Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week fo May 23-29, 2016. We're in the last full week of a month, so this will be your final chance to watch some of the programming features TCM put on this month. There's also a holiday weekend this weekend, Memorial Day, so TCM is giving us a bunch of war movies. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is spending Monday morning and afternoon with a bunch of Richard Widmark movies. One that I don't think I've recommended before is The Law and Jake Wade, which is coming on at 10:30 AM. Jake Wade, played by Robert Taylor, is a man with a past. Although he's a marshal now, before he was an outlaw in the gang run by Clint Hollister (that's Widmark). Hollister helped Wade escape from a hanging back in the day, and Wade, despite being a marshal, feels that he has to return the favor. You can probably guess that this is a mistake. It turns out that Clint believes Jake stole the money from a previous bank heist, and dammit, Clint wants his share. So after being freed by Jake, Clint takes Jake -- and Jake's fiancée Peggy (Patricia Owens) hostage and forces them to take Clint and his gang to where the money is. Among the members of the gang is one DeForest Kelley, several years before he would play Bones on Star Trek.
I don't get to recommend too many documentaries, but there's a really good one on TCM this week: Hoop Dreams, at 10:00 PM Monday. This one follows the lives of two teenagers, William Gates and Arthur Agee. The you teens are both extremely good at basketball, but they both come from the projects of Chicago. Well, basketball is big business, even on the college level and further down at the AAU level, so various powerhouse high schools want to take these kids on and give them a chance, and hopefully they'll do well enough to get a scholarship to a Division I school and then go on to the pros. Of course, life doesn't normally go that easily, and both these teens and their families suffer enormous hardships on their way to... well, if you haven't seen the film I won't tell you how they wind up. The film runs nearly three hours, but it's a gripping three hours and doesn't feel anywhere near that long. If you haven't seen this one, do yourself a favor and watch it!
I can't recall whether I've recommended The Man Who Could Work Miracles before, but it's going to be on TCM at 3:00 AM Wednesday. Roland Young stars George, as a meek British shop clerk who is more or less touched by the hand of God one night at a bar, thus giving him the power to perform miracles, or at least to put his thoughts directly into action. Obviously, it takes the poor guy some time to figure out exactly what's going on. However, other people in his life do get an idea of what's going on, and they'd like to use his powers for their own ends. George's boss (Edward Chapman) wants to use them to improve his business; nobleman Ralph Richardson wants the evil governments of the world to be defeated, and the local reverend (Ernest Thesiger) wants the powers used for good. Eventually George decides to use the powers for himself, although that doesn't particularly work out well either. This is based on a story by H.G. Wells, who also provided the screenplay.
If you liked DeForest Kelley in The Law and Jake Wade, you've got a chance to see him a couple of years younger in Illegal, airing at 11:30 PM Wednesday on TCM. Kelley only appears briefly, as he's being sent to the electric chair in the opening minutes of the movie. He was sent there by crusading prosecutor Victor Scott (Edward G. Robinson), on his way to the governor's mansion. Except that exculpating evidence comes out only after Kelley dies, leading Scott to resign and eventually become a defense attorney. Not only that, but he becomes a defense attorney for the head of the local crime syndicate, Garland (Albert Dekker). Then things go bad when he former assistant in the DA's office (Nina Foch) gets brought up on murder charges for the murder of her husband (Hugh Marlowe). She didn't do it, but the real killer will lead back to Garland's syndicate, which is also dangerous for Scott. This is also the feature film debut of Jayne Mansfield, playing Garland's moll.
Those of us who went to high school in the 1980s may enjoy going back to that decade by watching Weird Science, which is coming up on Starz-Encore Classics at 8:40 PM Thursday. Gary and Wyatt (played respectively by Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) are the two high school nerds who can't get anything right. The girls they want have the hots for other guys (one of them is Robert Downey Jr. before all the drugs), and Wyatt has a big brother who treats him like dirt. Well, the nerds are going to try to get their revenge, by using their computer skills to... create the perfect woman. Of course, it doesn't quite go like that, as Lisa (Kelly Le Brock) turns out to have supernatural powers. She uses those powers to help Gary and Wyatt, although it's more by having them learn for themselves what it's like to be more self-confident. There's 80s style, 80s music (Oingo Boingo provide the theme song). Oh, and there's Kelly LeBrock too.
