Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of May 28-June 3, 2018. We're at the end of a month, but we're not getting any new features for the new month this week since the month starts more or less with a weekend. At any rate, that means we still have the old Star of the Month Marlene Dietrich, and some war movies to get through on Memorial Day. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
The war movies continue on TCM on Monday, concluding with The Naked and the Dead at 3:45 AM Tuesday. Aldo Ray plays Sgt. Croft, who leads a group of men island hopping during the Pacific theater of World War II, a job that's not easy because of the danger on every single island; as a result, Croft has become tough and almost brutal. The generals, however, tend to think of the enlisted men almost as pieces on a game board to be moved around. This view, uttered by Gen. Cummings (Raymond Massey), irritates Lt. Hearn (Cliff Robertson). Cummings has sent Croft and his men on what seems to Hearn to be a suicide mission. So Hearn decides that he's going to speak his mind and tell Cummings that he doesn't like what Cummings is doing. You probably ought not talk this way to a general, and Cummings doesn't like the back talk, so he sends Hearn out on the mission with Croft and his men. Based on the acclaimed novel by Norman Mailer.
A search of the site claims that it's been four years since I've recommended the movie Lisa. It's going to be on FXM Retro this week, at 9:30 AM Monday and 7:25 AM Tuesday. Stephen Boyd plays Peter Jongman, a Dutch policeman who is following Lisa (Dolores Hart) and a man at the beginning of the movie, following them from Holland to England. It's just after the end of World War II, and Lisa is one of the many, many Jewish refugees who survived the concentration camps. Peter is following them because he knows the guy is an unscrupulous people smuggler. Peter gets in a scuffle with the guy in which the guy dies, having been killed by Peter in self-defense although Peter isn't aware of this and when he finds out the guy died, he thinks Lisa did it. So, to expiate his own sins, Peter decides he's going to help Lisa achieve her own dream, which is to make it to Palestine, which is still under the British mandate. This is going to be difficult since the British are actively trying to stop Jewish refugees from entering.
TCM's Tuesday schedule is a bunch of Bob Hope movies for the anniversary of his birth. These include Road to Bali at 1:00 PM. Hope teams with Bing Crosby once again, this time playing Harold and George respectively. They start off in Australia but being forced to flee because another of their schemes (this time involving women they proposed to but have no plans to marry) has gone badly wrong, so when they hear that a Princess Lala (Dorothy Lamour) is looking for a buried treasure. But her cousin Ahok (Murvyn Vye, and that was his real name) is trying to get all the divers killed, presumably to get the treasure for himself. Our two heroes have to escape with Lala Ostensibly, that's the plot, but as with all the “Road” movies, the real point is for Bing and Bob to ad-lib and play off each other with a long string of zingers and one-liners. There are also cameos from Jane Russell, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Bing's brother Bob, as well as the usual Hollywood in-jokes.
We get one more round of movie series on TCM this week, starting on Tuesday night and running through to 8:00 PM Thursday. This week, we have four series in two rather divergent pairs. First off, there will be the Boston Blackie and Saint detective movies. The scene then switches to non-detectives: the dogs Lassie and then Rusty, Lassie's lower-rent cousin. At least Lassie looks good in Technicolor.
It's been a while since I've recommended Yellow Sky before. It's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns at 10:31 AM Wednesday. Gregory Peck plays Stretch, who's just led a gang of men through a bank robbery. They're going to make their getaway across the desert which is of course quite risky, and leads to dissension from other guys in the gang like Dude (Richard Widmark). Eventually they're just about to collapse, but that comes very near a ghost town, which means a possible source of water. They also find out that the town isn't completely abandoned. There's still a young woman Constance nicknamed “Mike” (Anne Baxter) and her grandpa (James Barton). Duke cottons on to the fact that if these two are still around, there must be a good reason for it, and that reason must be gold prospecting. So he hatches a plan to get the gold. All of the men, meanwhile, are taken by Mike, with Stretch probably being the most in love with her and questioning whether he should be leading the rest of the gang any more.
