Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of November 11-17, 2019. There's nothing particularly noteworthy to put in this space, other than to mention that the same spotlights we had last week are still running: Star of the Month Bette Davis on Tuesdays; cinematography on Wednesdays, and so on. Oh, and all those damn Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel for Goldie and her boyfriend Baker Mayfield. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is Veterans' Day, so we get stuck with a bunch of military-themed movies on TCM on Monday. A lot of them are World War II-themed, but one that came out just before the war is Dive Bomber, which you can see at 12:45 PM Monday. Errol Flynn plays Navy doctor Douglas Lee, who sees one of his patients die on the operating table after an accident during flight training when the pilot blacked out from a steep dive, not being able to take the G forces. The pilot's commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Joe Blake (Fred MacMurray) blames Lt. Dr. Lee for the death. Lee decides he's going to try to redeem himself by becoming a flight surgeon, that being a doctor also trained as a pilot. But it only gets him posted under Lt. Cmdr. Blake. Another flight surgeon, Rogers (Ralph Bellamy) is trying to come up with a solution to the altitude sickness that G force problems that are plaguing the pilots, and Lee works with him, although some of the proposed solutions aren't necessarily believed in by Blake and the higher-ups. Alexis Smith makes one of her first movie appearances in what is supposed to be the object of both Blake and Lee's affections. Lots of great footage of old aircraft in color, although the subject material isn't quite based on fact what with security preparations for the upcoming war.
Bette Davis gets another day of her movies as Star of the Month on Tuesday. One that I don't think I've recommended before is The Girl from 10th Avenue, which will be on at 11:00 AM. Davis plays Miriam, a New York working girl who spends her lunch hour one day outside a church where a society wedding is being held. Also showing up is Geoffrey Sherwood (Ian Hunter), an upper-class drunk who used to be the boyfriend of the bride and is drinking away his sorrow. Miriam takes him away to keep him from getting arrested, and that eventually leads to his taking her upstate and getting a sudden marriage. They have a trial marriage while he goes into business on his own to keep the other society types from finding out he's married a commoner; she learns about how to be married to a rich guy from former Floradora girl now her landlord, Agnes Martin (Alison Skipworth). And then Geoffrey's former girlfriend Valentine (Katherine Alexander), tiring of her husband (Colin Clive), decides that she's going to look up Geoffrey and try to steal him back, never mind that she's married. By this time Miriam has discovered she really loves Geoffrey, and tries to keep him.
I know a lot of you like the cheesy 80s cult classics, so I'll mention one this week: The Running Man, at 9:37 AM Wednesday. Not to be confused with an earlier 1963 movie with the same title but a completely different plot, this one starts Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a policeman in California in 2017(!), when the US had collapsed economically and turned into a dictatorship with the media doing the government's business. (That part they got right, to an extent.) One of the most popular TV shows is a game show hosted by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson, who of course was an actor before hosting Family Feud minus the penis jokes) in which condemned criminals try to run for their freedom. Ben was framed for shooting a bunch of innocent civilians taking part in a food riot, and escaped prison. When he's recaptured, he's given the opportunity to try to win his freedom on Killian's Running Man show. Jesse Ventura plays one of the stalkers chasing Richards, while musicians Dweezil Zappa and Mick Fleetwood have small roles.
A movie that's returning to FXM is the 1944 version of The Lodger, which they're showing at 6:00 AM Thursday. The year is 1888, and Jack the Ripper is on the loose, killing actresses because the Production Code wouldn't let him kill prostitutes. The Bontings (Sara Allgood and Cedric Hardwicke) are a family that has suffered declining financial fortunes forcing them to take in a lodger, Slade (Laird Cregar). Slade is an odd man with any number of peccadilloes, like going out at night or not liking the portraits of actresses that hang on the walls of the room he's letting. This leads Mrs. Bonting especially to fear that perhaps Slade might in fact be Jack the Ripper. And to make matters more frightening, the Bontings' niece Kitty (Merle Oberon) lives with them -- and she's an actress! That, and Slade is falling for her! Does she realize she might be in danger? Investigating the case is Inspector Warwick (George Sanders), who also has an interest in Kitty. This is a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's famous silent thriller, and quite good in its own right.
TCMnis showing a bunch of Dick Powell movies on Thursday, including College Coach at 7:45 AM. Powell isn't the coach; that honor goes to Pat O'Brien, playing Coach Gore. Gore is hired by Calvert College, a school that's floundering and feels that the only way they can survive is to field a winning football team, this being the era when college football was much bigger than the pro game. Gore gets the job because he has no scruples, much like the college coaches of today. Gore has no problem hiring ringers and ignoring his wife (Ann Dvorak). Lyle Talbot plays Buck Weaver, the stark quarterback who cares more about football than his grades, and tries to put the moves on Mrs. Gore when her husband neglects her. As for Powell, he plays Phil Sargent, a student-athlete who epitomizes the myth the the NCAA still wants us to believe today. The amazing thing about this movie is how it expects up to have sympathy for Coach Gore and allows him to get away with stuff that would make Bill Belichick look like a choir boy.
