Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of November 8-14, 2021. Apparently one of the Packers was revealed to have committed thoughtcrime regarding the coronavirus this past week, and the shrieking masses decided they needed to show how virtuous they are in denouncing the heretic. If you want to escape that sort of nonsense, why not watch some good movies instead? There’s a lot of stuff this week that’s not the greatest of all time, but instead incredibly entertaining. And if you grew up in the 1980s like I did, there’s some fun trips to the past too. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
Hollywood had a whole bunch of B movie series back in the 1930s. One of them was the Nancy Drew mysteries. The final entry in that series, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, will be on TCM at noon on Monday. Bonita Granville returns as Nancy, daughter of lawyer Carson Drew (John Litel). This time, the mystery involves the spinster Turnbull sisters (Vera Lewis and Louise Carter). Their father died almost twenty years ago, and wrote and odd will that deeded the two sisters the house, on the condition that they keep it occupied for the next 20 years; otherwise, the city gets it. Those two decades are almost up, and now the chauffeur has been found dead in the house, and spooky things are going on as though somebody is trying to get the sisters out of the house so that they won’t be able to fulfill the terms of the will. But who, and why? Nancy likes a good mystery, so she investigates, dragging in her long-suffering boyfriend Ted Nickerson (Frankie Thomas). Good clean fun.
I recommended one James Spader movie last week, so this week I’ll recommend another one: Less Than Zero, on ThrillerMax at 8:21 PM Monday. Clay (Andrew McCarthy) is a spoiled rich kid from Los Angeles who went east to college certain that he, his best friend Julian (Robert Downey Jr.), and his girlfriend Blair (Jami Gertz) would be best friends forever. But after a semester at college, he returns home to find that a lot has changed. Blair and Julian, who didn’t go east, are in a relationship now, and Blair is exceedingly worried about Julian. It seems that, like a lot of the idle rich in the 80s, Julian thought that snorting lines of coke would be a fun idea, to the point that he’s now got an addiction and a pretty big debt to his dealer Rip (James Spader), who would like to be paid off, thank you very much. Clay gets sucked in trying to help Julian, but what if Julian doesn’t really want to be helped? The movie is one of those unintentionally funny misfires, filled with fabulous then-contemporary 80s style.
TCM’s look at the New Wave continues on Tuesday night, this time with the Australian New Wave of the 1970s. The first film of the night is Walkabout, at 8:00 PM. Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg (son of the film’s director, Nicolas Roeg) are a pair of siblings living in Sydney with their housewife mother and mining engineer father. One day, Dad takes the two kids into the outback for what the young son clearly thinks is just a picnic lunch. But Dad takes out a gun and tries to kill the two kids, before setting the car on fire and killing himself. Now, you’d think the car would have left some tracks since they went off-road, but the girl doesn’t have the smarts to go back the way they came, instead heading off in the opposite direction and having no idea how to survive out in the wilderness. However, an Aboriginal adolescent (David Gulpilil) going on his “walkabout”, an Aboriginal rite of passage, shows up, and is able to help the two white siblings out. This clash of cultures, however, causes all sorts of complications. On the bright side, you get topless Jenny Agutter.
A movie in the FXM rotation that a search of the site says I haven’t mentioned before is Gleaming the Cube. This week’s showing is at 1:10 PM Wednesday. Christian Slater plays Brian Kelly, a Southern California teenager who loves skateboarding with his friends and whose parents adopted a Vietnamese refugee boy about his age, Vinh, a decade ago. Vinh has a part-time job at the Vietnamese video store where his boss, Col. Trac, also runs a charity to send medicine back to Vietnam for anticommunist PR purposes. Vinh discovers that the numbers don’t add up and goes to investigate, getting caught and tortured, and accidentally strangled to death in the process, so the bad guys fake his death to look like a suicide. Brian knows this can’t be true, and starts investigating himself, which will put him in great danger too. But eventually the stereotypical good cop, Al Lucero (Steven Bauer) comes to believe Brian, and Brian’s skateboarding buddies help out in the unintentionally hilarious car chase climax. The friend driving the Pizza Hut delivery truck (which itself needs to be seen to be believed)? That’s a young Tony Hawk.
This week’s look at TCM Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet includes his final film, Malaya, at 11:45 PM Wednesday. The two stars of the movie here are James Stewart and Spencer Tracy. Stewart plays John Royer, an international correspondent who has just returned to the States with the attack on Pearl Harbor bringing the US into the war. Like many of the foreign correspondents in Hollywood movies, Royer has stories to tell, including claims that he’d be able to smuggle rubber out of Southeast Asia. Synthetic rubber hadn’t really been developed on a mass scale at that time, and rubber for tires was important to the war effort, which was part of why Japan invaded that part of the world – to get the rubber for themselves and keep other countries from having access to it. Government man Kellar (John Hodiak) hears Royer’s stories, and calls Royer’s bluff by having him be part of just such an operation to smuggle the rubber. They need somebody well-versed in criminal operations, however, so Carnahan (Spencer Tracy) is let out of Alcatraz to do his duty for the country. Greenstreet plays a saloon owner and former friend of Carnahan’s who seems to know all the gossip and how to use that information.