Thursday night brings one final night of movies from Star of the Month Marlene Dietrich. This final week brings some of Dietrich's later movies, with the one I don't think I've recommended before being The Monte Carlo Story, at 4:00 AM Friday. The plot is a hoary one that we've seen in a whole bunch of movies. Italian Count Dino has lost a bunch of money at the gambling tables in Monte Carlo. So he wants to find a rich woman to recoup that money from. On the one hand, there's Jane, the 18-year-old daughter of American businessman Homer (Arthur O'Connell). On the other hand, there's the lovely Maria (that's Dietrich, as if you could miss her). The Count falls in love with Maria, but it turns out that Maria has also lost big in Monte Carlo and is looking for a rich man. So the plot isn't much, but what the movie has going for it is Monte Carlo about a year after the big wedding between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, and widescreen Technicolor photography.
When you think of Esther Williams, you usually think of those aquacade musicals. But that wasn't all she did. She exchanged her swimsuit for a red cape in Fiesta, which TCM will be showing at 12:15 AM Saturday. Maria (Williams) and Mario (Ricardo Montalbán) are twins (stop laughing) born to famous matador Morales (Fortunio Bonanova) and his wife (Mary Astor). Dad expects his son Mario to grow up and follow in his footsteps, but Mario decides he'd rather be a professional musician. This would disgrace the family name, except that it turns out that Maria is a tomboy and wishes she could be a matador, which she can't because of that damn patriarchy limiting bullfighting to men. You can probably guess what happens next. This is the movie that introduced Montalbán to American audiences, and as with his non-romantic roles he shows he really was a good actor given the chance. Cyd Charisse also shows up to do some dance numbers, including one with Montalbán.
Memorial Day is this weekend, but there are still going to be war movies later in the week. TCM is showing The Best Years of Our Lives yet again on Friday as part of a day of Fredric March movies, while StarzEncore Classics is running Midway at 2:01 PM Saturday. This is based on the real events of the Battle of Midway, which was one of the key battles in the Pacific theater of World War II as it enabled the US to get naval air superiority and with that deal a serious blow to the Japanese navy that would all the US to continue its push westward to Japan, ultimately winning the war. Of course, at the time, the participants in the battle didn't know it was going to be the turning point in America's favor. There's an all-star cast including Henry Fonda as Nimitz; Robert Mitchum as Admiral Halsey (he had to have a berth or he couldn't get to sea); Glenn Ford, Cliff Robertson, Charlton Heston, and more play lower-ranking officers. For the Japanese, you may recognize Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, and James Shigeta. The movie also adds an extraneous and unnecessary sub-plot about an American naval man with a Japanese-American girlfriend back in Hawaii.
I mentioned Esther Williams getting away from the swimming in Fiesta earlier; a movie that goes in the opposite direction is Tarzan and the Mermaids, at 10:00 AM Saturday. Mara (Linda Christian) is rescued by Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller playing Tarzan for the final time), and it turns out that she's escaping from the high priest of a nearby island. The reason she was escaping is because the priest (George Zucco) planned to use her in a human sacrifice ritual and she, for understandable reasons, didn't want to be sacrificed. The priest, for his part, is using the people of the island as slave labor to mine the pearl beds offshore. The priest's men find Mara and shanghai her back to the island, so Tarzan and Jane (Brenda Joyce) follow Mara back to the island to try to rescue her and put a stop the the depredations against the island's people. The Tarzan movies obviously got sillier and sillier as the series went on.
Finally this week I'll mention Three Strangers, at 8:00 PM Saturday. Geraldine Fitzgerald plays Crystal Shackleford, a woman in London who has recently come into possession of a Chinese statuette. There's a legend around the statuette that if three unrelated people make the same wish in fron tof the statuette at the same time on Chinese New Year's, that wish will come true. So she invites Johnny (Peter Lorre) and Jerome (Sydney Greenstreet) up to her apartment so that the three of them can make a wish together and test that legend. All three of them need some money, and Johnny has recently bought a sweepstakes ticket, so they make the wish that Johnny's sweepstakes ticket wins so that they can split the money three ways and use the money for what they really want. Needless to say, however, that if the money does come into their lives it's not really going to solve all their problems, is it? The three leads all give excellent performances here.