Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of May 29-June 4, 2017. We're going to be starting a new month, but we don't get the new Star of the Month yet, and besides, we've still got the old one to finish with. There's good stuff on the other movie channels as well, too. Once again, I've used my erudition and good taste to select a bunch of movies I know all of you will like. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Don Rickles died earlier this year. It's fitting, then, that among the war movies TCM is showing on Memorial Day, you can watch Kelly's Heroes, at noon Monday. Kelly (Clint Eastwood) is a US Army lieutenant in World War II who captures a German colonel. Kelly learns that the Germans are hiding a huge amount of gold bars which are destined for Vichy France. Well, Kelly decides that while keeping the Nazis from completing their mission would be good, getting the gold for himself and his men would be better. (Do they know how much that value in gold weighs?) Anyhow, Kelly assembles a group of men including Sgt. Joe (Telly Savalas), hippie tank commander Oddball (Donald Sutherland), and fixer Crapgame (Don Rickles) among others to go behind enemy lines to get that gold. Their general (Carroll O'Connor) would obviously like to take the credit for anything his men does himself. Oh, and this is all a comedy, of course.
If you want to see some interesting Hollywood casting, watch All Hands on Deck, over on FXM Retro at 1:25 PM Tuesday. Pat Boone is the star of this, playing an executive officer on a navy ship. But the interesting casting here involves Buddy Hackett, one of the men serving under Boone and the captain (Dennis O'Keefe). Hackett's character, Shrieking Eagle Garfield, is a Chickasaw Indian. Yeah, Buddy Hackett playing American Indian. Anyhow, the oddity of having not only a Chickasaw, but one from a very wealthy family, serving in the navy, is a human interest story for reporter Barbara Eden, who comes on board to do a story. Of course, she falls for Pat Boone. Meanwhile, Shrieking Eagle gets into all sorts of trouble, and it's the job of Boone to keep all this trouble under wraps. Which is really going to tax him, since there's an admiral (Gale Gordon) coming to do a general inspection. Oh, and Pat Boone gets to sing several songs too.
If you want something silly but relatively recent, You can try My Stepmother Is an Alien, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 4:40 AM Saturday. Dan Aykroyd plays Dr. Mills, a second-rate astronomer at a second-rate university whose experiments are always failing. He wants to communicate with the life on other planets that he just knows is out there, but when his latest attempt fails spectacularly, it costs him his job. So his brother Ron (Jon Lovitz) tries to cheer him up by throwing a party, at which hot stranger Celeste (Kim Basinger) shows up. It turns out that Celeste is evidence that Dr. Mills' experiment actually worked: she's an alien from another galaxy, taking human form to come to earth and tell Dr. Mills that his last expermient accidentally screwed up Celeste's home planet, and that they need to do something at the source to stop the damage lest it wipe out an entire planet! Can they do this without everybody finding out that Celeste is an alien? That's a problem since Celeste knows next to nothing about Earth culture.
Clark Gable gets one more night as TCM Star of the Month this Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. This week I'll mention his final film with Lana Turner, Betrayed, at 9:30 AM Wednesday. Gable plays Col. Deventer, a member of Dutch intelligence in exile while the Nazis are occupying his country in World War II. He gets captured by the Nazis and rescued by the British spies managed by “The Scarf” (Victor Mature). Brought back to London, Deventer is made acquainted with Dutch widow Carla Van Oven (Lana Turner). She's being recruited to join the resistance, although there's some question as to her loyalty. And sure enough, things start to happen that imply there's a Nazi spy in their midst, which puts even more suspicion on Carla. Figuring out who is the spy is important, as the Allied invasion of the continent is coming up. Of course, Operation Market Garden, which tried to secure bridges over the Rhine, failed, as the bridge at Arnhem was a bridge too far.
I know how much you all enjoy Lee Tracy, so I'm going to recommend another of his movies, The Half-Naked Truth, at 8:45 AM Thursday on TCM. Tracy plays Bates, who at the start of the movie is a carnival barker who is of course fleecing small-town folks with his dishonesty. Teresita (Lupe Velez) is one of the dancers in the carnival. Of course, their act gets caught out forcing them to flee. Bates gets the idea to take Teresita to Broadway and pass her off as an exotic Turkish princess! He does this with producer Farrell (a young Frank Morgan), and soon enough Teresita's show becomes a success. However, Bates lets success go to his head and tries to get Farrell to make him a press agent, which Teresita doesn't necessarily care for, so she goes off and…. Veteran character actor Eugene Pallette plays Bates' sidekick Achilles and gets to be the butt of a running joke as to exactly what his function is regarding Bates and the Turkish princess.
Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray are back in a movie I haven't recommended in ages: No Time For Love, at 1:45 AM Friday on TCM. Colbert plays Katherine Grant, a magazine photographer who is given the assignment of going underground to where a bunch of “sandhogs” are digging a tunnel under a river. It's there that she meets Jim Ryan (MacMurray), who is one of the sandhogs and very stereotypically masculine. Unfortunately he gets in an altercation during the photo shoot and loses his job as a result, so Katherine figures that the best way to help is to give him a job to tide him over. Of course, she's really falling in love with him because lots of women want stereotypically masculine men. This even though she's already engaged and she just knows that blue-collar men like Ryan aren't for her. And Jim knows that upper-class women like Katherine aren't for him. So of course by the end they're going to wind up together. It's how they get there that's the fun, and this one is another sparkling comedy.
A few months back, I mentioned Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It's a remake of the 1934 movie The Man Who Knew Too Much, and the 1934 version is going to be on TCM at 3:30 PM Friday. Leslie Banks and Edna Best play a couple vacationing in Switzerland with their teenaged daughter (Nova Pilbeam who lived to be 97 and died only a few years back). Mom takes part in a skeet shooting competition and wins which is important for the plot later on. At a party later in the evening, Dad is approached by a guy who's just been stabbed to death and who whispers something important to him. The killers figure out who knows the secret, so they kidnap the daughter and taker her back to England in an attempt to keep the parents from revealing what they know. Mom and Dad follow, trying to get their daughter back as well as stop a nefarious plot. Peter Lorre plays the bad guy, and this is one of the very first English-language movies he made. It's as good in its own way as the later version even though 1930s England didn't have the production values that 1950s Hollywood did.
Friday night brings another round of Treasures from the Disney Vault back to TCM. This week starts off with a couple of Hayley Mills movies, although not The Parent Trap, which is probably the best known of the ones Mills made at Disney. Obviously, they want to keep that one for themselves, which is why you don't see any of the animated feature films on these Disney nights either. But there's Pollyanna at 10:00 PM, the story of a cheerful girl who visits her dour aunt (Jane Wyman) and spreads good cheer to everybody in town. It's an old story that's been done several times, although this might be the best of them. The rest of the night is a bunch of horse-themed stuff including a Mickey Mouse short at 12:30 AM Saturday.
A western I don't think I've recommended before is Rebel in Town, which you can see on StarzEncore Westerns at 12:19 AM and 7:03 AM Saturday. It's the years just after the Civil War, and the Mason family led by patriarch Bedloe (J. Carrol Naish) are southerners who have nothing to go back to, so they've headed west, eking out a living by robbing banks. In one town, the three sons not for a robbery, but to water their horses. However, they hear somebody from behind them shoot a gun in their general direction. So one of the brothers turns around and shoots the gunman dead, only realizing afterwards that the “gunman” was just a kid shooting a cap pistol. Oops. Worse, it turns out that the guy's father, Mr. Willoughby (John Payne) was a Major in the Union Army, and still hates the Confederates and is the first person to start up a posse for anybody – especially southerners – who commit a crime. But will Willoughby let his thirst for vengeance get the better of him?
For another silly little comedy, you could do worse than to watch For Pete's Sake, on TCM at 6:15 PM Sunday. Barbra Streisand plays Henrietta Robbins, a New York housewife married to Pete (Michael Sarrazin). He's trying to advance himself in life, taking night classes while driving a taxi by day. She wants to help him by making money on the side, but unfortunately she hears about a stock deal that goes south, costing her a bunch of money that she had borrowed from loan sharks. So she has to earn that money back without letting her husband on to the fact that she lost the money in the first place because who wants their spouse to know they've been dealing with loan sharks. Henrietta winds up in a bunch of increasingly hare-brained schemes foisted upon her by her creddtors to try to get that money back. This is a movie that could have easily been made as a fun B movie in the 1930s, but is updated for a New York City in that era just before Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead.