Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of November 1-7, 2021. We’re into the first full week of a new month, which means that we’re going to be getting a new Star of the Month on TCM. But more on that later. Note that this is also the week in which Daylight Savings Time ends, so keep that in mind when you go to record a movie on Sunday morning. In addition to that, we’ve got a bunch of football movies; a movie with a young Marilyn Monroe; a movie Monroe turned down; and more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday’s daytime lineup on TCM is a bunch of movies with college football as a subject. You may recall Pat O’Brien over at Warner Bros in Knute Rockne, All American. After he left there, RKO decided they’d want to make O’Brien a college coach again. That movie, The Iron Major, will be on TCM at 3:15 PM Monday. Here, O’Brien plays Frank Cavanaugh, who started coaching at the turn of the previous century, leaving his job at Dartmouth College to go off and fight in World War I. He gets injured in the war and nearly dies, but of course survives so that he can return to the States and coach some more, first at Boston College and then Fordham, his final job. There, his life is catching up with him, as he learns he’s only got a few years left to live. But he retires before dying; in real life he was totally blind and broke at the time of his death. But the movie was released in 1943 at the height of World War II, so instead we get a bunch of propaganda about how he fought and turned out young men who also fought for their country.
A movie that I don’t think I’ve recommended before is Sex, Lies, and Videotape. You’ve got a chance to see it this week, at 10:00 PM Monday on Flix. Ann (Andie MacDowell) is a bored housewife married to ambitious young lawyer John (Peter Gallagher). Coming into their lives is John’s old college friend Graham (James Spader), an odd young man who doesn’t want to be tied down and is impotent. Not only that, but he deals with his impotency by getting women to open up and talk to him about their sexual histories, videotaping these sessions. Meanwhile, John is having an affair… with Ann’s sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo)! Ann, who has become friends with Graham, finds out about the videotapes and is horrified, while Cynthia eventually sees Graham and is curious about the tapes, ultimately making one herself. And if things aren’t complicated enough, you know that Ann is going to find out that John is having an affair, forcing her to rethink her own sex life. None of the characters seem very appealing, and yet the movie works.
The Tuesday daytime lineup on TCM is movies set in Reno, the divorce capital of the world back in the day when it was one of the few places available to get a quickie divorce. Among the movies airing is Peach-O-Reno, at 7:30 AM Tuesday. This is one of the earlier movies for comic duo Wheeler and Woolsey. Woolsey (the one with the glasses), plays Julius Swift, lawyer in Reno and partner in a firm with Wattles (that’s Bert Wheeler). Joe and Aggie Bruno each separately come to the firm looking for a divorce, and wouldn’t you know that the firm winds up taking both of their cases, even though the cases wind up against each other. The Brunos have a pair of adult daughters, Prudence (Dorothy Lee) and Pansy (Zelma O’Neal) who follow their parents to Reno in order to try to prevent the divorce. IN a thoroughly unsurprising move, the daughters fall in love with the lawyers. Meanwhile, there’s a competing law firm trying to get one of the halves of the divorce case, and a disgruntled husband who has it in for Wattles, forcing him to disguise himself in drag.
This week’s movie that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation is How to be Very, Very Popular. It’s got another airing this week, at 3:25 AM Tuesday. Betty Grable plays Stormy Tornado, a showgirl in San Francisco together with her friend Curly Flagg (Sheree North). The two witness a murder, which forces them to flee for their lives. Their saved up money takes them as far as a college town, where they wind up on the campus of Bristol College, in a fraternity where perpetual student Fillmore Wedgewood (Bob Cummings) is one of the residents. Also finding the two women are Eddie (Tommy Noonan) and expelled student Toby Marshall (Orson Bean), whose father (Fred Clark) is a big donor to the college but doesn’t realize his son has been expelled. The police and the killer have both figured out where the two showgirls wound up, more or less, and are searching for Stormy and Curly, while college president Dr. Tweed (Charles Coburn) is trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. Frankly, the viewer is, too.
Now that we’re into a new month, it’s time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, it’s not actually a star, but somebody who was a supporting actor in most of the movies he was in – although he was exceedingly memorable in most of those supporting roles. That man is Sydney Greenstreet, whose movies will be on TCM every Wednesday in prime time, starting this Wednesday at 8:00 PM with The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart is the star here, as San Francisco private detective Sam Spade, who is approached by the mysterious Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor), who claims to be in danger. Murders occur, including Spade’s detective partner. Other weird people show up, such as Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), and the fat Kasper Gutman (that’s Greenstreet). It turns out they’re all looking for a stauette that’s hundred of years old and jewel-encrusted; rumor has it that it was put on a ship from Hong Kong to San Francisco which is why all these loonies have shown up. But there are also those pesky murders….
