Lucia Bose), a wealthy woman who's got a husband. They've been having trysts well away from their university town. Unfortunately for them, on the way back from one of those meetings they run into a cyclist, killing him. It's an accident, except that if they were to go to the police to report it, the affair that they've been having would become public, which is the last thing they want. So they leave him to die. It doesn't help that Maria cares as much about her place in society, having married up, as she does about Juan, or about what's right. Juan, for his part, has a conscience, and that may just bring matters to a head. There's also the issue of Rafael, a student who seems to know that Juan and Maria have some sort of secret between them. It's somewhat amazing that this got made in Franco's Spain considering the social commentary it's making.
A movie that showed up recently in the FXM rotation is Peeper. It's going to be on again this week, at 3:00 AM Tuesday. Michael Caine plays the titular “peeper”, a private eye named Tucker who's left Britain after World War II and wound up in 1947 Los Angeles. One day, into his office comes Anglich (Michael Constantine). His story is that he knocked a woman up 30 years ago and the child was given up for adoption, whereupon he left for Florida and made a fortune; now, he wants to do something for the daughter. Tucker's investigation leads to the wealthy Prendergast family, and the elder daughter Ellen (Natalie Wood). But as Tucker continues to investigate, there are goons trying to stop him, and perhaps Ellen isn't quite what she seems. Bodies start piling up, and Tucker is in danger. This one was designed as a spoof of the old 40s noirs, and everybody looks like they're having a lot of fun making it. But it's also rather convoluted.
I notice that my selections this week are skewing more recent, with most of it being from the 1950s and beyond. So I have to make note of the Tuesday night lineup on TCM. There's a recent documentary on Alice Guy-Blaché that's getting its premiere at 8:00 PM Tuesday, with a repeat at midnight Wednesday (ie. 11:00 PM Tuesday LFT). Guy-Blaché was a pioneering director, having made her first silent movie in 1896, working through the teens, an era when pretty much every director was a pioneer but especially a woman. Around the airings of the documentary there are a bunch of her movies, most of which are two-reelers. There's also the longer “epic” The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ, which tells the story of Jesus in about 20 chapters running an epic… 34 minutes! Well, that was quite long for 1906.
Earlier on Tuesday is one of the selections from the 1990s, Housesitter, at 5:40 PM on HBO Signature. Steve Martin plays Newton Davis, an architect in love with Becky (Dana Delany) to the point that he's designed and built a house just for her as a gift to propose to her. Becky, however rejects the proposal. A despondent Newton meets struggling waitress Gwen (Goldie Hawn) at a restaurant and tells her the story of that house and losing his girlfriend. Since Gwen is now in need of a house, she does some digging (pre-Internet), finds the house, and moves in, telling everybody that she's the girlfriend Newton was planning on getting married to! All of the townsfolk like her, and even Newton's parents do. But Newton still wants to reconcile with Becky, and trying to break off the relationship with his “wife” is going to be difficult since everybody thinks she's the right one for him, and even tries to prevent the two from breaking things off so Newton can marry Becky. Perhaps Gwen's lies are better for everybody than the truth.
TCM is running a day of Sterling Hayden movies on Thursday, which includes another airing of the worthy Suddenly, at 8:45 AM. Hayden plays Tod Shaw, sheriff of the town of Suddenly, CA. He's courting Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates), a widow living with her father (James Gleason) and son. Their house overlooks the local train station. This is important because word transpires that the President is going to be getting off a train at the station so he can continue on to the middle of nowhere for a fishing trip. This is supposed to be highly secret, with Tod making certain everything remains secret and secure. But, of course, the bad guys have already heard about the President's plans, and they send John Baron (Frank Sinatra) to Suddenly as a hired assassin to scope out the town and figure out how to kill the President. The obvious solution is to commandeer the Benson house and use it as a sniper's nest to shoot the President, so Baron and his men invade and hold the Bensons hostage until that train comes. Can Tod stop them?
Up against Suddenly is Column South, over on StarzEncore Westerns at 9:20 AM Thursday. This one sounds like I might have posted about it here before, but a search of the site says no, I haven't. This is another Audie Murphy western, with a theme similar to to some of his other westerns. Murphy plays Lt. Sayre, who's stationed with the cavalry at Ft. Union out in the New Mexico territory in the era just before the Civil War. There are Navajo out there, and as with the Apache later in Arizona, there were attacks on incoming settlers. But he still has a more realistic view of the Navajo than Capt. Whitlock (Robert Sterling), who has only recently showed up at the fort. After a settler gets killed and the Navajo are accused, Lt. Sayre believes that the Navajo weren't responsible for this attack, but Whitlock seems to have his own motivations for going after the Navajo, which might have something to do with the fact that he's a southerner and there's all that tension between the North and South back east. Joan Evans plays Capt. Whitlock's sister who becomes Lt. Sayre's love interest.
