Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of November 21-27, 2016. Mike McCarthy likes to say, “We do what we do”, even if what he does contributes to the Packers' season going down the toilet. Well, what I do is to keep all of you happy by selecting some good movies for all of you to watch. I've used my good taste to come up with several more movies this week, including shorts and some relatively recent classics. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
I can't recall if I've recommended Killer McCoy before. It's airing at 9:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Mickey Roony plays the title role, young Tommy McCoy. He grows up on the tough streets of the city, with a drunk ex-vaudevillean father (James Dunn) who can't stop gambling either. One night at the amateur boxing, Tommy gets in the ring and beats the crap out of another kid, bringing Tommy to the attention of the former middleweight champion, and starting a boxing career. But unfortunately the ex-champ has to go back into the ring, and has to fight Tommy in the process. Tommy accidentally kills him with a punch, so now only the professional gambler Caighn (Brian Donlevy) wants to manage Tommy through his father. How can Tommy get out of this mess? It doesn't help that his father is still losing money hand over fist gambling, while Tommy has fallen in love with Caighn's daughter Sheila (Ann Blyth), which Daddy doesn't like.
TCM is running a salute to the US National Park system on the system's 100th anniversary. They're showing five features all of which did location shooting in various national parks, as well as four Traveltalks shorts that highlight different parks. I love the Traveltalks shorts (and the Warner Archive has released two box sets of them, I think 120 shorts in total), and those are all in a block starting at 12:15 AM Wednesday. (There are more than that that James Fitzpatrick did that aren't on tonight's schedule.) King Solomon's Mines (3:00 AM Wednesday) is set in Africa and a good amount of filming was done there, but apparently there were some cave sequences done at Carlsbad Caverns, which I didn't know.
There are more documentaries this week as part of TCM's salute to the genre. One of the more disturbing ones is Salesman, which is on at 10:45 PM Wednesday on TCM. Apparently, a Bible publishing company back in the 60s would get Catholic parish churches to gage parishioners' interest in a new family bible, and then the compnay would take these leads and send out four of its salesmen door-to-door to try to sell bibles to the usually low-income people who really couldn't afford these crappy bibles. Pity the poor salesmen, too, who kind of realize that they're preying on people, but know that if they don't they won't be able to feed their own families so they come up with every rationalization in the book to justify what they're doing as they come up with every excuse to try to hawk these bibles. This being a documentary, there's nobody you've ever heard of in the cast, although the Maysles brothers, who directed, would go on to make Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens (the latter will be on next Monday).
I've got several recent movies this week, the first of which is The Blues Brothers, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 9:15 AM Wednesday. John Belushi plays Jake Blues, fresh out of prison and picked up by his brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd). They find out that the orphanage they were raised in is no longer getting support from the Chicago archdiocese, and since it can't pay its back taxes, the facility is going to close. Jake gets the brilliant idea to find the members of the blues band he and Elwood were in before Jake went to prison, and reunite them for a benefit concert to raise the money. Of course, it's going to be tough to find all of those people and stay out of legal trouble while doing it. Along the way, they meet some of the great musicians of our time, from Aretha Franklin to Cab Calloway to Ray Charles; go up against Illinois Nazis; find a bar that plays both types of music – country and western – and more. Belushi must have provided some damn good coke to get all those musicians. 
A western that isn't set very far west is The Fighting Kentuckians, at 2:00 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Westerns. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the US sold a bunch of land to French exiles, which they turned into what is now the city of Demopolis, AL. These exiles are led by Gen. Marchand (Hugo Haas), who has a lovely daughter Fleurette (Vera Ralston). John Breen (John Wayne) is leading his Kentucky regiment through Alabama and stops in Demopolis, finding the lovely Fleurette, so of course he wants to marry her. But there's a catch. The exiles are in danger of having their land stolen out from under them by the evil Randolph (John Howard), who also wants Fleurette's hand in marriage. So Breen takes up the fight on behalf of the French exiles. One interesting thing about this movie is Wayne's sidekick. It's none other than Oliver Hardy. Stan Laurel was ill at the time and couldn't make movies, so Hardy made this film after a lot of coaxing. Wayne apparently like working with Hardy and wanted to keep working with him, but Laurel recovered so Hardy went back to being part of a comic duo.
