Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of May 25-31, 2020. The weather is getting nicer, but some people are still stuck in house arrest because their governors want to panic over the coronavirus and arrogate power unto themselves. If you're one of those people stuck spending more time at home, why not spend that time with some good movies? There's more from Star of the Month Edward G. Robinson, something for Memorial Day on Monday, and interesting stuff on some of the other movie channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The site search must be acting up, because it claims I haven't recommended Coming Home before. It'll be on this week at 1:00 AM Tuesday. Jane Fonda plays Sally, a Marine wife in 1968 whose husband Bob (Bruce Dern) goes off to fight in Vietnam. With Sally being a stay-at-home wife with nothing to do, she decides to volunteer at the local VA hospital where soldiers are returning from Vietnam physically and mentally crippled. Among them is Luke Martin (Jon Voight), who lost his legs in the war and needs a catheter for peeing. As the two keep running into each other at the hospital, they begin to start a tentative relationship, which they both know is a big problem because of the fact that Sally is married. Eventually Bob returns from his tour in Vietnam, and like many of the other soldiers he's mentally scarred. And you know that sooner or later he's going to find out about the relationship between Sally and Luke, which might just break him even more.
After Memorial Day and all the war movies have ended, we've got something that was actually released this century: Standing in the Shadows of Motown, running at 5:45 AM Tuesday on Epix. Berry Gordy founded Motown in 1959 and had a lot of great singers and vocal groups, but they all needed instrumentalists to provide the backing music. To that end, Gordy assembled a whole bunch of Detroit musicians who would collectively be called the Funk Brothers, who performed all those backup tracks on so many great hits. The then-surviving Funk Brothers, along with many of the singers and some of the songwriters, give interviews which comprise this history of the music of Motown. In addition, some of the surviving Funk Brothers perform updated arrangements of those hit songs with singers of the early 2000s doing the vocals. It's incredible just how much talent they had, how many great songs they made, and how much influence they had on the musicians of today.
Tuesday night on TCM sees one last night of biopics about extraordinary women, with this night being focused on women in entertainment. One that I haven't recommended in a long time is Incendiary Blonde, which kicks off the night at 8:00 PM. Betty Hutton plays Texas Guinan, who went from Texas to first a wild west show, then to Hollywood, and in the 1920s to running a high-class speakeasy during Prohibition. Along the way, she had a series of men, although the movie is nowhere near presenting her real life in this regard. The real Guinan had three husbands; here she has a lover in boss Arturo de Cordova who can't marry her because he's got a mentally ill wife in a sanatorium. (The movie also stops before her tragically young death at the age of 49.) Barry Fitzgerald plays Guinan's father, and Charlie Ruggles the manager of the Wild West show. Guinan and her bosses also get involved with gangsters what with Prohibition, with Albert Dekker playing one of the gangsters. Alng the way, Hutton gets to sing a lot of songs.
An interesting mix of genres shows up in The Dead Don't Dream, showing at 5:38 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. It's part western, in that Hopalong Cassidy is out in the not-so-old west again, but it also also combines another type of movie popular in the 1940s, that being the old dark house mystery. Hopalong shows up at a hotel to attend the wedding of their friend Lucky (Rand Brooks), but the wedding is postponed when the uncle of the fiancée, a wealthy mine owner, is found murdered! If that's not bad enough, there are two more murders the next two nights, and both of them are people who took the same hotel room as the murdered uncle. So Hopalong comes up with the brilliant idea that he's going to sleep in that room, which means the murderer is going to try to kill him, allowing him to unmask the killer, who obviously must be getting into the room through a secret doorway or something. Nothing particularly new here other than the genre mash-up.
A few months back I recommended One Fatal Hour. It's a remake of an earlier movie called Five Star Final, and that original is airing at 1:45 AM Friday on TCM as part of Edward G. Robinson's final week as TCM's Star of the Month. Robinson plays Joseph Randall, editor of a big-city tabloid newspaper that deals in scandal. Except that Randall has wanted to bring more ethical behavior to the paper, something which has resulted in decreased circulation. So Randall's boss Hinchecliffe (Oscar Apfel) orders Randall to resurrect and old case of a woman who committed justifiable homicide to find out what happened to her. Randall sends in Isopod (Boris Karloff) to pretend to be a servant and get the goods. It turns out that the woman married a banker (H.B. Warner) and has an adult daughter Jenny (Marian Marsh) who is engaged to be married into a good family. But the story comes out and threatens to break up that wedding, leading to a crisis of conscience for Randall. The press really hasn't changed much in the last 90 years, has it?
