Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of May 24-30, 2021. We've got some programming themes coming back to TCM after a bit of an absence, including the annual Memorial Day marathon of war movies (although very few about the Civil War, the war for which the holiday was originally created). There's also interesting stuff on the other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned, which is important this week since one of the movies starts at 12:15 AM ET.
If you want an interesting but somewhat uncomfortable documentary, you might enjoy Salesman, on TCM at 11:30 AM Monday. A bunch of Catholic parishes in the Boston area got the names and addresses of their parishioners, which were then used as contacts for a Bible company to sell overpriced ornate Bibles to the mostly working-class parishioners who probably really couldn't afford such a luxury. The movie follows four of the salesmen as they go door to door trying to do a hard sell on the bibles, complete with a generous range of payment plans. Paul, one of the older salesmen, used to be quite good at his job, but is beginning to lose his touch and is starting to find the work soul-crushing. Combined with the equally disturbing scenes of the salesmen gathering at the company meeting to get their marching orders, it's easy to see why people would compare this movie to Glengarry Glen Ross (unfortunately not on this week).
You may not think of Gene Tierney as the sort of actress who would fit in westerns, but she was in one: The Secret of Convict Lake, at 10:57 AM Tuesday on StarzEncore Westerns. The male lead is Glenn Ford, playing Jim Canfield. He's a wrongly-convicted man who decides he's going to try to clear his name by getting out of prison during a prison break, and going to confront the man who framed him and actually committed the crime. The criminals, led by Johnny Greer (Zachary Scott) get to the town of Convict Lake, which is where Jim is looking to get his revenge. The crime involved a large robbery, and Johnny thinks Jim knows where the money is hidden, which of course he doesn't since he's innocent. Complicating matters is that all of the men in town have gonw out on the posse looking for the criminals, leaving the women behind. Gene Tierney plays Marcia Stoddard, who's supposed to marry the guy Jim is looking for, but winds up falling for Jim along the way. Jim, for his part, tries to protect the town's women from the convicts who obviously haven't had a woman's touch in quite some time.
Another difficult movie this week is One Potato, Two Potato, at 9:45 AM Tuesday on TCM. Julie Cullen is a woman in the south who's got an ex-husband who abandonder her in the form of Joe (Richard Mulligan), and a daughter of whom she has custody. Julie meets one of her co-workers, Frank Richards (Bernie Hamilton), and the two get to seeing more of each other. They fall in love, and Frank decides he's going to propose to Julie, and they live happily ever after. Well, of course not, or we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we? Frank is black and Julie is white, and interracial marriage in the early 1960s south is going to be a problem because of the opinions of the rest of society. Worse is that Joe returns to the scene, saying that a mixed-race household is not the place for a little white girl to be brought up, so now he's going to demand custody of the child. The case goes before Judge Powell (Harry Bellaver).
If you want an 80s comedy, one that's on this week is About Last Night…, which airs at 8:00 PM Wednesday on Showtime Showcase. Rob Lowe plays Danny, who has a best friend in Bernie (Jim Belushi) and both like to think of themselves as ladies' men. One night at the bar, Danny meets Debbie (Demi Moore), and the two have a one-night stand before falling in love. However, the relationship seems to be more about the sex than about anything that the two have in common. Meanwhile, Bernie doesn't think Debbie is right for Danny, while Debbie's old roommate Joan (Elizabeth Perkins) also thinks the two aren't right for each other. This eventually leads to Danny's breaking up with Debbie. But of course, after that happens, he realizes that he was wrong and should have stayed with Debbie for more than just the sex. But is it too late for him to make up with Debbie?
There's been a fall-off in the number of TCM Guest Programmers in the years since Robert Osborne passed away, which is now over four years. But we're going to get one this week. Stage and screen actor Frank Langella, whom you might recall from his Oscar-nominated role in Frost/Nixon, has selected three of his favorite movies and sat down with Ben Mankiewicz to discuss them. Those movies will be airing on TCM on Thursday in prime time:
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes at 8:00 PM, with Edward G. Robinson as an immigrant farmer in Wisconsin during World War II;
Arsenic and Old Lace at 10:00 PM, in which Cary Grant finds out that his two aunts are poisoning lonely old men who have nothing to live for; and
The Stranger at 12:15 AM Friday (which is of course still Thursday evening LFT), starring Loretta Young as a woman who discovers her husband Orson Welles is an escaped Nazi.