Thursday night on TCM brings another night of movies looking at the portrayal of blacks on film. One of the movies that I've never mentioned before is Nothing But a Man, at 11:30 PM Thursday. Ivan Dixon plays Duff, a man who's been working on a railway construction crew, moving from place to place in the South as the railroad rebuilds various lines. In one town, he meets teacher Josie (Abbey Lincoln), daughter of the local minister. The two fall in love even though her dad thinks she needs somebody with better prospects in life, especially when it turns out that Duff already fathered a child by another woman who migrated north with a different man and without the child. That, and Duff has an alcoholic father. But Duff and Josie get married, and Josie even gets pregnant. But Duff's attempts to provide for Josie are fraught with difficulties, as there's no work as good as the itinerant railroad work and there's the omnipresent racism too. Perhaps they should go north as well?
If you want to have fun watching a really bad movie, you could do a lot worse than to catch The Brain That Wouldn't Die, which you can see at noon Friday on TCM. Jason Evers plays Dr. Bill Cortner, who's been doing some experimental work in organ transplantation. He's about to take his girlfriend Jan (Virginia Leith) for a weekend getaway, but unfortunately they get in a car accident that leaves poor Jan decapitated. However, Bill has a great idea. He can continue work on his experiments by keeping Jan's disembodied head alive in an out-of-the-way laboratory while he finds a suitable body for the first head transplant. Of course, this means that he's going to have to find a body, and he has some very specific ideas about what sort of body he wants as he goes to strip clubs looking for just the right body. Then there are the problems of the woman in question not wanting to donate her body to science, while Jan is growing increasingly snarky toward Bill. And there's a locked door in the laboratory with something behind it – and Jan seems to have a psychic connection with whatever is behind that door. Tremedously tacky, but so much fun.
I was actually in a movie theater at the beginning of the year to watch a current movie. One of the previews was for a new version of The Invisible Man, and watching the trailer made me think, “Blithe Spirit meets Sleeping With the Enemy”. The latter movie is on this week, at 9:24 AM Saturday on StarzEncore Classics. Julia Roberts plays Laura, a housewife living what looks like a great life out on Cape Cod with her wealthy husband Martin (Patrick Bergin). The only thing is, he beats the crap out of her and is utterly controlling. So she finally decides to take matters into her own hands and fake her death in a boating accident a la Natalie Wood, swimming to shore and escaping west to Iowa, where she's moved her nursing home-bound mother. She gets a nice house in a small town and even has a nice neighbor in Ben (Kevin Anderson) whom she might be able to love if she can get over the psychological scars of having lived with Martin. Martin, for his part, receives information that Laura didn't actually die, so he starts looking for her, and you just know he's going to show up in the final reel.
I have a feeling that I've recommended the movie Countdown before, but I can't remember the last time I did. It's going to be on TCM again this Saturday at 4:00 PM. It's the late 1960s, and NASA has been running the Apollo program to get to the moon; Chiz (Robert Duvall) is one of the mission commanders. However, one of the training exercises is cut short when news is released that the Soviets have a manned mission to the moon set to go in a couple of weeks. Apollo can't ramp up that fast, but fortunately NASA has had a secret emergency program prepared, called Pilgrim. This would allow for one astronaut to go up with a previously-launched shelter pod, find that pod once he lands on the moon, and then wait several weeks for Apollo to send a full crew. It's audacious, and matters are made worse when the Soviets launch a civilian into space. Chiz would have been the perfect person to go to the moon, but now NASA feel they need to send a civilian, so they pick NASA geologist Lee Stegler (James Caan). Will he be able to get to the moon safely and find the shelter? And will they beat the Soviets?
We have one feature from before 1950 this week, and that's Biography of a Bachelor Girl, which will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Sunday. Ann Harding plays the bachelor girl, an artist named Marion who is more famous for being famous and is returning from Europe. Magazine editor Dick Kurt (Robert Montgomery with odd glasses) thinks that a serialized version of her life story would sell well, so he's trying to buy the rights before anybody else can. He runs into Bunny Nolan (Edward Everett Horton), who is running for US Senator and engaged to the daughter (Una Merkel) of a newspaper publisher. He sees Marion and realizes that both of them are from the same home town and had a relationship before either of them became famous. And, if Marion were to publish that biography, it might sink Nolan's electoral chances. So he's trying to impress on Marion and Kurt not to publish the story. Edward Arnold shows up as an Austrian but disappears from the story for no good reason.