I know you all like the 80s movies, so I'll mention another one this week: Still of the Night, which you can watch at 11:15 AM Friday on Cinemax (and three hours later if you only have the west coast feed). Roy Scheider plays Sam Rice, a Manhattan psychiatrist who has as one of his patients the antiques dealer Bynum (Josef Summer). Bynum talks about somebody being a killer, and wouldn't you know, Bynum winds up murdered! Sam gets a visit from the police, but also from the mysterious Brooke (Meryl Streep), who happens to be Bynum's mistress. Sam starts investigating the murder himself, with help from his mom (Jessica Tandy), who was a psychiatrist herself back in the day. But Sam also rather stupidly starts falling in love with Brooke, which is a problem because, as you can guess, Brooke might just be the murderer that Bynum was talking about in his sessions with Sam. This one has a lot of homages to Alfred Hitchcock, although it was only released two years after Hitchock's death.
One generally doesn't think of either James Cagney or Bette Davis doing comedy. But they made one together, a movie called The Bride Came C.O.D. That movies shows up this week, at 6:15 PM Friday on TCM. Davis plays Joan Winfield, a flighty heiress planning to elope with bandleader Allen Brice (Jack Carson). Steve Collins (Cagney) is a pilot who's going to fly Joan to Allen. But Steve hears from Joan's dad (Eugene Pallette) and learns that he can make much more money bringing Joan home to Dad unmarried. When Joan learns of the deception and figures she's being kidnapped she interferes with Steve's flying the plane, causing Steve to crash land in the Nevada desert. There's a ghost town that turns out to have one last resident, gold prospector Pop Tolliver (Harry Davenport). So the two stranded youngsters are able to survive until civilization can get back to them. But they begin to fall in love, threatening to screw things up for both Joan's fiancé and her father when they eventually show up to claim Joan.
In the TCM Underground slot, there are a couple of films alerting people to danger that air in the 5:00 AM hour on Saturday. One of those is Shake Hands With Danger. (TCM lists it airing second, but has both films running at 5:00 AM, so you'll probably wind up with the whole hour.) This safety movie was produced by Caterpiller, and was designed to show workers using Caterpillar's industrial equipment what they damn well shouldn't be doing. You'll be repeatedly shaking your head at how stupid these people must be to overlook such obvious safety precautions, and be thankful if you don't have to work with such equipment.
I think I recommended it not too long ago, but one of the movies that's currently in the FXM rotation is How To Steal a Million. Your chance to catch it this week is at 11:15 AM Sunday. Audrey Hepburn plays Nicole, the fashionably-dressed daughter of Parisian art collector Charles (Hugh Griffith). Except that Charles is actually the latest in a long line of art forgers recreating missing works. Two things complicate their lives. One is that art thief Simon (Peter O'Toole) breaks in to their house to steal a piece, and Nicole can't really call the police because the forgeries will be found. And then Charles lends a fake to a museum which takes out a temporary insurance police on it, meaning the insurance company will inspect the piece and discover the forgery. So Nicole gets the idea of asking Simon to help her break into the museum and steal the forgery before the inspectors can learn it's a forgery. Simon has other reasons for wanting to help, and things get even more complicated when Simon and Nicole fall in love.
Our final selection this week stars a woman who, in her way, is just as lovely to look at as Audrey Hepburn. The movie is Sex Kittens Go to College, which you can watch at 2:15 AM Sunday. That attractive woman is Dr. Mathilda West, played by Mamie Van Doren. She gets hired by a small college that needs a new head of the science department, and since Mathilda has a dozen or more doctorates, the college's primitive computer selects her as the obvious candidate. Of course, when she gets there, the male professors don't think somebody who looks like Mathilda could be a real professor. (The fact that she has a hidden past as a stripper is part of it too, I suppose). The college has some problems with its students, including a football star who has difficulties with the opposite sex (among the opposite sex students are Tuesday Weld and Brigitte Bardot's kid sister Mijanou), and a couple of gangsters who are looking for the school's computer because reasons. Among the professors are Louis Nye and John Carradine. This one is bizarre and absolutely needs to be seen.