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Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 15-21, 2018.  The Badgers are just playing out the string, but I know you're all worried about the Brewers and whether they'll advance to the World Series or fail spectacularly.  While you're worrying about that, why not relax with some good movies?  As always, I've used my discerning taste to pick out a bunch of movies that I know you'll all enjoy.  All times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

 

A movie that hasn't been on TCM in quite some time is The Stork Club, which is going to be on this week at 4:45 PM Monday.  Barry Fitzgerald plays Pops Bates, a man walking along a bridge one day when his hat is blown off.  When he tries to get his hat, he falls over into the river,leading passerby Judy (Betty Hutton) to think he's attempting suicide.  So she tries to save him.  It turns out that Bates wasn't trying to kill himself, and is extremely grateful for Judy saving his life.  She's a hat-check girl at the Stork Club who has ambitions of becoming a singer.  What she didn't know is that Bates is actually a millionaire, so he bankrolls Judy's ambition without her knowing.  You'd think she'd be happy with her newfound wealth, but It also brings problems.  Her boyfriend Danny (Don DeFore) is a sergeant in the army, and there's that war going on. When he comes home and finds his girlfriend is newly rich, he understandably wonders who the man behind it is.  It threatens to screw up her singing ambitions as well as her love life.

 

Monday night brings another installment in the Treasures from the Disney Vault series to TCM. There's a Mickey Mouse cartoon kicking the night off, although it's mostly live-action features this time around, including a movie it's easy to forget is a Disney movie, The Black Hole at 12:15 AM Tuesday. The USS Palomino, captained by Capt. Holland (Dan Forster) is a research vessel making a voyage in deep space, when suddenly, they run into a strong gravity field that can only mean one thing: a black hole. Obviously the crew, including science officer Durant (Anthony Perkins) and journalist Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine) are nervous since they don't want to be sucked into the black hole. But they're stunned to find an object near the event horizon that shouldn't be there. They're even more stunned to find it's another ship, the USS Cygnus. And the Cygnus seems to have created a stable gravity field such that it doesn't have to deal with the gravity of the black hole. So they board it, and find its captain, Dr. Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) there with his army of robots. But the crew of the Palomino discover that perhaps Dr. Reinhardt has more sinister motives in being on the edge of the black hole, that could destroy them all.

 

The TV show Roseanne was enough of a hit the Roseanne Barr got to make a movie like She-Devil after the sitcom's first season.  She-Devil is going to be on StarzEncore Classics at 3:52 PM Tuesday.  Barr plays Ruth, wife to accountant Bob (Ed Begley Jr.) and mother to their two children.  One day at a social function Bob meets wealthy novelist Mary (Meryl Streep), and she not only becomes one of his clients, she becomes his mistress.  Eventually Bob leaves Ruth for Mary, and as they say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  Bob once listed his assets as his home, his family, his career, and his freedom.  Ruth proceeds to devalue all of them by burning down the house, giving custody of the children to Bob and Mary, and finding Mary's mother in a nursing home with the intention of using the mother to put a serious crimp in Bob and Mary's relationship.  Of course, all of this is a comedy.

 

Tuesday night brings another night of Star of the Month Rita Hayworth's movies to TCM, including Affair in Trinidad at 10:00 PM.  Hayworth plays Chris Emery, a nightclub singer on the Caribbean island of Trinidad who was married to Neal, until his untimely death.  It was ruled a suicide, but that's questionable.  Nepal's brother Steve (Glenn Ford) came down to visit not realizing Neal had just died, and on finding out decides to stay for the investigation since he doesn't believe it's a suicide.  The case gets complicated for a bunch of reasons.  One is that Steve is staying with Chris, and the two find themselves falling in love with each other.  But Chris is also seeing Max Fabian (Alexander Scourby), who as it just happens would be the prime suspect if Neal's death really was a murder.  Why would Chris be seeing him?  Perhaps Chris is just using both Steve and Max for her own ends, whatever those may be.