The baseball season may be almost over, heavens be praised, but our next-movie is baseball-adjacent: Brewster’s Millions, at 7:45 AM Wednesday on StarzEncore Classics. Richard Pryor plays Montgomery Brewster, a failed minor-league baseball player who constantly gets in trouble with his best friend, Spike Nolan (John Candy). After his latest problems get him kicked off the team, a mysterious man shows up to “help”. It turns out that the man is working for the lawyers managing the estate of Monty’s uncle, who has recently died, and come up with a strange will that probably wouldn’t hold up in court. The terms of the will are a test to see if Monty knows the value of money: if he can spend $30 million of the uncle’s estate in the next 30 days in a very specific way that leave him without assets, he’ll inherit the entire estate valued at a good $300 million. If not, the law firm gets to keep managing the estate. But of course, Monty isn’t allowed to tell anybody about the challenge So of course, they try to sabotage the scheme so that at the end, an accounting error will keep him from spending all of that money. It’s an old story, so old that the first movie version goes back to the silent era and there have probably been about a dozen versions of the story.
It may be hard to believe, but there were US senators in the months before Pearl Harbor who wanted to bring the movie moguls to heel for making movies seen as encouraging the US to join the war on the Allied side. One such movie is the daring 1939 film Confessions of a Nazi Spy, on TCM at 8:00 PM Thursday. In the late 1930s there was a fear that the Nazis would try to infiltrate the German-American Bund to get German-Americans to agitate for neutrality in the coming war. One of those German-Americans is Kurt Schneider (Francis Lederer), who was dishonorably discharged from the Army. So when he hears Nazi-sympathetic speeches from Dr. Kassel (Paul Lukas), he decides to become a turncoat. When his contact in Scotland is caught, FBI agent Edward Renard (Edward G. Robinson) is put on the case to figure out what Schneider knows and, if possible, bring the higher-ups such as Schlager (George Sanders) to justice. The film, presented in a docudrama style, shows early uses of technologies like hidden cameras and two-way mirrors. Watch also more the actress playing Mrs. Schneider; that’s Grace Stafford, who would go on to marry Walter Lantz and become the voice of Woody Woodpecker.
If you want to see Marilyn Monroe at the beginning of her career, even before her small role in The Asphalt Jungle, try Ladies of the Chorus, on TCM at 11:00 PM Friday. Monroe plays Peggy Martin, a chorus girl who is the daughter of former star Mae Martin (Adele Jergens), now reduced to being back in the chorus herself. Eventually Peggy gets elevated to being the star of the show, which is how she comes to the attention of Randy Carroll (Rand Brooks), a wealthy young man of the sort that would have populated 1930s movies with chorus girls and rich playboys. Randy falls in love with Peggy, and the feeling is mutual, but Mom is worried about how all of the Carroll’s wealthy friends will react when they discover Randy has fallen in love with a chorus girl. Randy’s mother (Nana Bryant) has her own way of dealing with the problem. This is a movie that would be largely forgotten if it weren’t for the presence of Marilyn Monroe, who is actually already pretty good here. But the movie is something that a decade earlier would have been a two-reel short; stretched out to an hour, there’s not much here.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned a singing cowboy western recently, so I’ll point out that Lights of Old Santa Fe can be seen this week at 8:26 AM Friday on StarzEncore Westerns. Roy Rogers plays himself, as does Trigger, who gets billing above Rogers’ real-life wife Dale Evans. Dale plays Marjorie Brooks, who owns a rodeo that is run by her manager, Gabby Whittaker (Gabby Hayes). However, the rodeo is in a parlous financial state with a lack of bookings. Rival rodeo owner Frank Madden (Tom Keene, billed here as Richard Powers) knows this, and is lusting after Marjorie, so he decides that the best thing to do is to destroy her rodeo so that he can ride in and save the day, marrying her in the process. Roy finds the evidence of sabotage, and investigates; of course you know that he’s going to save the day. Roy’s back up band the Sons of the Pioneers appear as well, giving Roy the opportunity to sing a couple of songs over the course of the hour; Dale gets one solo herself.
One wonders if Eddie Muller is running out of movies to show in Noir Alley, considering some of the movies he’s shown recently. That includes this week’s selection, 5 Steps to Danger, at 10:00 AM Sunday. Sterling Hayden plays John Emmett, a man on vacation driving from California to Texas whose car breaks down. He’s picked up by Ann Nicholson (Ruth Roman), who is heading out to New Mexico and who would like somebody to help with the driving. As they go down America’s highways and byways, Emmett begins to get the feeling something isn’t right, as Ann is trying to get away from her psychiatrist, Dr. Simmons (Werner Klemperer) and his nurse. It also turns out that Ann was born in Germany, which leads to the eventual revelation that there are international secrets here over new rocket technology, secrets that are being stolen and that people would pay big money for. But who’s on which side? Emmett, being an innocent bystander, is clearly on the American side, this being the 1950s when American intelligence agencies could do no wrong.
