Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of May 3-9, 2021. I've picked out a series of movies especially for Ammo, as I know how much he enjoys reading every post I write, especially the movie review threads. 
TCM decided to do something different this month for Star of the Month (more on that later), and the virtual TCM Film Festival is this weekend, so even though Mother's Day is this Sunday, TCM is presenting festival-themed programming instead of traditional fare like Mildred Pierce. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Today, May 2, is the centenary of Indian movie director Satyajit Ray, so TCM is running 24 hours of his movies, starting at 8:00 PM this evening with the “Apu Trilogy”. Unfortunately, I'm not terribly familiar with most of the movies on the schedule for the tribute. One that looks interesting is an Indian-set version of Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, at 4:00 PM Monday. You may recall the Steve McQueen movie treatment of the play, which is about a town that has waters with healing powers that bring in people from miles around and is the lifeblood of the town, only for somebody to return to town with evidence that the water is actually poisoned.
Something back on StarzEncore Westerns is Broken Lance, airing at 4:15 AM and 7:14 PM Monday. Spencer Tracy plays cattle baron Matt Deveraux, who has four sons. Three by the first marriage: Ben (Richard Widmark), Mike (Hugh O'Brian), and Denny (Earl Holliman); and by his second wife of Indian descent (Katy Jurado), Joe (Robert Wagner). Joe has just gotten out of prison having been the sacrificial lamb for the family in a dispute with miners and water rights. In that time, Ben has started running the ranch with an iron fist, and he's really grown to resent Joe, who became the son Dad liked best. Joe, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Barbara (Jean Peters), daughter of the governor (E.G. Marshall), but this is complicated by the goveror's not really wanting his daugher to marry someone of mixed race. Joe's brothers, meanwhile, try to figure out a way to get him off the family land, by force if necessary, when their “nice” attempts to get him to start a new life elsewhere don't work. This is a remake, moved out west, of a fine Fox drama called House of Numbers.
Instead of a traditional Star of the Month on TCM this month, they're giving us a month of Stars Named Robert. Every Monday in prime time, leading into Tuesday morning, there will be a whole bunch of movies, one or two with each of the Roberts. This first Monday actually starts with the Private Screenings interview where late TCM host Robert Osborne was interviewed by Alec Baldwin. May 3 would have been Osborne's 87th birthday. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first movie aired as part of the programming is Crossfire at 9:30, which stars no fewer than three Roberts: Robert Ryan, Robert Young, and Robert Mitchum.
One of Esther Williams' lesser films shows up this week: This Time for Keeps, at 2:00 PM Tuesday on TCM. Esther plays Nora, part of an aquacade (how original). During World War II, she was entertaining for injured troops which is how she met Dick Johnson (Johnny Johnston), real name Richard Herald II. He fell in love with Nora's beauty, at least until Nora found out he wasn't really blind. Before going of to war, he had a socialite fiancée, and was being groomed to follow in his father's (Lauritz Melchior) footsteps as an opera singer. But the war changed him and he wants something different, namely Nora, so he looks her up and finds her on Mackinac Island her her pianist Ferdi (Jimmy Durante) gets him a job singing for the band led by Xavier Cugat. The various complications ensue, and as you can guess from the cast list above, they get to sing songs in all sorts of genres. Also in the cast is Dame May Whitty as Nora's grandmother. A fair amount of the movie was filmed on location at Mackinac Island.
A movie that was not on during 31 Days of Oscar but was nominated for several Oscars is Georgy Girl. You've got a chance to catch it this week, at 11:45 PM Tuesday on TCM. Lynn Redgrave plays Georgina, a young woman in London who's in a bit of a shell. She lives with the decidedly opposite Meredith (Charlotte Rampling), who has had a string of boyfriends (and a couple of abortions, a taboo topic in the 1960s), with a current boyfriend in Jos (Alan Bates). Georgy finds that she's developing a crush on Jos, while at the same time, trying to keep her parents' boss, Leamington (James Mason), from putting the moves on her since he's trapped in a loveless marriage with an invalid wife. Things get a lot more complicated when Meredith gets knocked up again, and decides that this time she's going to keep the baby and expects Jos to do the gentlemanly thing and marry her. Lots of nice exteriors of London as it was in the mid-1960s, and of course that earworm of a title song.
Sometimes it's easy to forget how long certain actors have been around. I was thinking of that when I saw that Hamburger Hill was on this week, at 10:10 AM Wednesday on Showtime Extreme. It's 1969 in Vietnam, and a platoon that could be any platoon gets replacements, including a young Don Cheadle as Pvt. Washburn. Their commanding officer, Sgt. Franz (Dylan McDermott in his debut) soon sends them into battle before the real operation begins. There's a Viet Cong-held mountain known as Hill 937 that could be any hill, and it's this platoon's job to take the hill from the North Vietnamese. This time, however, the North Vietnamese don't use the same tactics the Americans are used to them using, making the battle that much more difficult. In the assaults on the hill, soldiers on both sides drop like flies. It's all based on an actual battle, and the movie has been unfairly forgotten, thanks to being released around the same time as some other better-remembered movies like Platoon.
