Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of November 15-21, 2021. Everybody’s favorite coronavirus heretic is back in action today, so there’s a lot to cheer about. YA Tittie will be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday, so I’ll mention a bunch of good movies he can watch during his long weekend. There’s more from Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet; a movie that’s less than 15 years old; vintage animation; and more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell were always fun together, as you can see in a movie like His Kind of Woman, on TCM at noon on Monday. Mitchum plays Dan Milner, a professional gambler who’s just gotten out of jail and returns home to find a couple of thugs waiting for him with an offer he can’t really refuse, which is $50,000 to spend a year down in Mexico. He’s flown down to Mexico, on a plane with singer Lenore (Jane Russell). Also at the resort where they’re both staying is actor Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price), an Errol Flynn type who is a rather hammy actor who has lost his luster; Mark and Lenore have a past together. But the real reason Dan has been brought down to Mexico is because of Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr). Nick is a gangster who has been deported from the US, and has decided that the best way to get back in it to take the identity and face of somebody who’s got the same build as him – and Dan will do just fine for that. And nobody will miss Dan when he’s gone. But the situation might just give Mark the chance to save the day and revive his career. Price’s ridiculous overacting – which is what the script requires – is the highlight of the movie.
For those of you who like more recent movies, I’m recommending one that’s less than 15 years old: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, at 6:45 AM Monday on Flix. Rebecca Hall plays Vicky, who’s traveling to Barcelona with her friend Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) for the summer to do work on her master’s thesis before getting married to fiancé Doug (Chris Messina); Cristina isn’t certain what she wants to do with life. One day, they see artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) first at a show and then in a restaurant, and Cristina can’t stop looking over at him. So he comes over to their table and invites them to Oviedo for the weekend. This leads to each of them getting romantically involved with him, although it’s Cristina who actually winds up living with him once Doug calls up to suggest they actually get married in Barcelona. But then things get really complicated when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria (Penelope Cruz) shows up, as her new relationship to a Madrid architect has gone sour. The threesome between Maria, Cristina, and Juan Antonio is a mess for absolutely everybody.
Tuesday night on TCM sees a salute to director Gordon Parks, which includes the original version of the movie Shaft, at 11:00 PM Tuesday. Richard Roundtree plays John Shaft, a private detective in New York who is approached one day by a couple of emissaries from the gangster Bumpy (Moses Gunn). It seems that Bumpy’s daughter was kidnapped, and Bumpy would like his daughter back and somebody to figure out who did it. The problem is that the police have concluded that it’s white mafiosi from downtown who committed the kidnapping as part of a turf war. But the general public is going to believe that it was really done for race reasons. And to be honest, there are black liberation types who would be more than happy for the general public to get involved in a race war, as it furthers their purposes, so somebody like Ben Buford (Christopher St. John) might just be behind the kidnapping as a false flag operation. Shaft has to tread carefully as there’s danger on all sides, from the police, the white mafia, and the black liberationists.
A movie that’s been back in the FXM rotation is Two For the Road. It’s got another airing at 6:00 AM Wednesday. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney play Joanna and Mark Wallace respectively. They’re a British couple who have been married 10 years, and are on their way from Britain to the south of France, where Mark has designed a home for a client. However, their marriage is not in the happiest state, and as the couple drive through France, we learn why the marriage is nearing its breaking point. However, what makes the movie different is that it’s not a linear story. Instead, the couple has made this particular drive before, and as they go through various points of the trip, we see various scenes from the marriage that happened at those places, some of which may have happened more recently than others. This makes the movie a bit tough for some people thanks to that disjointed story line. Watch also for a young Jacqueline Bisset as one of the people who takes a ride with the Wallaces.
There’s another night of Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet on TCM on Wednesday, including one of his lesser remembered movies, Three Strangers, at 9:45 PM. Greenstreet plays one of the strangers, a solicitor in 1938 London named Jerome who is approached on the street by a woman named Crystal (Geraldine Fitzgerald). She’s got a statue of an ancient Chinese goddess, Kwan Yin, behind whom there’s a legend that if three strangers make the same wish in front of the goddess on New Year’s Eve, that wish will be granted. Crystal already has another stranger, Johnny (Peter Lorre) up in her apartment. Both of them need money, and Johnny has a sweepstakes ticket. So perhaps Jerome needs money too and will come up and wish for it? As it turns out, each of the three does have the need of coming into a substantial sum of money pretty soon, and those backstories are explored. Unfortunately, it’s not told in anthology form, and since the three are strangers, bouncing from one story to another where the other two aren’t involved doesn’t quite make sense.
