Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of November 9-15, 2020. Unfortunately, A Man for All Seasons is not airing this week, as I think it would be highly appropriate with everything that's going on:
However, there are a bunch of other good movies out there, and I've picked several that I know you'll find interesting. I didn't mention TCM Star of the Month Shelley Winters on Monday night because there are enough other good movies out there. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
You might be mistaken if you think you're watching another version of The Letter when you tune into The Unfaithful, at 2:00 PM Monday on TCM. Ann Sheridan plays Chris Hunter, who returns home from a party one night to be accosted by a man, only for her to kill the man, seemingly in self defense. The next morning, Chris' husband Bob (Zachary Scott) returns home to a shocked wife and the police looking for a statement. It's ruled self-defense at first, until an art broker Barrow (Steven Geray) shows up with a bust that looks suspiciously like Chris, and wanting a large sum of money for it. It turns out that while Bob was off fighting in World War II, Chris was lonely, and the artist became friends with her, except that it went further than that. And Chris doesn't want her husband to find out about the relationship, which is probably what will happen when the case goes to trial. Lew Ayres plays the lawyer who tries to help Chris out of her predicament, and Eve Arden gets a much less comedic role as Bob's cousin who ultimately becomes more friendly with Chris.
An 80s movie that I think I haven't recommended before is The Pick-Up Artist. It's going to be on StarzEncore Classics at 4:32 PM Monday. Robert Downey Jr. plays Jack Jericho, a New York teacher who likes to drive around in his Camaro trying to pick up hot young women. One day, he runs into Randy Jensen (Molly Ringwald). Randy's father (Dennis Hopper) is heavily in debt to the Mob, who in the form of Alonzo (Harvey Keitel) try to use Randy to help Dad pay off the debt, not that Jack knows any of this at first. He just thinks she's pretty and wants to bed her like everyone else. Randy finds out about Jack's conquests and unsurprisingly doesn't want to be just another in a long line of women. Still, Jack keeps basically stalking Randy to try to find her. And then when he begins to learn about the trouble that she and her father are in, things go deeper even though this could mean a whole lot of trouble for Jack.
Somebody with a sense of humor might have put The Unfaithful on a double-bill with The Unsuspected, but instead, TCM is airing the latter movie at 9:15 AM Tuesday. Claude Rains plays Victor “Grandy” Grandison, a host of a popular radio crime show telling the stories of true crimes. He's also guardian to two nieces, Matilda (Joan Caulfield), who is traveling abroad, and Althea (Audrey Totter), who is married to an alcoholic Oliver (Hurd Hatfield). Things start to go wrong for Grandy when his secretary is found dead in his office, having hanged herself from the chandelier. Also, news reaches Grandy that Matilda has died in mysterious circumstances in an accident. Things go from bad to worse when Stephen (Ted North) shows up claiming that he married Matilda just a couple of days before her purported death. Althea has the strong suspicion that nothing is what it seems and starts to investigate, especially when news reaches everybody that Matilda didn't die after all. Of course everything's not on the up and up, or else we wouldn't have a movie.
A search of the site claims that it's been four years since I mentioned Three Coins in the Fountain. It's back in the FXM rotation, with an airing at 6:00 AM Tuesday, so I'll point it out this week. Maria Williams (Maggie McNamara) arrives in Rome to be a secretary at a US government overseas agency. She's going to share an apartment with two other young American women: Anita (Jean Peters), who is a secretary at the same agency as Maria; and Frances, who is also a secretary, but for a writer named Shadwell (Clifton Webb). Maria hopes she'll meet a rich European and find romance, especially once Prince Dino (Louis Jourdan) notices her. Her roommates, however, aren't so sure Maria should go down that road. Meanwhile, they wind up going down the same road themselves; Anita with co-worker Giorgio (Rossano Brazzi) and Francis with Shadwell. The plot is no great shakes but the movie was an excuse for the combination of Cinemascope, Technicolor, and location shooting in Rome, which unsurprisingly looks lovely here. The plot would be recycled a decade later for The Pleasure Seekers, with the action moved to Madrid so that Fox could put another great old city on the screen.
Wednesday is Veterans' Day, which means we get a bunch of war movies on TCM. Since it was originally Armistice Day, we should get World War I movies, but instead we get World War II movies, such as Screaming Eagles at noon Wednesday. It's the spring of 1944, which means the D-Day invasion is about to come up. The 101st Airborne is going to be parachuting in on D-Day, and Lt. Pauling (Jan Merlin) has the task of training men to be paratroopers, they being in short supply. Pvt. Mason (Tom Tryon) and Pvt. Corliss (Martin Milner) are two of those trainees, who have some difficulty adjusting to their new assignment. Mason, in particular, gets drunk the night before the platoon is to be parachuted in to Normandy to take a bridge, and it threatens to bollix the whole operation. To make matters worse, once they do get parachuted in, they land off course, several miles from where they're supposed to, with a whole bunch of Germans in between them and the bridge. No Minnesota State football here.
