Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of March 29-April 4, 2021. Apparently the baseball season is beginning this week, but nobody really cares about baseball, do they? So instead, it's more time to watch some good movies. With the Oscars about four weeks away, TCM begins its annual 31 Days of Oscar this week, but there's other stuff worth watching as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Spencer Tracy got some odd roles in his early career. One of those is in Riffraff, airing on TCM at 6:00 AM Monday. Tracy plays Dutch, a tuna fisherman and ladies' man who is the love interest for cannery worker Hattie (Jean Harlow). Meanwhile, Hattie's boss at the cannery, Nick (Joseph Calleia), has his eyes on her, but she turns him down to marry Dutch, who is also a bit of a blowhard who thinks the working classes like him are going to take over the world. With that in mind, he becomes head of the fishermen's union, eventually engineering a strike that damages the interest of all the fishermen. Dutch, having failed his fellow workers, skips town and throws his lot in with the hobos, leading Hattie to turn to theft to try to help Dutch, although he doesn't realize what Hattie is doing, until it's too late and she winds up in prison. Oh, not only that, but in the brief time they were married, he was able to knock her up, so she's going to give him a child too while in prison. Una Merkel plays Hattie's sister, and a young Mickey Rooney Hattie's nephew.
The big basketball thing is drawing to its inevitable conclusion of a little school being shafted by the refs in favor of a “name” program, so this week would probably be a good time to point out that Hoosiers is on, at 9:00 AM Monday on Showtime (and, as always, three hours later on the west coast feed). Based very loosely on a true story, the movie stars Gene Hackman as Norman Dale, who comes to the small town of Hickory, IN to teach history and coach the high school basketball team. The town is passionate about basketball, and think they know as much about how the team should be coached as the coach himself does. But Hickory is a small town with a tiny team, and Coach comes in with an unorthodox style and brusque personality that's off-putting to a lot of people, including the players. But with the help of a former player with faded glory now an alcoholic, as an assistant coach (Dennis Hopper), and a kid with problems who comes back to the team, the team starts winning, and makes it to the state tournament in big Indianapolis against a heavily favored time in the state final.
We get one more night of Doris Day as Star of the Month on Mondy in prime time, concluding with Billy Rose's Jumbo at 4:15 AM Tuesday. Day doesn't play Billy Rose or Jumbo, but Kitty Wonder, daughter of the owner of a struggling turn of the century family circus, Pop Wonder (Jimmy Durante). Rival circus owner John Noble (Dean Jagger) wants to put wonder out of business and take over the valuable attractions, and to that end sends in a spy, Sam Rawlins (Stephen Boyd) to size up the situation, ostensibly working as a high-wire act. In one of the most surprising plot twists in Hollywood history, Kitty and Sam wind up falling in love with each other. The comic relief subplot involves the circus' fortune teller, Lulu (Martha Raye), trying to pursue Pop romantically. A little bit of either Durante or Raye goes a long way. So the movie doesn't have anything particularly special in the plot department, but does have Doris Day doing a lot of singing, and assistant direction in some of the numbers by Busby Berkeley.
Some movies capture a moment in time, and you can question whether they've aged poorly. One such movie is St. Elmo's Fire, which will be on StarzEncore at 8:43 AM Tuesday (and three hours later for those of you wth the west coast feed). It's the mid-1980s, and a group of seven friends are spending their first autumn after having graduated from Georgetown University. They all find that trying to navigate adulthood (I don't think the word “adulting” had been coined yet) isn't as easy as they might have thought, as their dreams from their college days are coming into conflict with the stark reality of life. Alec (Judd Nelson) is in love with would-be architect Leslie (Ally Sheedy), but she's not certain if she wants to commit. Kirby (Emilio Estevez) wants to be a lawyer, and shares an apartment with Kevin (Andrew McCarthy). Billy (Rob Lowe) is a bit irresponsible, but has Wendy (Mare Winningham) lusting after him. And then there's Jules (Demi Moore), who's living on her credit card, much like the country as a whole is thanks to the “pandemic stimulus” laws. Maybe eventually these people will all grow up.
Kids acting grown-up is a staple of the movies, and a fun example of a bunch of kids doing it together is in Gallant Sons, on TCM at 8:00 AM Wednesday. Gene Reynolds plays Johnny Davis, whose father “Natural” (Ian Hunter) runs a nightclub. Jackie Cooper plays By Newbold, whose father Barton (Minor Watson) is a newspaperman. There's a murder, and the elder Newbold breaks the story with evidence that leads straight to Natural Davis. So naturally Johnny doesn't want to be friends with By, who in turn suggest that they investigate the case together, as a way of patching up their friendship. Johnny agrees, and together with Kate (Bonita Granville, who had been Nancy Drew earlier) and others like “Doc” (Leo Gorcey) and Dolly (MGM protégée June Preisser), they investigate, taking a page out of Shakespeare to put on a relevant play to catch the real killer. Gail Patrick plays Kate's mom Clare, who it turns out has some interest in the case. A B movie with all the gloss MGM could muster makes this appealing.
