Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of November 4-10, 2019. We're in the first full week of a new month, which means that in addition to the "Dennis Miller and Friends" spotlight I mentioned last week, the other new programming themes for November are on, including the new Star of the Month and another spotlight that I'll mention later. I also specifically for Goldie to see if the Hallmark Channel is into it "7 billion Christmas movies with the same exact plot" programming has started, and it seems that yes, it has, so she's got something to watch instead of Packer football. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is the birth anniversary of actor Gig Young, so TCM is showing several of his movies. One that I haven't recommended before is Hunt the Man Down, which will be on at 7:45 AM. James Anderson plays Bill Jackson, who at the start of the movie is working at a bar in northern California. He foils a robbery on night, which is bad news for him because his photo gets seen by the DA down in Los Angeles. Bill, you see, is actually Richard Kincaid, who stood trial for a murder a dozen years back but fled before the trial ended. Now the DA wants to try him again, and has all the old evidence. Gig Young plays Paul Bennett, an attorney from the public defender's office who gets assigned to defend Kincaid. To win the trial, he's going to have to track down the witnesses, which is going to be tough after all these years. Especially because one of them is dead, and somebody is trying to kill in order to prevent the other witnesses from revealing what they know. A surprisingly good little B movie.
Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, we get a new Star of the Month. This time out, it's Bette Davis, and she made so many movies that TCM is running her films all day and night on Tuesdays this month. This first Tuesday brings a lot of her earlier movies, from before she won her first Oscar for Dangerous (which airs on November 12). One that I don't think I've mentioned before is The Working Man, at 4:30 PM Tuesday. Davis is still in a supporting role here, with the lead being George Arliss. Arliss plays John Reeves, who owns a successful shoe company but is getting close to retirement age, especially if you listen to his nephew (Hardie Albright). So he goes to the middle of nowhere in New England on a vacation, and who should he run into but the Hartland kids, Jenny (Davis) and Tommy (Theodore Newton). They're the adult children of Reeves' old friend and business rival, who also ran a shoe business but died, leaving it to the kids, who don't seem particularly interested or apt at business and have been running the family company into the ground. Reeves doesn't like this, so without telling the Hartlands who he really is, he gets involved in their company, becoming trustee, reviving the business along the way and showing his nephew he's still able to run a business. Arliss and Davis also starred together in The Man Who Played God, but that one isn't part of the Star of the Month salute.
FXM shows a surprising number of movies that Fox distributed as opposed to producing at the studio. One that's on this week is Kagemusha, which you can see at 12:40 PM Wednesday. In Japan not long before the Edo period (so, late 1500s), Kagemusha (Tatsuya Nakadai) is a thief who gets caught and is sentenced to die. However, the warlord Katsuyori Takeda sees that Kagemusha looks amazingly like his brother Shingen Takeda, the leader of their warlord clan. So he frees Kagemusha so that Kagemusha may become Shingen's double. Kagemusha is pressed into service when Shingen dies as a result of injuries sustained in battle with another warlord clan (remember that the Tokugawa clan would ultimately win these wars and usher in the Edo period). Will Kagemusha be able to learn enough to keep up the ruse? And will pretending to be Shingen change him? It doesn't help that Shingen's son is unhappy about being passed over for a leadership role. This was directed by Akira Kurosawa, who was going through a rough patch in his native Japan at the time, with production funding provided by George Lucas (who had an in with Fox after the success of Star Wars) and Francis Ford Coppola.
On Wednesdays in both the mornings and prime time, TCM is running a spotlight on cinematography in the movies, as this year is the centenary of the American Society of Cinematographers, the "A.S.C." that you'll see in the credits of a whole bunch of movies. Each Wednesday this month, Ben Mankiewicz is sitting down with a different cinematographer to discuss the movies and cinematographers selected. There are also going to be multiple airings of a new documentary about the pioneering cinematographers who left the east coast where Thomas Edison and the Biograph studios were and went west to make movies and basically help found Hollywood, with the first of those airings being at 8:00 PM this Wednesday.
On Thursday morning and afternoon, TCM is showing a bunch of James Cagney's early work, all from before 1934. I think I've recommended every one of the movies before, but the one I'll mention again this week is The Mayor of Hell, which will be on at 5:30 PM. Cagney is in one of his ex-gangster roles, as Patsy Gargan, who is now a ward heeler in the big city. The political bosses, thinking he's pliable, given him a job as a deputy commissioner of prisons, so he goes up to the juvenile prison he's expected to look after to see how it's run. What he sees shocks him, as the boys, led by Jimmy (Frankie Darro), complain about the terrible treatment at the hands of the corrupt warden Thompson (Dudley Digges). Dorothy (Madge Evans) is a nurse at the reformatory who is also deeply concerned about the kids but doesn't think Patsy can really help. He falls for her and tries to institute reforms, as he doesn't want the boys he sees to wind up the way he did. Thompson and his henchmen try to block the reforms, leading to the climactic showdown that's surprisingly dark.
