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Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 1-7, 2018.  We're in the first week of a new month, so we're going to get a new Star of the Month on TCM (more on that later), a bunch of horror movies, starting with silent horror on TCM on Wednesday night, and a bunch of other interesting stuff not just on TCM but a bunch of other channels too.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

 

Hollywood has remade a lot of foreign movies.  An example showing up this week is The Outrage, which will be on TCM at 10:00 AM Monday.  This is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, with the action moved the the old west in the 1870s.  If you don't know Rashomon, shame on you, but the basic story is that a bunch of people run into each other in the middle of nowhere, where it turns out they were all witnesses to a crime and its aftermath, in which a bandit waylays a couple, rapes the wife, and kills the husband.  But all of the witnesses remember the story differently, including who's really guilty.  In this updating, Paul Newman plays a Mexican bandit accused of the crime.  Claire Bloom and Laurence Harvey play the wife and husband respectively.  The dead man in theory not being able to tell his side of the story is represented by a shaman (Paul Fix).  And Edward G. Robinson is a con artist who is also one of the witnesses.

 

It's the start of a new month, and that means some movies that haven't been on FXM in a while are getting pulled out of the vault.  One of them is Demetrius and the Gladiators, which will be on at 1:15 PM Monday and 3:00 AM Tuesday.  The 1953 movie The Robe was a surprise hit, to the point that Fox made a sequel even though the two stars of The Robe couldn't reprise their roles what with their characters having been executed at the end of it.  Anyhow, at Jesus' crucifixion, there was a slave named Demetrius (Victor Mature) who was handed Jesus' robe so that he could give it to St. Peter (Michael Rennie).  However, the emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson) has heard about the strange power that this robe supposedly has, and he wants it for himself in the hopes it will bring eternal life.  However, a soldier tries to hurt Demetrius' girlfriend Lucia (Debra Paget) and when Demetrius defends her, he ends up getting taken to Rome as a gladiator.  He is granted protection by Caligula's aunt Messalina (Susan Hayward) who is clearly seducing Demetrius, but can that keep Demetrius safe?

 

If you want silly melodrama, you could do worse than East Side, West Side, which TCM is showing at 11:00 AM Tuesday.  Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessie, long-suffering wife of Brandon (James Mason), a playboy who has stepped out on Jessie on a number of occasion.  Most recently, he's gotten into a fight at a nightclub, and when she meets the working girl who tended to him, it leads to an encounter with Mark (Van Heflin), a cop turned expert 0n the situation in post-war Europe.  Eventually the two realize they have feelings for each other, even though she's married.  Meanwhile, Brandon's old mistress Isabel (Ava Gardner) returns to town, and she's vowed to win Brandon away from Jessie. Brandon actually meets with Isabel again, and sometime after one of those meetings, Isabel is found murdered, making Brandon one of the prime suspects.  Jessie is also involved in the case.  Cyd Charisse plays the working girl, and Nancy Davis plays a friend trying to give Jessie advice.

 

A search of the archives claims that I haven't mentioned 40 Guns to Apache Pass before.  It's going to be airing on StarzEncore Westerns this week at 11:13 PM Tuesday.  Audie Murphy, near the end of his career, plays Capt. Coburn, an army officer out in the Arizona Territory in the years not too long after the end of the Civil War.  White people are settling the land, but the Apache and their leader Cohcise (Michael Keep) are unhappy about this and going to try to kill white settlers.  Coburn has two missions.  One is to shepherd a bunch of settlers to their final destination, and the other is to fetch the titular guns and bring them back to the army fort.  That latter mission is going to be tough because it requires going through Apache territory, and because Capt. Coburn doesn't have the best men with him.  He's a tough, by-the-rules guy, and among the men he's commanding is Cpl. Bodine (Kenneth Tobey), who's already been busted in rank and doesn't like Coburn's command style, so he's going to try to plan a mutiny if he can.

 

We're in the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for a new Star of the Month.  This time around, that star is Rita Hayworth, whose movies will be on TCM every Tuesday night into Wednesday morning in October.  Those of you who like Fox's style of Technicolor musicals of the 1940s will be happy to see that TCM is running My Gal Sal at 11:30 PM Tuesday.  Hayworth plays Sal (short for Sally), who is the girlfriend of Paul Dresser (Victor Mature).  Paul is a songwriter from the midwest who in the Gay Nineties goes to New York City to try to make it big.  At the start of his career he meets Mae (Carole Landis), and in New York meets and falls in love with Sally, a popular singer, although Sally is also being pursued by Fred (John Sutton).  All in all, though, it's an excuse to put public domain songs to dance in bright color, something which Fox did well over and over in the 40s.  Paul's real last name was Dreiser, and he had a much younger brother named Theodore, who is of course that Theodore Dreiser.

