Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of November 22-28, 2021. We’ve got a holiday this week, so that should give everybody some time to sit back and relax with some good movies. Well, in addition to the good movies there’s also one that’s hilariously awful. There’s also a programming tribute to a recently deceased star; more from TCM’s Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet; comedies, heist movies, and westerns dot the schedule too. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Actor Dean Stockwell died earlier this month at the age of 85. TCM is honoring Stockwell on Monday morning and afternoon with a bunch of his performances as a child actor, including The Mighty McGurk at 10:45 AM. Wallace Beery plays McGurk, a former prizefighter who has retreated into the bottle and is now working as a bouncer for Bowery saloonkeeper Glenson (Edward Arnold). McGurk is given the job of picking of Glenson’s daughter Caroline (Dorothy Patrick) from the transatlantic liner, but McGurk winds up with an orphan, Nipper (that’s Stockwell, as if you couldn’t tell), who was supposed to meet an uncle who got involved in embezzlement and disappeared. Caroline falls in love with a Salvation Army man Johnny (Cameron Mitchell) who had trained with McGurk back in the day. Glenson wants the Salvation Army place in order to expand his bar and to get rid of those meddling teetotalers, and is willing to use McGurk to drive Johnny out. This was made near the end of Beery’s career, when he was reduced to a parody of the roles he was playing back in the 1930s.
It’s been almost five years since I last mentioned Smoke Signal. It’s on StarzEncore Westerns this week, at 9:21 AM Tuesday. Cavalry captain Harper (William Talman) returns from a patrol to his fort on the Colorado river, finding not only that the fort is under siege by the Utes, but has a strange prisoner: Brett Halliday (Dana Andrews). Brett had been in the army but deserted when he thought they were about to start a disastrous war with the Utes. Meanwhile, the fort’s commander has been killed in the siege, replaced by his lieutenant, Lt. Ford (Rex Reason). The old commander’s daughter, Laura Evans (Piper Laurie) is in love with Ford, although you know there’s going to be a romantic conflict involving Brett too, especially if he’s right about the Utes and Ford is wrong. In any case, Brett surmises that the only escape route is to go down the Colorado River, even though this will take them through the difficult Grand Canyon. Brett is, however, wrong about the Utes not following.
I’m not certain if I’ve mentioned The Man in Grey before, but you have a chance to see it this week, at 2:30 PM Tuesday on TCM. Clarissa (Phyllis Calvert) and Rokeby (Stewart Granger) meet at an estate sale and realize they both have ancestors who were involved with somebody with the other person’s name. Flash back to Regency England…. James Mason plays the titular man, Lord Rohan, who is looking for a woman he can marry to produce a male heir for his family. He finds that woman in sweet, innocent Clarissa. She marries him, he being well to do, and they live happily, not ever after, of course, but until Clarissa’s old friend from her school days, Hester Shaw (Margaret Lockwood) shows up. Hester had a fall from grace in hre school days, and wound up as an actress in an era when the acting profession was seen as decidedly classless. She wants the better things in life, and when she finds that her old friend has married well, she decides that she wants Lord Rohan for herself, introducing Clarissa to Rokeby to try to get them together leaving the way free for Clarissa to go after Rohan.
I’m not certain if I’ve recommended The Split before. It’s going to be on TCM at 5:30 AM Wednesday, so I’ll mention it this week. Jim Brown plays McClain, a criminal returning to Los Angeles to see his estranged wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) for the first time in a while. But he’s also got other reasons for coming back, as he sees Gladys (Julie Harris), who has the money to finance another planned heist. The heist, involves stealing the take from an NFL playoff game (real footage of a Rams-Falcons game was used, although it was a regular season game), with help from getaway driver Kifka (Jack Klugman); sniper Negli (Donald Sutherland); safe-craker Gough (Warren Oates), and all-around “muscle” Clinger (Ernest Borgnine). The heist seems to go off without a hitch, but the hitch comes afterwards, when McClain stashes the money in Ellie’s apartment. Her landlord sees the money and kills her for it, leading everybody to try to find it without getting caught.
If you want a movie that’s so bad it’s good, try Grizzly II: Revenge. It will be on Flix at 9:00 AM Wednesday. Filmed in Hungary in 1983 but held up by financial issues until all of the film elements could be put back together for a release about a year ago, the movie tells the story of a super-sized grizzly bear in a national park who has decided to go on a killing rampage because poachers killed the bear’s cubs. Charlie Sheen, Laura Dern, and George Clooney all get killed in the movie’s opening scene, but they’re by far not the last victims. Meanwhile, park superintendent Draygon (Louise Fletcher, an Oscar-winner but certainly not for this!) has given the green light for a rock concert to go forward in the park, much to the consternation of the rangers. The plot is a mess; the acting is bad; there’s a bunch of stock wildlife footage; and the music is an awful Eastern European simulacrum of 1980s New Wave (if you pay attention, you’ll hear the keyboardist singing in Hungarian). But it’s all such a hilarious mess.