Most normal people are relieved that the baseball season is finally over. But if for some reason you like baseball and want more, I'll mention that the movie Bull Durham is running at 12:08 PM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Kevin Costner plays “Crash” Davis, a career minor leaguer (with three weeks' Major League experience) who is getting sent down to single-A Durham not because he's that bad, but because he's a talented catcher, and the organization has a young, up-and-coming pitcher who needs a good catcher to teach him about pitching and the battery, Ebby LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). Meanwhile, Annie (Susan Sarandon) is a Goldie-like groupie who takes on a new “boyfriend” from the team every year. At first, she has her heart set on Crash, but he as a cynical veteran more or less spurns her advances, so she turns to LaLoosh who, as a young impressionable man, takes to Annie. This even though we really know that Crash is right for her, and vice versa. And will Ebby ever get truly serious about baseball?
Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland made nine movies together, and TCM is running several of them on Friday morning and afternoon. One that gets less mention is Four's a Crowd, which airs at 8:30 AM. Flynn plays Robert Lansford, a PR man trying to get a job representing America's richest man, John Dillingwell (Walter Connolly). To do this he first makes Dillingwell the most hated man so that he'll need a PR man in the first place. Robert has his journalist girlfriend Jean Christy (Rosalind Russell) write the negative stories. But Dillingwell decides he's going to go after the paper and get it shut down, which threatens Jean's job. But the story is much more complicated than that. Dillingwell has a granddaughter Lorri (De Havilland), and she's in love with Patterson Buckley (Patric Knowles). Buckley just happens to be the publisher of the newspaper where Jean works -- and where Robert used to work too! The messy plot is part of the reason this one isn't as well-remembered as some most of Errol and Olivia's other collaborations.
Remember The Mighty Ducks, the Disney movie that gave its name to a crappy NHL franchise when Disney got in the hockey game? The movie was popular enough that it spawned a pair of sequels, and all three of the movies are airing on HBO Family this week:
The original The Mighty Ducks, starring Emilio Estevez as a self-centered lawyer who gets sentenced to the community service of coaching youth hockey, will be on at 2:50 AM Wednesday.
After coaching that team to success, Estevez got them to go to the Junior Goodwill Games, as seen in D2: The Mighty Ducks, at 8:25 PM Friday, although the idea that they have to beat Iceland of all countries to win the title stretches credulity;
These adolescents who were good enough to represent the USA in D2 are somehow having trouble against a prep-school varsity time in D3: The Mighty Ducks, which airs at 2:00 PM Saturday.
HBO Family has both an east coast and west coast feed, so all of the movies are going to be on again three hours after the times seen here if you only have the west coast feed.
StarzEncore Western runs quite a few of the John Wayne westerns that he made while working on Poverty Row before breaking through with Stagecoach, but this week they're showing one he made not long after Stagecoach made him a star: Dark Command, at 12:10 AM Sunday. Set in “Bleeding Kansas”, the era just before the Civil War when pro- and anti-slavery forces were fighting over the future of the territory, the movie stars Wayne as Bob Seton, a cowboy from Texas who goes north to Lawrence, KS, where he pursues banker's daughter Mary McCloud (Claire Trevor). Also pursuing her is William Cantrell (an obvious pseudonym for Quantrill, and played by Walter Pidgeon in a rare bad-guy role), a respected schoolteacher. The two also go up against each other in the election for town marshal. Bob wins, and with the Civil War breaking out Cantrell decides to round up a bunch of southern sympathizers and start a band of raiders that terrorize the town. Roy Rogers plays Mary's brother, and Marjorie Main plays Cantrell's mother.
If you liked My Man Godfrey, then you'll probably also like Merrily We Live, which is going to be on TCM at 8:15 AM Sunday. Billie Burke plays Emily Kilbourne, the umpteenth of her ditzy matriarch roles. In this case she's the wife of Mr. Kilbourne (Clarence Kolb) and mother to Jerry (Constance Bennett) and Marian (Bonita Granville). Mom has a habit of trying to reform bums and criminals by bringing them into the household to be servants, but of course they all screw the family over, and everybody seems sick of it but Mom. Her newest find is Wade (Brian Aherne), whom she hires to be the chauffeur, but who has no noticeable desire to be saved; after all he really only wants to report his car accident. But he slowly begins to ingratiate himself with the rest of the family, with things getting complicated when Jerry begins to fall in love with him. Eventually, they're going to learn Wade's true identity. It's easy to see why everybody compares this one with My Man Godfrey.