For a movie that's a hell of a lot of fun, you could do worse than to watch Rafter Romance at 12:15 PM Friday on TCM. Ginger Rogers plays Mary, a woman who unfortunately can no longer afford her apartment what with the depression on. But her landlord Eckbaum (George Sidney) has an idea: she can share an apartment with Jack (Norman Foster)! She works days, and he works as a night watchman, so they'll never meet each other or be using the apartment at the same time. (What about weekends and holidays?) Mary accepts the deal, and then she and Jack each find that they don't care for their roommate's habits, even though neither of them sees the other. Well, except that they do see each other outside, with neither of them realizing the person they're seeing is in fact their roomate. They fall in love out in the wide world, which is obviously going to cause problems once they discover they are in fact roommates. Ginger gets to wear a great pre-Code outfit, and there are some interesting scenes involving her boss (Robert Benchley) and the telemarketing business (yes, cold calling was around all the way back in 1933) he runs.
Back on FXM Retro after an absence is Way... Way Out, at 1:10 PM Friday and 11:10 AM Saturday. Jerry Lewis plays the astronaut Pete, who is going to be sent to the American base on the moon. The Americans have been having problems at their base in that all of the male astronauts wind up sex-starved. The Soviets, meanwhile, send mixed pairs to their two-cosmonaut base, giving the Americans the idea to send up the first married couple in space. Except that Pete really had no desire to get married. Still, the American brass plan to marry him to Eileen (Connie Stevens) and send the two to the moon, except that it's now Eileen who has even less desire than Pete to get married. Once there, they find the Soviet team of Igor (Dick Shawn) and Anna (Anita Ekberg). Predictable romantic shenanigans ensue. If you find Jerry Lewis' comedy too manic, Dick Shawn can be even more manic, as he is here. On the other hand, there's wonderful faux-futuristic set design.
This weekend is Memorial Day weekend, so we're going to be getting a bunch of war movies starting on Saturday. Actually, they start on Friday night with Star of the Month Robert Ryan; TCM is showing some of his war movies in prime time on Friday. Be warned that the starting times may be a bit off because the running times given for the movies come right up against the time slots they've been stuck in. Ryan has a small part in The Dirty Dozen, for example, as the blowhard war-games commander going up against the dozen; he hasn't got a chance. That fun action movie is listed as going from 2:00 AM Saturday to 4:30 AM, but it's a 150 minute movie and by the time you add an intro/outro plus the list of what's showing up next, well, you're probably into the time slot fot the next movie. Never mind that it might not start on time since the previous movie, The Longest Day, is a 178-minute movie in a three-hour time slot.
As for Saturday, an odd curiosity is Behind the Rising Sun, which TCM is showing at 8:00 AM Saturday. This one was made in 1943 at the height of the war, and stars J. Carroll Naish (!) as the father of the Japanese Seki family. His son Taro (Tom Neal) went to college in America before the war, and came back a liberal, by Japanese standards. However, Japan is already in the war, at least in China, and Taro gets drafted to serve over there. That, combined with the militaristic culture in Japan at the time, conspire to turn Taro and people like him into decided illiberals. This, much to the dismay of the Americans they knew and would probably have been good friends with if it weren't for that damn war. There are several westerners depicted in the film, such as Taro's would be boss O'Hara (Don Douglas); O'Hara's love interest the reporter Sara (Gloria Holden), and Robert Ryan as a boxer who gets in a match with judo master... Mike Mazurki! Like I said, this is an odd curiosity.
If you want a service comedy, you could do worse than to watch The Horizontal Lieutenant, which will be on TCM at 7:00 AM Sunday. Jim Hutton plays Lt. Wye, a would-be Army intelligence officer during World War II who has never gotten to see any action. Until now, when the Army sends him to an island in the South Pacific. Except that the island was liberated some months back, with there being one last Japanese soldier who's been hiding but is unarmed and is simply robbing the PX. It's Wye's job to find the guy. If he doesn't, his CO, Col. Korotny (Charles McGraw) will ship him off someplace even more remote and with even less action. Complicating matters is the arrival of Army Nurse Lt. Molly Blue (Paula Prentiss), who was one of Wye's old classmates, and has grown into, well, the statuesque Paula Prentiss. Hutton and Prentiss were teamed together four times because they made such an appealing screen couple.
Our final movie for this week will be Mother Didn't Tell Me, at 11:45 AM Sunday. Dorothy McGuire plays Jane, a woman who sees Dr. Morgan (William Lundigan), and decides that he'd be just the man for her. So she gets him to marry her, only to find out that married life isn't quite the bed of roses she'd thought it would be. At least, not being married to a doctor. There are all those emergency calls which take the good doctor away from his wife at times. And then there are the other people in the doctor's life. There's Jane's mother-in-law, for example (Jesse Royce Landis), who would have preferred that her son marry a lady doctor since then both of them would know the challenges of the medical life. Thanks to the production code, however, we know that the two leads are going to remain together in the end as the doctor appreciates his wife and she appreciates his professional life and the work the hospital does.