Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of May 16-22, 2022. The Milwaukee Basketball Team may be playing more games after today, or maybe not until the autumn. Either way, you guys are going to be doing bickering about sports. As always, why not deal with the bickering by watching some good movies instead? We've got movies from the 1930s through the 1990s, including another selection from Star of the Month Anna May Wong. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
As usual, most of the old movies are on TCM, kicking off with Varsity Show at 1:15 PM Monday. At Winfield College, a bunch of students are looking to put on their annual variety revue, but their faculty advisor, Professor Biddle (Walter Catlett), isn't so thrilled with their ideas. So the students call in one of the school's noted alumni, Chuck Daly (Dick Powell), who went on to some success as a Broadway producer. However, what they don't know is that his last several shows have been flops and he's badly in need of a hit and hoping to get to Hollywood to get that hit. He brings in Fred Waring, a noted bandleader of the time, to provide the music, and Ted Healy to provide the comic relief. Instead, he packs up the production and returns to New York, at which point the students figure out what's going on and follow him to New York, with the show eventually being put on on Broadway. The original cut of the movie was 120 minutes, but was re-released some years later with 40 minutes cut out.
One of this week's 90s movies is Get Shorty, airing at 10:00 AM Monday on The Movie Channel. John Travolta plays Chili Palmer, a Miami gangster who works as a loan shark for Bones (Dennis Farina). Dennis sends Chili to deal with a particularly difficult recovery, from the widow of a man who died in a plane crash. Except that he didn't die, but faked his death and went out to Vegas. While in Vegas, a casino owner who had the not-dead guy as a client tells Chili about another client, Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman), who racked up a bunch of debt before decamping to Hollywood where he works producing low-budget movies. Palmer, being a movie buff, tells Zimm a story that is a thinly-disguised version of the search of the guy who faked his death, and this gets Palmer an in to Hollywood. It turns out that he has a knack for the Hollywood business, which is about as cutthroat as being a loan shark. But the other producers may still have a few tricks up their sleeves.
We've got a movie this week that's only two dozen years old: A Simple Plan, which will be on Cinemax multiple times this week, including at 11:30 PM Tuesday. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) is a bookkepper for a feed mill in small-town Minnesota who has a pregnant wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) and a brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) who has some sort of mental disability that's left him on welfare for most of his life. One winter's day, Jacob and his good-old-boy friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) pick up Henry for a jaunt out on the rural roads; chasing a fox into the woods, they come upon a crashed small plane. That's bad enough, but the plan has moneybags in it totaling over $4 million. Lou and Jacob want the money, while Hank isn't so sure what to do because he rightly knows it will get them into trouble. However, the other two prevail on him to hold the money for safekeeping until the spring when the plane will be found. Bad idea, as Lou and Jacob are going to want the money now. Worse, Hank tells his wife, and her plans for dealing with it lead to more disaster.
For another World War II morale-builder, try Cairo, on TCM at 6:30 AM Wednesday. Robert Young plays a small-town reporter named Homer Smith who, because of his paper's reporting, gets a job as a foreign correspondent covering the war personally for the folks back in small-town America. On the way to Cairo, the boat he's on gets torpedoed by the Nazis, and he meets Philo Cobson (Reginald Owen), who claims to be with British intelligence. He may not make it to Cairo thanks to the torpedo, so if Homer does, perhaps he should deliver the message kind of like The Man Who Knew Too Much. And then, once actually getting to Cairo, Homer meets Marcia Warren (Jeanette MacDonald), a movie star forced to flee continental Europe because of the war. She also happens to be Homer's favorite actress.However, due to a series of misunderstandings, each of them thinks the other may actually be a spy for the Nazis! Ethel Waters plays Marcia's maid and then some, and gets to sing some songs along with MacDonald.
The Last Temptation of Christis on this week, at 9:27 AM Thursday on Starz Cinema. Based on a controversial 1950s novel, the movie takes a different look at Jesus Christ (played here by Willem Dafoe). Jesus in addition to being the son of God according to the New Testament, was also a human living in a complicated period of history (assuming there was one Jesus and not a composite of a bunch of people with a messiah complex). This Jesus collaborates with the Romans at first, much to the consternation of Judas Iscariot (Harvey Keitel), before doing some of the things mentioned in the gospel, notably saving Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey). The real controversy, however, comes after Pontius Pilate (David Bowie) has Jesus crucified. Jesus is resurrected after the crucifixion, but as a man who is able to take a wife and start a family, but he's also a man tormented by demons as we learn when he's an elderly man.