A search of the site claims I haven’t mentioned Incident at Phantom Hill before. It’s showing up this week over on StarzEncore Westerns at 6:38 AM Thursday. In the closing days of the Civil War, a Confederate gang led by Joe Barlow (Dan Duryea) stole a shipment of Union gold and buried it, obviously hoping to get it later. But the Union won the war and people like Barlow wound up in prison. But the feds would like that gold back, and since Barlow is the only one who knows where it is, they offer him a pardon if he renounces his claim to that gold and helps an Army mission led by Capt. Martin (Robert Fuller) get that gold back. Martin wants revenge because his brother was killed in Barlow’s raid, while Barlow wants to double-cross Martin and keep that gold for himself. Meanwhile, the land where the gold was buried is now Comanche territory, so they’re bound to show up at some point since this is a western. And there are other outlaws who would like the gold as well.
Another movie that I have apparently not mentioned here before is GI Blues. TCM has it at 11:00 PM Thursday. Elvis Presley plays Tulsa McLean, who, like Elvis in real life, has 18 months stolen out of his life courtesy of the peacetime draft, which has sent him to Germany to drive a tank. By night, Tulsa sings in a combo with his friends Cookie (Robert Ivers) and Rick (James Douglas). A couple of servicemen get in a bet over whether one of them can get a date with one of the girls working at the club, Lili (Juliet Prowse), and then spend the night with her. Because the servicemen involved gets transferred to Alaska, Tulsa is given the task of wooing Lili. He falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Rick has a former girlfriend in Germany whom he knocked up but she doesn’t want to tell him so she broke off all contact. And Cookie gets involved with Lili’s roommate Tina. Eventually all three of the stories come together, with a couple of Elvis songs along the way, most notably “Wooden Heart” which because a hit for somebody else; here, Elvis sings it at a puppet show.
I’m thrilled to see that Skidoo is one of this week’s TCM Underground selections, at 2:00 AM Saturday. Jackie Gleason plays Tony, a retired gangster who has a wife in Flo (Carol Channing) and a daughter; this being the 60s, said daughter has fallen in with hippies and Mom has some sympathy. Meanwhile, Packard (Mickey Rooney), a member of a rival gang, is threatening to testify before a Senate committee, being held in a jail to keep him self until the committee can meet. Tony’s old boss God (Groucho Marx) calls Tony out of retirement to get himself into that prison where Packard is being held, and bump off Packard. The problem is, this being the 60s, the plot to get rid of Packard and escape detection is going to involve LSD, and somehow everybody in the prison winds up ingesting some of that LSD. This is Otto Preminger trying to be hip with the new young generation and going spectacularly wrong, as we can see in scenes of Channing doing a strip tease for Frankie Avalon, or the musical finale that has Channing dressed up as Napoleon.
Our most recent movie this week comes from all the way back in 1990. It’s The Grifters, airing at 10:52 AM Saturday on HBO Zone. John Cusack plays Roy Dillon, a small-time con artist in Los Angeles who gets himself clubbed in the chest for his troubles. He’s got a girlfriend in Myra (Annette Bening) who is also a small time grifter, and an estranged mother Lily (Anjelica Huston) who works the race track scene for a bookie named Bobo (Pat Hingle) back east. Her latest job, however, is going to take her out to the race track in La Jolla, which will give her the chance to reconnect with the son she hasn’t seen in years. Unfortunately, that clubbing Roy took was more serious than he thought, forcing Lily and Myra to take care of him, and they find that they’re not on the same page regarding Roy. Eventually, a plan comes up for a long con involving all three, and you just know that it’s going to be fraught with problems and not work out the way any of them intended.
Several movies have explored the idea that if you find somebody else’s stash of drugs, you’re in deep doo-doo. One of the earlier examples of this is The Lineup, airing at 10:00 AM Sunday as the latest installment of Noir Alley. Some tourists from Asia have knick-knacks filled with heroin put into their luggage in Asia, with criminals on the US side retrieving those items to get the heroin once the travelers get back to San Francisco. However, one of the retrievals goes wrong when a taxi driver in on the retrieval gets chased down and killed by the police. The police discover what’s going on, and take the heroin out of that traveler’s luggage, replacing it with sugar. Obviously, the gangsters are going to find out that their heroin has gone missing and will look for it, which is precisely what the police want, bringing the drug lords out into the open. The gangsters send Julian (Robert Keith) to get the drugs, together with his gunman, Dancer (Eli Wallach).