 

For those of you who like more recent movies, I'll mentionThe Falcon and the Snowman, airing on StarzEncore Classics at 8:09 AM Friday.  After all, it's only a third of a century old.  Based on a true story, in which Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) were childhood friends who took different paths as adults.  Chris dropped out of seminary and got a job with a defense contractor, where he was handling CIA secrets.  Daulton became a drug dealer and, after getting caught, jumped bail and fled to Mexico City.  Chris eventually comes across secrets suggesting the CIA wants to interfere in Australia's democratic process to get a new prime minister.  He realizes just releasing the communiques won't work, so he decides to sell the information to the KGB, using his old friend Daulton as a go-between.  Of course, Chris doesn't realize that the Soviets are no less meddling than the Americans, or that a drug dealer who's only in it for the money might not be the best person to use pass secret documents.

 

You've probably heard of the movie Three Godfathers before.  TCM is running the 1936 version at 3:30 PM Thursday, and there was a famous remake from the late 1940s starring John Wayne.  But the story was originally filmed in 1929 with the title Hell's Heroes, and that version will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Thursday.  Charles Bickford plays Bob Sangster, leader of a gang of bank robbers in the old west.  The latest robbery sees one of the four killed, and Bob and the other two: "Barbwire" Tom (Raymond Hatton) and Wild Bill (Fred Kohler) make their escape into the harsh desert.  During their escape, they run into a party that's failed to make it across, with the two survivors of that party being a mother who is on the verge of dying herself, and her infant child.  After Mom dies, Bob wants to save the child, but means taking it back to town, where the robbers will be brought to justice (meaning certain death).  So the other two don't want to go back.  Will their dissension doom them all anyway??

 

One of this week's TCM Underground selections is the fun 1970s sci-fi/horror mashup Demon Seed, which will be on at 3:45 AM Saturday.  Fritz Weaver plays Alex Harris, a computer scientist in a strained marriage with wife Susan (Julie Christie).  He's so into computers that he's got the original "smart house" that's fully computerized, and at work he's working on the extremely advance organic artificial intelligence computer Proteus IV.  Proteus has gotten intelligent enough to decide on its own that man might be a danger to the world, so Proteus wants to be freed from its sandboxed computer system to be able to observe the world better.  Eventually, it finds one open port, which happens to be the one Alex used to work from home, and this allows Proteus to take over the Harris' entire smart house controls.  Proteus holds Susan hostage, and makes the absurd demand that it's going to impregnate Susan and she's going to have their baby!  And wouldn't you know Proteus is pretty damn good at manipulating humans and defending itself.  Flawed, but a lot of fun.

 

Next up is the 1992 version on Last of the Mohicans, which will be on ActionMax at 2:10 PM Saturday.  Uncas (Eric Schweig) and Chingachgook (Russell Means) are the last two members of the Mohican tribe in New York around the time of the French and Indian War, along with adopted mixed-race Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis).  They'd like to sit out the war, but of course they don't have any control over that.  Hawkeye is guiding a pair of daughters among others to a fort where their father, a British colonel, is stationed.  Uncas begins to develop an attachment to elder daughter Cora (Madeleine Stowe) despite the fact they're of different races and a British officer is pursuing Cora.  Meanwhile, there's the Huron Magus (Are Stuck).  Cora's father destroyed Magua's village, and he wants revenge by going after every Englishman he can, especially their father.

 

Finally, for the benefit of people like Jaymo, I'll mention Welcome to Hard Times, at 6:00 PM Sunday on TCM.  Henry Fonda plays Will Blue, the mayor of a small western town called Hard Times.  One day, a stranger rides into town  and starts to tear the place up, burning down buildings and raping saloon girl Molly (Janice Rule).  Blue vows to rebuild, but most of the townsfolk up and leave, blaming Blue for having done nothing to stop the stranger, even though as in High Noon most of them could have done something too.  Anyhow, there are mines around, which means miners and their most primordial needs, so soon enough a new bordello owner comes to the desolate Hard Times to rebuild.  Of course, if they rebuild, they know that the stranger who burned the place down before is going to come back, but that only means that this is finally the time they'll stand up to the bully.  I can't help but wonder what poor Henry Fonda was thinking when he saw the completed film on the screen as he had done so much better in his career.

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