Thursday is April 1. Since the Academy Awards are going to be held at the end of April, TCM decided to move their annual 31 Days of Oscar from February to April. For 31 days, throught May 1, all the movies will be Oscar-nominated. And this time around, the overriding theme is Oscars A to Z, with all of the movie titles in alphabetical order. As usual this month, there are also some more recent movies, such as Almost Famous, at 10:00 PM Thursday. William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is a precocious kid in 1970s San Diego who has an interest in music, submitting articles to underground fanzines. He meets Creem magazine editor Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who pays him to go interview Black Sabbath. Unfortunately Miller only gets to meet the opening act, Stillwater, who invite him backstage and agree to an interview. This eventually leads to a call from Rolling Stone magazine, who don't realize that Miller is still only 16 but want him to do some articles. Miller decides to go on tour with Stillwater to cover them, as well as some of the young women who insist that they are not groupies, like Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). Complicating things are the tensions between band members, as well as Miller's mom (Frances McDormand) not being happy that her minor son is on the road.
A search of the blog suggests that it's been four years since I mentioned the movie Rough Night in Jericho. It's on again this week, at 10:49 AM Friday on StarzEncore Westerns. Dean Martin gets to play a villainous character, something he didn't often get to do, as Alex Flood. He's a former lawman who has decided to take over the town of Jericho, ruling it with an iron fist through his henchmen, led by second-in-command Yarbrough (Slim Pickens). The one thing Flood hasn't been able to take over to this point is the stagecoach line, run by Molly Lang (Jean Simmons), who conveniently happens to be Alex's former lady. With that in mind, Alex ambushes one of Molly's coaches, which has as one of its passengers Dolan (George Peppard), a former deputy. He's indecisive about whether to stay in town and help Molly, but he begins to fall in love with her. And Alex's continued attacks on Molly and Dolan might make Dolan reconsider.
For those of you who like war and action movies, we've got a great one this weekend: Bridge on the River Kwai, at 11:00 AM Saturday. In the Southeast Asian theater of WWII, the Japanese have taken a group of British soldiers prisoner in Burma, the group led by Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness). Also among the POWs is an American, Cmdr. Shears (William Holden). The camp commander, Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) is trying to get a railroad bridge built across the river, vital for the Japanese war effort. He's willing to use prison labor, in violation of Geneva Convention rules, and is willing to use torture to get his POWs to do it. Nicholson refuses for obvious reasons, but then comes up with the difficult rationalization that what if having something to do and a goal to reach will actually give his men a reason to live? Meanwhile, Cmdr. Shears takes part in a prison break and escapes despite everyone else thinking he was shot. He makes it to a military hospital in Sri Lanka, hoping for a medical discharge, but since he knows the area where that bridge is being built, British Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins) wants to borrow him for an operation to destroy that bridge.
If you want a movie on the movies, you could do worse than to watch Hitchcock, at 4:55 AM Sunday on Action Max. Anthony Hopkins plays Alfred Hitchcock, who as the film opens is celebrating the success of the lastest in a long string of hits, North by Northwest. Some people think he should retire, but he wants to do something different. He reads the novel Psycho by Robert Bloch, and decides it would be perfect for adapting into a movie, together with the help of his wife and frequent collaborator, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren). However, the studio wants a different kind of movie, while the Production Code certainly isn't going to be happy with something as boundary-pushing as Psycho, either. Still, Alfred pushes on, working with actresses like Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel). The shoot is difficult, compounded by the fact that Alfred and Alma are having problems in their personal life. But as we all know, Psycho would go on to be one of the great movies of all time.
Technically, in the first few years of the Oscars, there weren't official nominations released, but names under consideration in the various committees. Charlie Chaplin was originally under consideration for Best Actor for The Circus, airing at 4:15 AM Sunday on TCM, but the Academy decided to give him a special honorary award instead since he also wrote and directed the movie. Chaplin, as usual, plays his tramp character. While visiting a traveling circus (Al Ernest Garcia plays the owner/ringmaster), the Tramp is wrongly accused of a theft and chased by the police. The Tramp's antics in trying to escape are mistaken by the audience as part of the circus act, and they think it's hilariously funny. Since the circus is struggling, our ringmaster hires the Tramp to boost sales. Except that the Tramp can't be funny on cue, so he's made a “janitor” and put into exploitative situations for the benefit of the audiences. Meanwhile, the ringmaster is also treating his stepdaughter Merna (Merna Kennedy), one of the riders, like crap. The Tramp develops feelings for Merna, and you can probably guess where the movie is going.