Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 28-April 3, 2022. We've got the last couple of days of 31 Days of Oscar this week, followed by a few days of April that don't yet have the new Star of the Month on TCM, so we'll get into that next week. Instead, we get a pair of big birthdays at the start of April. There are also a bunch of interesting films and one that's a huge mess, running from the dawn of the sound era through to the 1990s. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Some movies are remembered mostly for showing up in lists of Oscar winners, and would be forgotten otherwise, which is a shame since some of them are really good movies. An example is Min and Bill, airing at 6:45 AM Monday on TCM. Marie Dressler won the Oscar for playing Min, who runs a rooming house on the pier where all the fishermen leave their stuff and sleep when they don't go out to sea. Bill (Wallace Beery) is one of those fishermen, in a volatile relationship with Min. Min has been looking after a sort of foster daughter in Nancy (Dorothy Jordan), whose prostitute mother Bella (Marjorie Rambeau) dropped her off there several years back. Nancy has finished school and a wealthy young man has asked for her hand in marriage, which very much pleases Min. Bella, however, has heard about this, and comes back into the picture, clearly having dollar signs in her eyes and looking to get into Nancy's good graces. Min knows this would be a disaster for Nancy, and tries to prevent Bella from seeing her and ruining Nancy's chance at marriage and happiness, with a surprise ending.
A search of x4 says that it's been over six years since I last mentioned Ten Wanted Men. It's on StarzEncore Westerns this week at 11:05 AM, so now is a good time to mention it again. Randolph Scott plays John Stewart, a rancher who has had a long rivalry with Wick Campbell (Richard Boone), who has been trying to buy up all the land in the area. Stewart is trying to get help, in the form of his brother Adam who is a lawyer; Adam brings along his adult son Howie (Skip Homeier). On their introduction to local society, Howie meets Mexican orphan Maria Segura (Donna Martell), and falls in love with her. The problem is that Wick more or less raised her and thinks that now that she's an adult, he's got the right of first refusal on her. So he's going to hire all the bad guys he can to try to get the Stewarts to stop making his life more difficult. Scott churned out a whole bunch of B westerns in the 1950s; in this one watch for Marlon Brando's sister Jocelyn as well as a young Dennis Weaver as the sheriff.
Mickey Rooney received four competitive Oscar nominations during his long career. One of them was for The Human Comedy, which will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Tuesday. Rooney plays Homer Macauley, high school student and second son in the Macauley family in small-town California in the early days of World War II. Dad, who died not too long ago, fought in World War I, so Mom (Fay Bainter) is raising the kids alone. Eldest brother Marcus (Van Johnson) has joined the war effort, and to bring in some extra money, Homer is working as a delivery boy for Western Union and otherwise trying to lead a normal life. But the war means death notices by telegram, and the stress has led chief telegraphist Willie Grogan (Frank Morgan) to deal with it all by turning to drink, which forces Homer to take on more responsibility at a young age, especially when he has to start delivering those death notices personally. Watch for a young Donna Reed as Homer's sister, and an uncredited Robert Mitchum as a solder.
Dudley Moore made some great comedies, but he also made some duds, such as Best Defense, airing at 3:00 PM Tuesday on The Movie Channel (or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). Moore plays Wylie Cooper, an engineer for a defense contractor that's going bankrupt. The company, however, has a contract to produce a new weapons targeting system for the Army's next generation of tanks. The system won't work, but: a competing engineer has produced a system that will work and switches the plans surreptitiously because he's being trailed by the KGB. A couple of years later, Lt. Landry (Eddie Murphy) is a tank commander in the Army, stationed in Kuwait while the Iran-Iraq war is going on. Although Cooper's system theoretically works, it turns out it also causes an overheating problem that will doom the tanks that, apart from the targeting system, are shoddy crap. If the movie doesn't work, it's because Murphy's character and storyline were added late in production, after test audiences panned the original movie. The two plot lines don't really mesh.
For a bigger western than Ten Wanted Men, try The Big Country, on TCM at 11:15 AM Wednesday. Gregory Peck plays James McKay, a former ship's captain who met Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker) back east and got engaged to her, now moving out west to marry her. Patricia's father, Maj. Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford), owns a good portion of the land but also has a long-time enemy in Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives who won an Oscar for this role) and his family. In the middle is Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), who owns a small ranch and the key lake called the Big Muddy which everybody uses to water their cattle and which the Hannasseys and Terrills have been trying to get control of, by violent means if neccessary. McKay isn't happy with the feuding and doesn't want to be a part of it, so he decides he's going to by the Maragon spread and continue to allow everybody to use Big Muddy. This only serves to make him an enemy of both sides. Charlton Heston has a rare supporting role as Terrill's ranch foreman, while future rifleman Chuck Connors plays the evil Hannassey son; it's always nice to see him in a bad-guy role.