You've probably heard the awful mid-50s song “Three Coins in the Fountain”, which was the title tune to a movie of the same name. Director Jean Negulesco remade the movie a decade later as The Pleasure Seekers, which will be on FXM Retro at 1:10 PM Thursday and 11:25 AM Friday. Basically, the movie looks at three young American women abroad (in this movie, that's Spain; the original was set in Rome), all of whom are single and all of whom want to find love. Susie (Pamela Tiffin) has come to Madrid to visit her old college roommate Maggie (Carol Lynley) and when Susie arrives, she meets wealthy Emilio (Anthony Franciosa). But he may just be trying to bed her and not really love her. As for Maggie, she has a thing for her boss (Brian Keith), but he's already married (to Gene Tierney). The third woman is nightclub singer Fran (Ann-Margaret). When she gets sick Dr. Andres (Andre Lawrence) helps her and she falls in love with him, but he seems married to his practice of medicine and therefore not in want of a wife.
Perhaps you've heard the phrase The Life of Riley. It comes from an old radio show, and that show was turned into a movie in 1949 (and later a TV series). That movie is on TCM at 8:00 PM Thursday. William Bendix reprises his radio role, playing a man who works at an aircraft plant for Mr. Stevenson. Riley has a wife (Rosemary DeCamp) and daughter (Meg Randall) who cause him no end of exasperation. In this movie, the story revolves in part around the daughter, who is engaged to be married to the boss' son, although it turns out that this is just a marriage of convenience: the son has gambling debts that he can pay off by getting married, while Riley's daughter thinks she's helping her father's job prospects by marrying the boss' son. Will Dad be able to solve everybody's problems and make them all happy?
For people who think I don't recommend recent enough movies, well, you could watch Airplane! which will be on StarzEncore at 5:15 AM Friday. (If you only have the west coast feed, it would be on three hours later.) An airplane takes off, and unfortunately, it turns out that the fish is contaminated, so everybody who has the fish dinner gets violently ill – including the pilot! They have to land the plane quick, and find somebody who can do it; the burden falls on Ted Striker (Robert Hays). The only thing is, he was a pilot in the war and has PTSD about it, which makes flying rather a stressful thing for him. This was based on a 1950s movie called Zero Hour! which was good in its own right, but Airplane! took the movie and turned it into a comic spoof not just of the original movie, but the entire genre of all-star disaster movies. Relive all those hilarious old sequences, such as June Cleaver speaking jive, or Peter Graves asking a little kid about gladiator movies, or Robert Stack picking the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Friday night bring the movies of Natalie Wood to TCM, and this week being the last Friday of the month, it's only fitting that they show her final film, Brainstorm, at 12:15 AM Saturday. Wood plays Karen, the estranged wife of Michael (Christopher Walken), who both work at a California tech company. Michael has been working closely with Lillian (Louise Fletcher) on a system that nowadays would be called virtual reality, except that this is more real in that it takes real-life experiences and literally puts them into other people's heads. It's a great idea, but one that might be too great since people want to do all the wrong things with it. Some want to use it as a sex toy, while the Defense Department has its obvious uses for it. And then Lillian suffers a heart attack and, knowing she's dying, records her final moments for the system. Michael realizes he just has to get that tape and play it so he can unlock the secret of what death is like. But can he get his wife to help him. This is a movie with some good ideas, but unfortunately Wood drowned suddenly during the filming, which meant they had to change the script and we get something rather more muddled.
If you're someone like Goldie who switches between Packer games and the Lifetime Channel, you might enjoy the chance to catch another airing of The Clock, at 4:00 PM Sunday on TCM. Robert Walker plays Cpl. Joe Allen, a serviceman with a short leave, which he wants to spend seeing New York. While in Grand Central Station he runs into shopgirl Alice (Judy Garland), literally, accidentally breaking the heel of her shoe in the process. She shows him around town, and you can see them falling in love. So they agree to met under the big clock at the Waldorf and spend a night together. But can love really bloom in such a short time? Joe and Alice wind up on a bunch of adventures late at night with milkman Al (James Gleason), who takes the young couple home to his wife (Lucile Gleason, James' real-life wife of 40-plus years by that point.) If you don't like Judy Garland's singing, this is a good movie to watch, since she doesn't sing at all and shows she really could act.