If you want something rather lighter, then you could do a lot worse than to switch back to TCM and watch ABBA: The Movie, at 2:15 PM Thursday. In March of 1977, the Swedish supergroup set out on a concert tour of Australia, performing in all of the country's major cities. Obviously, a lot of the movie focuses on the group's performances, but there's also staged backstage footage. It's not a straight concert movie, however, as there's a framing story about a rural DJ named Ashley (Robert Hughes) whose job it is to get an interview with the band for his local radio station (yeah right, as if the band's managers would allow this). Along the way, Ashley constantly gets thwarted by the band's security, while also recording interviews with the group's multitudinous fans (the scenes with the little girl ballet students seem the most real and are among the best in the movie). Oh, and there's also a bizarre dream sequence set to “The Name of the Game”. In any case, the movie is filled with great music and a lot of fun.
One of the more memorable disasters of the early 1980s is Xanadu. It's going to be on 5Star Max this week, at 6:11 AM Thursday. Michael Beck plays Sonny, a frustrated artists who does murals of a record company's album covers, but has a dream of his own, which is to open a roller disco. One day, one of the ancient muses, Kira (Olivia Newton-John), steps out of a painting and decides to help Sonny with his dream. Also to that end, Kira arranges a meeting between Sonny and Danny (Gene Kelly), a clarinetist whom Kira had helped in the past. However, along the way, Kira falls in love with Sonny, which is a big no-no, and that threatens to get the whole project scuppered. Michael Beck couldn't act, and disco was on its way out by 1980 when the movie was released. And Gene Kelly on roller skates has to be seen to be believed. Plus, the plot doesn't always make sense, so you can understand why the movie bombed. But the music is memorable, a collaboration between Olivia Newton-John and the Electric Light Orchestra, and if the movie had been released in a year without a lot of strong movie music, at least one of the songs would have merited an Oscar nomination.
We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. So begins Plan 9 from Outer Space, which will be on TCM at 9:30 PM Friday. Director Ed Wood was friends with actor Bela Lugosi, and filmed footage of him with no specific plot in mind. After Lugosi died, Wood tried to turn the footage into the basis of a movie, with some lack of success. The plot, such as it is, involves aliens who are worried about Earth getting not just the atomic bombs, but weapons even worse than that, so they come to stop this by robbing graves and creating an army of zombies or some such. Of course, you don't watch Plan 9 from Outer Space for the plot, but instead for how bad it turned out, with the terrible plot, direction, and acting. Tom Keene and Lyle Tablot, who had been B-listers in the 1930s, play military men investigating the alien plot, while a bunch of people who would be unknown if it weren't for this movie play the other roles. It later became a cult classic, and the 1994 movie Ed Wood is about the making of Plan 9 from Outer Space, winning Martin Landau an Oscar.
For those of you who want more recent movies, I actually have one that's only two years old: Ford v Ferrari, at 9:50 PM Saturday on HBO2. Matt Damon plays Carroll Shelby, who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race in 1959, but had to give up auto racing, at least as a driver, due to a heart condition. So he goes into designing racecars instead. Meanwhile, over at Ford, Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) is trying to modernize the company's image, in part by designing the Mustang, and in part to get the company into auto racing against Ferrari who are the big boys of racing in Europe. Unsurprisingly, Iacocca and Shelby meet and after a lot of back and forth the two companies decide to partner to get into car racing and entering the 1966 Le Mans. Shelby would like to use driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), but th bigwigs at Ford have a problem with his attitude. Of course, this is all based on real events, so you know how the story turns out. The big race takes up the final 40 minutes or so and has all the stereotypical Hollywood touches, which may displease some people.
Just before Ford v Ferrari you've got a chance to catch an interesting little movie on TCM: They Won't Believe Me, at 8:00 PM Saturday. Robert Young plays Larry Ballentine, a man standing trial for the murder of Verna Carlson (Susan Hayward). Larry has a defense that he claims is the god-honest truth, but he knows that it's going to sound far-fetched to the jury, as you can probably surmise from the title of the movie. Larry is an investment broker who married Greta (Rita Johnson) for her money. But they agreed that if Larry ever left Greta, he wasn't getting any of her money. He then had a fling with their mutual friend Janice (Jane Greer), before Verna came into the picture. She was one of Larry's co-workers, and was much more grasping, trying to figure out a way to get at Greta's money, even if dishonestly and allowing her and Larry to live together happily ever after. However, as you can guess, things don't go the way Larry hopes. Unfortunately, this is the sort of movie that has to tie itself into knots to deal with the Production Code.
Josephine Baker was a force of nature, but there's not all that much of her work that's extant. One of her movies is Princesse Tam-Tam, which is on TCM at 12:45 PM Sunday. Max de Mirecourt (Albert Préjean) is a French writer who goes off to Tunisia (part of France at the time) to get away from the society types including his wife who are making it difficult to get his next book done. At the villa where Max is staying, he meets Alwina (that's Baker if you couldn't tell), a shepherdess who is utterly captivating if primitive by western standards. So Max decides he's going to get back at his wife by giving Alwina an extreme makeover, bringing her to Paris, and passing her off as Princesse Tam-Tam, Pygmalion-style. Many complications and some lavish musical numbers that give Baker a chance to show off her great talents ensue. Will any of the characters live happily ever after?