For another 80s comedy with sexual themes, you could do far worse than to catch The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which you can see at 8:40 AM Wednesday on Showtime 2. Dolly Parton plays Mona Stangley, a former employee of the Chicken Ranch bordello who inherited the institution when the previous owner died. Mona wants to keep it going the way it was, because it's become an institution precisely by not being quite what you'd expect of a whorehouse. And indeed, most of the local politicos have been willing to turn a blind eye to the Chicken Ranch because they've availed themselves of the ranch's services themselves, such as sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (Burt Reynolds), who has had a relationship with Mona. But then self-righteous reporter Melvin Thrope (Dom DeLuise) shows up and does an exposé on the ranch, trying to get the authorities to Do Something about it. The governor (Charles Durning in an Oscar-nominated role), meanwhile, has been turning a blind eye the entire time. Will Thorpe be able to get the ranch shut down before the big game between Texas and Texas A&M?
If you want an interesting pairing in an odd romantic comedy, then your choice for this week might be Top Secret Affair. TCM is showing it at 9:45 AM Thursday. Susan Hayward plays Dottie Peale, who runs a publishing empire with a whole bunch of magazines. She's interested in the idea of the peaceful use of atomic energy, and the new international commission dedicated to those peaceful ends. However, she's horrified to learn that the president has nominated somebody she thinks would be entirely unsuited to the job: two-star general and war hero Melville Goodwin (Kirk Douglas). So Dottie invites the general to her place out in the country to interview him and do a piece on him, when in fact she's really planning a hit piece that will get the president to rescind the nomination. But as you can probably guess, Dottie winds up falling in love with the general, greatly complicating things. Paul Stewart plays Dottie's right-hand man, while Jim Backus plays the general's PR man.
A movie that I think is overrated, but one that I know a lot of people think is great, is The Big Lebowski. It's got a couple of airings this week, including at 1:00 PM Friday on Showtime Beyond. Jeff Bridges plays Jeff Lebowski, the ultimate slacker, living in Los Angeles, nicknamed “The Dude”, and caring mostly for going bowling with his friends like Walter Sobchak (John Goodman). One night when he gets home, he finds a couple of thugs waiting for him, claiming that his wife has welched on a debt. They beat him and piss on his carpet. The only thing is, the Dude doesn't have a wife. On some investigation, the Dude and his bowling buddies find out that there's another Jeff Lebowski (David Huddleston), a well-known philanthropist whose trophy wife got involved with a pornographer, hence the blackmail and all that good stuff. The Dude gets involved further with his namesake when the trophy wife gets kidnapped for not paying off that debt, and wants the Dude to get involved with the ransom payment.
We've got a second Burt Reynolds movie this week, and that's 100 Rifles. You can see it at 6:09 AM Saturday on StarzEncore Westerns. Raquel Welch plays Sarita, a Yaqui Indian in 1912 Mexico whose father is executed by Mexican General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas). Into this comes Joe Herrera, a half-Yaqui from America. He robbed a bank in Phoenix and escaped to Mexico. Hot on his trail is Lydecker (Jim Brown), a US marshal chasing Joe but who has no jurisdiction in Mexico. When Joe finds out about the plight of his fellow Yaqui, he decides to use the money to help finance their fight against the brutal generals plaguing them. Verdugo goes after Joe. But he also goes after Lydecker, who is technically interfering with Verdugo by trying to bring Joe back to the States. The only way that Lydecker is going to be able to survive is to team up with Joe and Sarita, but of course Joe has no intention of going back to the States where he faces execution. A fun if not particularly demanding western.
One of the most interesting movies from the late period of Alfred Hitchcock's career is Frenzy. It's going to be on TCM at 3:45 AM Sunday. Made back in Hitchcock's native England, it stars Jon Finch as Richard Blaney, a down-on-his-luck bartender who is estranged from his ex-wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) to see if she can help him out financially. They have a less-than-amiable meeting and go their own ways. When Brenda returns back to her office, she finds her ex-husband's friend Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) waiting there. He rapes and kills her using his necktie to strangle her. Because there's no DNA evidence yet and because of the argument between Richard and Brenda, the police naturally suspect Richard at first. So he has to try to escape and stay one step ahead of the police while attempting to figure out who might have done it. As with all of Hitchcock's “wrong man on the run” movies, not everybody out there is actually going to be able to help Richard. A fairly dark movie compared to Hitchcock's earlier movies, now that movies were more permissive.