If you want to feel old, consider the fact that Basic Instinct is 27 years old. It's going to be on this week, at 8:00 PM Thursday on Epix. Michael Douglas plays Nick, a San Francisco police detective with a checkered past. He's assigned the case of a particularly brutal murder, that of a rock star who was stabbed by an ice pick. The dead guy had a girlfriend in crime novelist Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone), and as Nick investigates he gets the distinct feeling that Catherine did it, especially after finding out that she wrote a novel in which one of the characters was ice-picked to death. But then another investigator gets killed, and a police psychiatrist who was also Nick's ex-girlfriend is brought in, making things complicated. Still more murders happen. Catherine is manipulative, and as Nick investigates, the whole case gets extremely sexually charged, which is what most people remember the movie for.
If you're into vintage computers, then you might enjoy Hot Millions, which TCM has at 6:00 AM Saturday. Peter Ustinov plays Marcus Pendleton, an accountant who embezzled from his previous employer and spent a stretch in prison for it. He's getting out, and finds that businesses are going into computers, which makes the traditional form of embezzlement he practiced more difficult, but opens up vast new fields of money-skimming on an industrial scale. Except that he doesn't know computers. So he finds a computer whiz Caesar (Robert Morley) and uses identity theft to send Caesar away and take his place in the London branch of an American multinational. (What if the original Caesar should return?) He falls in love with Patty (Maggie Smith), although executive Willard (Bob Newhart) also develops a thing for Patty. Willard begins to grow suspicious of “Caesar”, but his boss Carlton (Karl Malden) doesn't notice. That is, until Pendleton has the problem of what to do with all that money that he skimmed.
For some reason I thought I had recommended Major Dundee here before, but apparently not. But since TCM has it this week at 3:30 PM Saturday, now is as good a time as any to do a post on it. Charlton Heston plays Maj. Amos Dundee, who screwed up at Gettysburg and got summarily transferred to commanding a POW camp out in the New Mexico Territory. The Apaches have gone on a raid, killing a patrol and a settler family, kidnapping the children and leaving only bugler Tim Ryan (Michael Anderson Jr.) alive. Dundee wants to go on a raid to find the Apache and rescue the kids. The only problem is that they don't have nearly enough soldiers to do that and still guard all the Confederate prisoners. So Dundee offers some of the prisoners a chance at better treatment if they'll come on the raid. They're not happy about it, but since some of them are facing execution for having killed a Union guard, Capt. Tyreen (Richard Harris) ultimately reluctantly agrees to serve under Dundee with several Confederates. It's a difficult search, made more difficult by the fact that the Apache go into Mexico, which is currently occupied by the French, who are a much better fighting force than the Mexicans.
A search of the site suggests that I haven't mentioned Tomahawk recently. It's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns, at 10:05 AM Sunday. Van Heflin plays Jim Bridger, a famed “mountain man” and Army scout in what is now Wyoming. In the era just after the Civil War, gold has been found in the region. With an influx of people sure to come after this discovery, the Army decides to build a fort, and a road to the fort. The only problem is, all of this is on land that had been ceded to the Sioux, who understandably don't want the white man to come onto their land yet again. Bridger doesn't particularly want to lead the Army to where they're thinking of building the fort, in no small part because he had a Cheyenne wife who was massacred by the white man. Lt. Dancy (Alex Nicol) is going to be leading the expedition, which gets Bridger interested because Bridger has a score he'd like to settle with Dancy, while trying to keep another Indian war from starting. Yvonne De Carlo is the requisite romantic interest for Heflin.
Finally I'll mention a dated 1960s sex comedy, Boys' Night Out. It's coming up on TCM at 4:00 PM Sunday. Fred, George, Doug, and Howard (played respectively by James Garner, Tony Randall, Howard Duff, and Howard Morris) are four middle-class office workers who commute together from the suburbs to New York. One of the men finds that his boss is carrying on an affair, and wonders his the boss does it. It turns out that the boss has enough money to have a separate apartment for his girlfriend. The four friends don't, but figure out that if they could pool their money, they could get one apartment and use it as a sort of time-share, each of them for their one night a week in the city away from their wives. They set up a place with "kept woman" Cathy (Kim Novak). What they don't realize, however, is that Cathy is actually using them, as she's a sociology student doing graduate research on the sex habits of the suburban middle-class man. Jim Backus plays the owner of the apartment building, and Oscar Homolka plays Cathy's professor.