It's funny how conspiracy theories about the government spying on us hand in hand with large businesses went from being a lefty thing in the 70s to a righty thing today now that the left is largely in control of the permanent state. One of those old conspiracy theory movies, The Parallax View, will be on Flix at 8:20 AM Wednesday. Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) is a reporter who tries to gain attendance at a campaign hosted by a US Senator. That Senator gets assassinated at the event. Three years later, another journalist who was at the event, Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), and who was in a romantic relationship with Frady, comes to see him, telling him she's in fear for her life. Apparently, several other journalists who were at the event three years back have died under mysterious circumstances, and she's next. So perhaps somebody not involved with the event could investigate. Once he starts investigating, his own life is in danger, as everybody knows what he's up to. Eventually, Frady's search takes him to the mysterious Parallax corporation.
If you want a movie that's not a comedy, you could do far worse than to watch The Days of Wine and Roses, on TCM at 5:45 PM Thursday. Jack Lemmon plays Joe Clay, an account manager at a PR firm who is also an alcoholic although he doesn't want to admit to his problem. At a function for a client, he meets the client's secretary, Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), who doesn't like the taste of alcohol at all but is a chocoholic. After finally convincing Kirsten to go out on a date with him, he eventually breaks her down and gets her to try chocolate-flavored drinks so he can have a drinking problem. They get married, and sure enough, Kirsten becomes an alcoholic just like Joe, much to the consternation of her father (Charles Bickford). Eventually, all the drinking starts to take a toll on Joe, and he realizes that he is in fact an alcoholic and goes to AA where his sponsor Jim (Jack Klugman) gets him to stay off alcohol. Joe tries to convince Kirsten to kick the alcohol habit, too, but does she want to?
If Debbie Reynolds hadn't dropped dead after finding out that her daughter Carrie Fisher had died, she would be turning 90 on Friday. TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with several of Reynolds' movies, with the most notable of them being Singin' in the Rain at 4:00 PM Friday, in which she plays Kathy Selden, who falls in love with Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) at the start of the talking picture era in Hollywood because she's got a voice for film and Don's movie partner Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) doesn't. Another movie that I really like is The Mating Game (2:15 PM Friday), which has the radical for Hollywood message that using the IRS as a cudgel against your enemies is an inarguably bad thing to do, as well as the message that the government will actively screw you over. Reynolds plays the eventual love interest of IRS agent Tony Randall.
Some time after Saturday Night Live alumni graduated to making feature films, Lorne Michaels got the idea of taking popular skits from the show and turning them into full-length movies. One example is Coneheads, on Cinemax at 6:31 PM Friday (and three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). Dan Aykroyd reprises his role from the TV show as Beldar, a man from the planet Remulak where everybody has cone-shaped heads that put Peyton Manning's forehead to shame. He and his wife Pyrmaat (Jane Curtin) are on a scouting mission to find planets to conquer for their resources, and Earth seems like a good candidate. Except that they get shot down, forcing them to try to fit in on Earth, specifically in American suburbia. Beldar is able to get a job, but because he doesn't have a Social Security number, a couple of INS agents (Michael McKean and David Spade) are after him. Complicating matters is that Beldar and Pyrmaat have daughter Connie (Michelle Burke), and since all she knows is Earth, she falls in love with an earthling. A bunch of SNL cast members from the era have small parts.
The Saturday matinee programming block returns to TCM after a four-week hiatus for 31 Days of Oscar. The block invariably includes a two-reeler at 11:30 AM, and this week, that short is College Hounds. This is the first of the Dogville shorts, a series that parodied various movie genres (or individual movies) by taking similar plots and putting dogs in all of the character roles, with voice actors providing the dialogue. (Don't think too much about how the poor dogs might have suffered being forced to "act" like this.) This one is a spoof of college comedies, which invariably had a focus on college football, which was much bigger than professional football in the 1920s and 1930s. Red Mange is the big college football hero, but his girlfriend's father has a gambling problem, so tries to get Red forced out of action so that his wager can pay off. Of course, Red is able to escape and show up just in time to save his team. The football action is terrible, but the two schools have better wide receivers than anybody currently on the Packers roster.
If you thought Debbie Reynolds at 90 was a big deal, there's an even bigger deal on Sunday, which is the centenary of the birth of Doris Day. TCM has 12 hours of Doris from noon to midnight on Sunday, although they're only showing four of her films because prime time is a couple of TV specials followed by episodes of the sitcom The Doris Day Show, which she starred in after retiring from films. Of the movies, the best is Love Me Or Leave Me(1:45 PM Sunday), based on the true story of 1920s/30s singer Ruth Etting, who made the mistake of falling in love with a gangster (played in the movie by James Cagney) and has trouble breaking out of that relationship.