Thursday brings another night of Anna May Wong's movies on TCM, including A Study in Scarletat 9:15 PM. You might recognize the title as the firstof the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and indeed this is a Holmes movie, starring Reginald Owen as Arthur Conan Doyle's detective. This time, the story revolves around "The Scarlet Club", a society of members that have pooled their resources, with a member's estate being distributed to the other members should he or she die. A Mrs. Murphy has come to see Holmes, her husband having just died and she finding out that she'll get nothing since he was part of the Scarlet Club. Holmes begins to investigate and finds that there's murder afoot, but he also finds that there's not much he can do about it, at least not quickly.Anna May Wong plays Mrs. Pyke, widow of one of the members who might actually be responsible for the murders. Despite her high billing, she actually has a relatively small role.
Before James Cameron went overboard directing Titanic, he made another movie about a sunken vessel: The Abyss, which you can on on StarzEncore at 8:55 AM Friday. This time, however, the ship in question is a US Navy submarine, which encounters something while in the Caribbean, winding up in one of the deep trenches that are part of the ocean. The Navy needs to find the sub fast, before the Soviets can get to it. The Navy is in a bit of luck, as there's a drilling platform from an American company nearby. Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who designed this experimental platform, wants to go on the expedition, and the Navy commander, Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn) doesn't have that much choice. However, the current foreman of the platform is Lindsey's estranged husband Bud (Ed Harris). When they find the sub, they find some sort of strange phenomenon. Complicating matters is an approaching hurricane.
If you want a movie that sounds familiar, try watching Once You Kiss a Stranger, on TCM at 7:30 AM Friday. Carol Lynley plays Diana Granger, a young woman in Malibu living off a trust set up by her aunt. This is conditional on Diana seeing a psychiatrist, as the aunt is concerned about Diana's homicidal tendencies; needless to say, this condition is something that greatly bothers Diana. Diana goes to a PGA tournament that her late uncle sponsored, which is where she meets golf pro Jerry Marshall (Paul Burke), who is in a failing marriage and who has this terrible habit of always succumbing to the pressure and finishing second at tournaments. Indeed, at the present tournament he misses a putt on the 72 nd hole that results in a playoff set for Monday. Diana comes up with a ridiculous idea. Since Jerry sees one of the other golfers as a constant rival, perhaps Diana could bump him off, in exchange for Jerry bumping off Diana's current shrink. Obviously, Jerry thinks this is nuts, but then the rival golfer winds up dead, and Diana has evidence that would incriminate Jerry.
If all of the above sounds familiar, it's because the movie is a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train. You have the opportunity to catch the latter, at4:15 PM Saturday on TCM.
Ralph Richardson was a fine British actor who received a posthumous Oscar nomination for his final film. That movie, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, will be on Cinemax at 8:06 AM Saturday. Richardson plays the 6 th Earl of Greystoke, whose parents are shipwrecked off the African coast. They have an infant son before Mom dies and Dad gets killed by apes, who take away the infant. Many years later, explorer Philippe d'Arnot (Ian Holm) runs into an odd young white man who doesn't speak any western language, and because of their mutual need for survival, they become friends of a sort. D'Arnot figures that the young man must be the Greystoke heir, and takes the man back to the Greystoke estate in Scotland, which is where he meets Jane (Andie MacDowell, although her voice was dubbed by Glenn Close). News of a possible heir makes the Earl happy and gives him a renewed vigor, but the young man finds that it's difficult integrating into human society after that upbringing with the apes.
TCM did not run Mildred Pierce on Mother's Day. Instead, they're running it this Sunday at 8:00 PM, as part of a double feature with another film with an oversized mother, Gypsyat 10:00 PM Sunday. Joan Crawford plays Mildred, who at the start of the film sends business partner Wally Fay (Jack Carson) to the beach house of her second husband, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), where Wally finds him shot to death. The police investigate and bring Mildred in for questioning, at which point we get the flashback. Mildred was married to Bert (Bruce Bennett) with two daughters, including elder daughter Veda (Ann Blyth). Unfortunately, the marriage goes sour, and Mildred has to go to great lengths to try to make her daughters happy, eventually working baking cakes and as a waitress, which leads to opening a restaurant that gets her in partnership with Wally and future second husband Monte. Meanwhile, Veda is increasingly ingrateful and spoiled, not liking anything that her mother does for her. Eventually, it leads to that shooting in the beach house, but who did it and why?