A western I haven’t mentioned in a while is The Hallelujah Trail, at 11:33 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. Winter is closing in on the Colorado Territory a few years after the end of the Civil War, and people are concerned that there are enough provisions to last through the winter in case any of the passes are closed off, the Transcontinental Railroad not having been completed. One of those supplies is whiskey, both for the miners and the saloon owners. A scout, Oracle Jones (Donald Pleasance), comes up with the idea of placing one giant order of whiskey for everybody and having a wagon train get it in before the snow comes. However, word of the order gets out by a press that doesn’t care about anybody’s privacy (no different from today). As a result, a lot of people have an interest in that shipment, including Oracle and the miners; the cavalry guarding the shipment, led by Col. Gearhart (Burt Lancaster); temperance groups led by Cora Massingale (Lee Remick); and the Indians like Chief Walks Stooped Over (Martin Landau).
TCM has several fairytale-type movies on Friday morning and afternoon, which includes the 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels, which will be on at 12:45 PM Friday. Based on just one small part of the book by Jonathan Swift, and made by the Fleischer brothers, not Disney, this one focuses on the portion of the book dealing with Lilliput, since it’s the best known part of the book. Lemuel Gulliver is a doctor who winds up shipwrecked on an island and wakes up with a zillion tiny ropes tying him down, having been put there by the minuscule people of Lilliput. Gulliver finds that he’s in a country that is about to go to war with the equally small kingdom of Blefescu due to a dispute over arrangements for a royal wedding. Gulliver decides to try to be a mediator, but there are forces on both sides getting in the way. Like the animated movies over at Disney, there are several songs included, but what makes this different than Disney’s work is the rotoscoping process used to animate Gulliver.
We’ve got another Marilyn Monroe movie this week: Niagara, on TCM at 8:00 PM Saturday. Jean Peters and Casey Adams are Polly and Ray Cutler, a young couple who are heading up to Niagara Falls to enjoy the honeymoon they didn’t get to have when they first married. At the place they’re staying, a group of small self-catering cabins, they meet another couple, Rose and George Loomis (Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten respectively). George seems like he has mental issues that make the marriage a less than happy one, and Polly discovers that there’s another man in Polly’s life. What Polly has no way of knowing is that Rose and the other man (Richard Allan) are planning on killing George and making it look like an accident at the Maid of the Mist. The “accident” seems to go as planned, but in fact it’s George who’s killed the other man, so won’t Rose be surprised when George shows up again. Thanks to the Production Code, Rose is going to have to pay for her sins, but the movie is still worth watching, and there’s a lot of nice Technicolor footage of Niagara Falls.
For a period drama, you could do a lot worse than to try The Madness of King George, which will be on multiple times this week, including 11:37 PM Saturday on MovieMax. Nigel Hawthorne plays King George III of England, who was king for 60 years, from 1760-1820. In the final years of his life he suffered from blindness and dementia that led to a regency. But there had been a regency crisis twenty years earlier as George probably suffered from a progressive mental illness (porphyria is most often cited as the culprit). The first serious episode was in 1788, and as George was away from London to recuperate, political forces in Parliament tried to figure out what to do. George had hand-picked William Pitt as Prime Minister, and Pitt tried to keep a regency from being installed, in no small part because George’s wayward son and heir apparent preferred Pitt’s rival, Charles Fox. Fox, for his part, was off in Italy when the crisis broke. In any case, this is Hawthorne’s movie all the way, with Helen Mirren playing his Queen Consort.
This week’s Noir Alley selection is Johnny O’Clock, on TCM at 10:0 AM Sunday. Johnny, played by Dick Powell, is part owner of a casino together with Guido (Thomas Gomez) and crooked cop Blayden (Jim Bannon). Johnny is hoping to become an equal partner with Guido, but Blayden is trying to cut in. Harriet (Nina Foch) is the hat-check girl, in a relationship with Blayden; her sister Nancy (Ellen Drew) has a thing for Johnny. And then Harriet is found dead, presumably having committed suicide because of the breakup of that relationship. When it’s determined that Harriet did not in fact commit suicide, Johnny and Guido are suspects, and Nancy is wanted for information by the investigating detective, Koch (Lee J. Cobb). Blayden would be a prime suspect too, except for the fact that h winds up being found floating face down in the river. So now we’ve got two murders and two obvious suspects. But who did it and why?