We have one more night of the movies of Sydney Greenstreet on TCM on Wednesday in prime time, leading into Thursday morning. One of his smaller supporting roles is in They Died With Their Boots On, at 6:00 AM Thursday. Errol Flynn plays George Armstrong Custer, who at the start of the movie is entering West Point in 1857. The Civil War comes, and with the Union needing officers, Custer gets promoted, leading to controversial successes borne of disobeying orders. After the war, he marries his sweetheart Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland), but finds that he can’t hack it in civilian life. His old nemesis from West Point, Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy) offers him a job as nominal head of a company taming the Dakota Territory, but Custer refuses, instead getting reactivated and sent with the cavalry to a fort in… the Dakota Territory, where he meets Sharp again and has the task of dealing with the treaty with the Sioux. Sharp tries to get the treaty broken, which in this telling of history is what leads to the Battle of Little Big Horn, not that that’s the way it really happened. As for Greenstreet, he plays Gen. Winfield Scott, helping run the war from Washington DC.
Up against They Died With Their Boots On is an airing of The Robe, at 7:35 AM Thursday on FXM. (It will also be on Friday at 6:00 AM, but that conflicts with another movie I’m mentioning.) If you remember your Bible, according to the Gospel of John after Jesus was crucified Roman solders gambled for Jesus’ vestments. Winning them is Marcellus (Richard Burton), who had been sent to Palestine for buying the slave Demetrius (Victor Mature) out from under Caligula. Marcellus returns to Rome hoping to marry his girlfriend Diana (Jean Simmons), but having been around Jesus’ robe begins to cause serious problems for him, so he goes back to Palestine, looking for both Demetrius, who has become a Christian, and that robe. However, in Palestine he keeps finding more and more reasons to become a Christian himself, and this would get him in serious trouble with the Roman government, which at that time considered the new religion a serious threat.
Thursday being Thanksgiving (except, of course, for YA Tittie), TCM is running a bunch of family movies. One that hasn’t shown up in a while is Houseboat, which will be on at 8:00 PM Thursday. Cary Grant plays Tom Winters, a divorced man with three children working for the State Department. His ex-wife dies and her parents want to take custody of the parents, something Tom absolutely doesn’t want. But the children need a mother figure. One day while taking the kids to an outdoor concert, one of the kids runs off and is rescued by Cinzia (Sophia Loren). She’s the daughter of a prominent conductor, but she wants to escape that life and as a result agrees to become the nanny to the children, the whole “family” living on the titular houseboat on the Potomac. Sparks fly between Tom and Cinzia, while Tom’s sister-in-law Carolyn (Martha Hyer) thinks Cinzia isn’t right for Tom or the kids. And certainly Cinzia’s dad is going to figure out what’s going on. Apparently in real life Grant and Loren had had a torrent fling before she went and married Carlo Ponti, making this movie a tough shoot for both of them.
Up against FXM’s Friday airing of The Robe is Guarding Tess, starting at 7:19 AM Friday on StarzComedy. Tess Carlisle (Shirley MacLaine) is a former First Lady who is still eligible for a Secret Service detail as a result of that status. For the past few years, that detail has been led by Doug Chesnic (Nicolas Cage), who is returning to Washington thrilled that his stint as the head of Tess’ detail is over, because Tess is just so darn difficult to deal with and basically treats the Secret Service like the hired help. However, Tess has some pull with the current president, and she uses that to get the president to re-appoint Chesnic to another term as head of her security detail because he’s been so darn good at dealing with her foibles. Faced with going back to work for Tess or losing his job, Chesnic goes back to Tess, and you just know that a situation comes up that only he’s got the ability to handle and that Tess’ life will depend on that ability.
TCM is running a bunch of Ernst Lubitsch movies on Friday, including To Be or Not to Be at 6:15 PM. However, I’d like to mention a Lubitsch movie showing up outside of that block: Heaven Can Wait, at 1:45 PM Sunday. Don Ameche (shut up, Ferrari) plays Henry Van Cleeve, who has just died and, thinking he lived a dissolute life, is going to be doomed to Hell. The gatekeeper, known as His Excellency (Laird Cregar), doesn’t believe Henry’s protestations, so he asks Henry to go over his life to explain why Henry thinks he’s not going to go to Heaven. Flash back to the Gay 90s, when Henry was a young playboy, and meets his cousin Albert’s (Allyn Joslyn) fiancée Martha (Gene Tierney). Henry sweeps Martha off her feet and they elope, which is a pretty mean thing to do to your cousin. Henry then proceeds to spend a lot of time with other pretty young women, but Martha just can’t quit him. There’s a cast of outstanding character actors here, including Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main as Martha’s parents, Spring Byington as Henry’s mother, and Charles Coburn as Henry’s grandfather.