A movie that's returning to the FXM lineup is The Black Swan. It'll be on at 6:00 AM Friday. Tyrone Power plays Jamie Waring, a pirate in the 17th century Caribbean who gets caught. However, his and the other old pirates' capture doesn't stop the problem. Somebody is obviously feeding a new generation of pirates information, but who? So England pardons the old pirates, sending people like Capt. Morgan (Laird Cregar) to become governor of Jamaica, with Waring following him. There, he meets lovely Lady Denby (Maureen O'Hara) and falls in love with her, although she's betrothed to a proper man. However, that fiancé is the one feeding information to Capt. Leech (George Sanders) about the movements of the English shipping that enables Leech to intercept and plunder the English ships. Eh, you know that Waring is going to beat the bad guys and get Lady Denby in the final reel; the fun is seeing how they get there and watching Tyrone Power and the rest swashbuckle. Watch also for a young Anthony Quinn in an early role.
If you want a movie with beautiful cinematography, you could do a lot worse than to watch Dersu Uzala, at 10:00 AM Friday on TCM. In early 20th century Russia, the surveyor Capt. Arseniev (Yury Solomin) is sent out on a mission to survey a particularly little-explored corner of the Siberian taiga. The quickly discover that the reason it's little explored is because it's fairly inhospitable. However, the Russian team meets one of the local nomadic people, the titular Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk) and hire him as their guide. He's been living in harmony with nature and can teach the “civilized” Russians a thing or two about living in Siberia. Arseniev develops a great respect for Dersu, and once the mission is over, he wants to bring Dersu with him to Arseniev's home in Vladivostok. But city life is not for Dersu. Directed by Akira Kurosawa at a time in his life when a co-production with the Soviets was the only work he could get, the movie has a plethora of gorgeous shots of Siberian nature, but a pretty good story too at the heart of it all.
Most of you probably remember the movie The Revenant. It's based on a true incident, but not the first film to take that incident and build a movie around it. There's also Man in the Wilderness, which shows up this week at 6:00 PM Friday on TCM. Richard Harris plays Zachary Bass, who is a guide on an expedition in the northwest in 1820. The expedition, led by Captain Henry (John Huston), is looking to get a bunch of pelts back east, but Henry, being a free-range a**hole, insists they portage his boat to the Missouri River, which is going to take up valuable time. One day, while hunting for food, Zachary is attacked by a bear and mauled to within an inch of his life. He appears dead at first, but even though there are signs of life, everybody else expects him to die. So they leave him for dead and get on with the journey so they can get the boat on the Missouri before the winter snows set in, and before the Indians get them. Zachary, as you can guess, survives as well as Robert Ryan in Inferno, leading him to try to find Henry (with whom he has a history) to get his revenge.
Peter O'Toole was nominated for the Oscar eight times, but never won a competitive award. One of his lesser-known nominations ws in The Stunt Man, which will be on at 6:00 AM Saturday on HBO Comedy. O'Toole doesn't play the stuntman; that honor goes more or less to Steve Railsbeck. In fact, Railsbeck plays Cameron, a Vietnam War veteran who is on the run from the law who want him on an atttempted murder charge. While escaping, Cameron runs into the path of a vintage car that drives off a bridge as a result. The driver of that car was the stuntman on the movie directed by Eli Cross (that's O'Toole); the stuntman's body isn't discovered. When Cameron “saves” the lead actress in the movie, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey), from drowning, Cross decides to hire Cameron because he needs a new stuntman and has to keep the movie on budget; if the police investigate a disappearance, the'll bring the production to a grinding halt. But can Cameron be competent enough to do actual stunt work?
Memorial Day is this coming weekend, so starting in prime time Friday night, TCM is giving us a bunch of war-themed movies. One of the more interesting ones is Thunder Afloat, at 7:00 AM Saturday on TCM. Wallace Beery plays John Thorston, a tugboat captain in a World War I-era New England coastal town who has had his tug sabotaged and is convinced that it was deliberate on the part his rival, Rocky Blake (Chester Morris). So when the US joins the war against Germany, Thorston gets Rocky to enlist in order to get rid of Rocky and have no rivals for a possible military procurement contract. But when it turns out that the German U-boats sing John's tugboat, he too enlists and, as you can guess, winds up under commanding officer Rocky Blake. The movie was released in September 1939, about two weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland, so there's an obvious message here about Nazi Germany, even though the US was officially neutral and a lot of Congress didn't want Hollywood making any anti-Nazi movies.