Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of October 11-17, 2021. This week has the Columbus Day holiday, but only the useless parasites in the government sector get it off, with the rest of us having to work. Still, perhaps for some of you there’s more time to watch movies. As always, we’ve got an interesting selection of movies, including another from TCM’s Star of the Month Lucille Ball, and a movie made within the last 10 years, for people who think the movies I select are too old. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We’ve got a couple of movies based on prominent works of literature to give you vulgar lot some edification. First up is the movie adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play Mourning Becomes Electra, at 6:00 AM Monday on TCM. The Mannons, led by patriarch Ezra (Raymond Massey) and his wife Christine (Katina Paxinou) are a prominent family in one of those Civil War-era New England towns. Ezra and adult son Orin (Michael Redgrave) have both been away fighting the war, and adult daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell) has caught Mom being unfaithful with ship’s captain Adam (Leo Genn). In fact, Lavinia held a flame for Adam even though nice young Peter Miles (Kirk Douglas) would have been better for her. Lavinia starts digging into what’s going on, and things slowly start turning into a disaster as it transpires that there are a whole bunch of family secrets, starting with Christine never really having loved her husband and wanting to be rid of him. It’s understandable why this movie was a commercial failure when it was released, but it’s got some really good acting.
For those of you who insist on more recent movies, try I, Tonya, at 6:40 AM Tuesday on Showtime 2. Margot Robbie plays Tonya Harding, the figure skater who was not exactly a darling of the establishment because her skating was more physical than graceful and because she grew up in the Icky Class, being raised by single mom LaVona (Allison Janney in an Oscar-winning role). Tonya marries the equally Icky Class Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Sten) while trying to climb the ladder of figure skating and reach the Olympics. Her main rival to qualify for the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994 is Nancy Kerrigan, and somewhere along the way, somebody in Tonya’s entourage gets the brilliant idea to intimidate Nancy, which ultimately results in Nancy getting hit in the knee with a baton and the whole scheme quickly unraveling. The movie presents this in a style that’s part music video, part mockumentary, except of course that it’s all based on real events that, if you wrote an original script, people would say it’s unbelievable.
One of TCM’s spotlights for October is the New Wave in cinema. Last week had a bunch of Italian movies; this week sees several French films, including Shoot the Piano Player at 3:45 AM Wednesday. Charles Aznavour plays the piano player, a man named Charlie who was a serious pianist under his birth name Edouard Saroyan, but is now reduced to working at a cheap bar under the pseudonym Charlie Koller. Charlie’s personal life is a bit of a mess in that his wife committed suicide while he’s taking care of his kid brother Fido. Into this comes another brother, Chico (Albert Rémy). Chico is a small-time gangster. Chico is on the run from bigger gangsters who he has fallen afoul of, and if possible, could Charlie help him? Charlie does, but unsurprisingly the gangsters get an idea of what’s going on and start watching Charlie and new girlfriend Lena (Marie Dubois). They figure the best way to get at Chico is to kidnap Fido to get Charlie to spill the beans.
For some more fine acting, catch Nobody’s Fool, at 1:22 AM Wednesday on 5Star Max. Paul Newman plays Sully, a man who’s kind of failed at life as he’s trying to scam worker’s comp from his boss Carl Roebuck (Bruce Willis) while living with elderly Beryl (Jessica Tandy in one of her final films before her death; the movie wasn’t released until three months after she died) in a Rust Belt town and paying rent. He’s got an estranged son in Peter (Dylan Walsh), and wouldn’t you know, thanks to a timely flat tire, Sully runs into Peter who is going home for Thanksgiving to see Mom. Peter, for his part, has a troubled marriage and has just lost his job as a college English professor. So Peter is thinking of perhaps staying in town for a while and asking Dad to help him get a job until he can get back on his feet. This gives Sully a chance to connect with his grandson. Meanwhile, he’s still not a very good role model, as we can see from his dealings with Carl’s wife Melanie (Toby Griffith).
Ricardo Montalban was a much better actor than just playing Khan on Star Trek. As an example of his acting chops, watch Border Incident, at 8:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. In the early 1940s, the US and Mexico started what was known as the “bracero” program, designed to enable Mexicans to come to the US and work in the seasonal agricultural business, regularizing everything. However, there were still people smuggling Mexican labor into the US, with violent murders as one of the results. US federal agent Jack Bearnes (George Murphy) is investigating from the American side, but what they really need is a Mexican who can infiltrate the throngs of Mexican laborers. That job goes to Mexican agent Pablo Rodriguez (Montalban), posing as a farm worker looking for a permit to enter America. Together, they hone in on bigwig farmer Owen Parkson (Howard Da Silva), who is bringing in farm workers on the cheap and silencing any of them who object to the treatment. Will Pablo be found out? Montalban is quite good, and the movie is surprisingly brutal for a film of the late 1940s.
A movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation recently is Bad Medicine. It will be on again this week, at 7:50 AM Thursday. Steve Guttenberg Jeff Marx, youngest son in a family where everybody’s a doctor but him, and they expect him to become a doctor too. Except that he doesn’t have good enough grades to get into medical school. So his father finds the one medical school that will accept him, the Madera University of Medicine, which is somewhere in Central America, and run by Dr. Ramón Madero (Alan Arkin). Madera being extremely cost-conscious, the school is in a rather parlous state, with a severe lack of supplies. The American students, including Jeff, Liz Parker (Julie Haggerty) and Dennis Gladstone (Curtis Armstrong) discover this when the university sends them on a free clinic day that is essentially a PR operation. The American medical students decide they’re going to open a clinic for real, but what’s going to happen when it’s discovered they’re not officially doctors yet, and when Madera figures out where all the school’s medical supplies are going?
There are more Lucille Ball movies on TCM on Thursday night into Friday morning. One that I’m not certain I’ve recommended before is Next Time I Marry, at 6:00 AM Friday. Ball plays Nancy Fleming, an heiress whose father inserted an odd clause into his will. Apparently he was worried about fake foreign nobility trying to steal Nancy’s inheritance, so he required that, in order to get the inheritance, she marry a “plain American”. Nancy, naturally, goes looking for one such American that she can pay to marry her long enough so she gets the inheritance and then divorce the guy. She thinks she’s found that in Anthony Anthony (James Ellison), working on a WPA project, this being the Depression after all. Nancy would like the divorce to become final as quickly as possible so she can marry her true love, the non-American Count Georgi (Lee Bowman), but Anthony only wants to divorce Nancy on his terms, which starts a cross-country race to get to Reno first to file the divorce papers.
If you want something that’s surreal but not horror, try Blue Velvet, on StarzEncore Classics at 4:09 AM Saturday. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey Beaumont, who returns home to small-town North Carolina to visit his ailing father. Taking a walk to relieve some stress, he finds… a severed human ear! The police, in the form of Sheriff Williams and his daughter Sandy (Laura Dern), do a cursory investigation, but there’s no body in the morgue missing an ear. When Jeffrey decides he’s going to do some investigating on his own, which leads him to lounge singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini). Dorothy has some problems of her own, being blackmailed by local psychopath and ether-huffing criminal Frank (Dennis Hopper). There’s the possibility that Frank and his acquaintances have kidnapped Dorothy’s husband and son, which of course only makes Jeffrey more curious, and puts him in more danger. This was directed by David Lynch, so don’t be surprised when you find all that surrealism as you watch.
Actress Jane Powell died last month at the age of 92. TCM will be honoring her on Saturday afternoon with four of her movies, including Royal Wedding at 4:00 PM. Powell plays Ellen Bowen, a dancer who is part of a double act with her brother Tom (Fred Astaire, who is only 30 years older than Jane Powell). They were doing a show in New York, but that closed, so their agent got them a job in London. This just happens to be at the same time that Princess Elizabeth (there was a time when she wasn’t Queen?) is set to get married to Prince Philip. But first the siblings have to cross the Atlantic, which means an ship voyage. As you can guess, Ellen meets a nice man during that time, Lord John Brindale (Peter Lawford). That’s one thing that threatens to break up the act. But then they get to London and Tom meets a woman of his own, dancer Anne (Sarah Churchill). Will Tom and Ellen dance together in London? This is the movie which famously has Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling of his hotel room.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." So begins Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. The 1940 movie version of that novel will be on TCM at 11:45 AM Sunday. Laurence Olivier plays Darcy, the rich man in Regency England who is unmarried and winds up living near the Bennetts (Edmund Gwenn and Mary Boland as Mr. and Mrs. Bennett respectively). They have five unmarried daughters and no sons, which is a huge problem because the inheritance laws of the day would have made trying to leave their family estate to the daughters difficult. Their closest male relative is a cousin they don’t care for, so they want to get those daughters married off so perhaps a son-in-law would be in order. So naturally everybody tries to pursue Darcy, including a couple of the Bennett daughters, Elizabeth (Greer Garson) and Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan). Jane Austen purists would say this movie isn’t faithful to the book, but then I’m not a Jane Austen purist.