 

I know some of you prefer more recent movies, so I'll recommend something that's only 20 years old: As Good As It Gets, which will be on StarzC Comedy at 12:38 AM and 12:345 PM Wednesday.  Jack Nicholson plays Melvin, a popular author who's terrible to everybody around him, mostly because of his obsessive-compulsive disorder.  He gets breakfast at the same diner every morning and insists on being served by the same waitress, Carol (Helen Hunt).  Back at his apartment, he has to deal with a neighbor he doesn't like, the gay artist Simon (Greg Kinnear), who has a yippy little terrier who drives Melvin nuts.  But then two things happen to change his life.  One is that one morning he goes to the diner and Carol is not there, because she's a single mother who's had to tend to her son having another of his asthma attacks.  Then Simon gets brutally attacked, which sends him to the hospital, leaving the terrier with nobody to look after it.  Simon's friend remembers Melvin because "they owe Melvin one".  These lead Melvin to start learning how to deal with people more normally.

 

Wednesday night on TCM brings another horror star, this time Boris Karloff.  An interesting movie that I probably recommended last October but will mention again because it's so much fun is The Sorcerers, at 3:15 AM Thursday.  Karloff plays Prof. Montserrat, a disgraced hypnotist living with elderly wife Estelle (Catherine Lacey).  He's invented a device that could be a boon to mankind, but he needs a volunteer test subject.  So at a swinging 60s London club, he meets Mike (Ian Ogilvy) and offers him the job as that subject.  The device is a sort of virtual reality device that will enable other people to feel the sensations that the subject feels; think of the educational uses and benefits for shut-ins.  Estelle, however, experiences those sensations and realizes the device could be used for more nefarious mind-control purposes, something she summarily proceeds to do despite her husband's best attempts to stop her.  Does Mike have any willpower to stop what's happening to him?

 

A movie that I haven't recommended in a couple of years is Fury at Showdown, which is going to be on StarzEncore Westerns at 1:26 AM Friday.  John Derek is Brock Mitchell, a man who is trying to put his life back together after having spent time in prison for having killed a man in self-defense.  Of course people aren't exactly thrilled to have a killer in their town, so Brock winds up going back to his younger brother Tracy (Nick Adams) who is running the family ranch.  Tracy has taken a risk in that the railroad is planning to build a line nearby that's going to make it easier to transport cattle, but hasn't completed the line yet.  Still, Tracy has taken out a loan with the ranch as collateral in that hope, so they absolutely have to get the cattle to market this season.  Unsurprisingly, some people are trying to stop the Mitchells.  There's town lawyer Chad Deasy (Gage Clarke), as well as the sheriff (Robert Griffin).  The sheriff's daughter Ginny (Carolyn Craig) was in love with Brock and with the guy Brock shot, and the sheriff has always thought Brock did it for jealousy, not self-defense.

 

TCM's Friday morning and afternoon lineup deals with early movies with condemned criminals, several of which I've already mentioned.  One I don't think I've mentioned before is Are These Our Children, which will be on at 2:00 PM.  In this morality play, Eric Linden plays Eddie, who has about as good a life as could be hoped for in the early depression, living with his grandmother (Beryl Mercer), going to high school, and going steady with Mary (Rochelle Hudson).  But then one day he fails to win a school oratory competition, and suddenly something snaps in him.  He goes to seedy joints where he meets bad girl Flo (Arline Judge), and she sucks him into a dissolute life that leads to meeting other juvenile delinquents followed by a further descent into crime that climaxes with the killing of a delicatessen owner.  For this, Eddie winds up on death row, and everybody wonders where he went wrong.  Hollywood's treatment of juvenile delinquency was never subtle, but the over-the-top nature of it is always fun.

 

FXM has brought The Foxes of Harrow out of its vault and into its rotation and is running it again this week, at 9:20 AM Saturday.  The title refers not to the animal or the movie studio, but to a guy with the surname Fox.  Stephen Fox (Rex Harrison) is an Irish immigrant in New Orleans in the early part of the 19th century.  Fox has come here to win his fortune and gain a higher status in society, something he couldn't do back home for reasons that will become apparent later in the movie.  He does make some money and courts Odalie (Maureen O'Hara), daughter of one of the upper crust of the old polite society.  Eventually they get married and Stephen builds his wife a stately plantation house at Harrow (the other half of the title), but it's not a happy marriage and Stephen eventually goes off in search of himself and more adventure.  But Odalie is going to lose Harrow if the cotton crop doesn't come in, so Stephen has to come back and try to save it, and their marriage....

 

Before there was a Twilight Zone, Rod Serling was writing some extremely good screenplays both for those live TV drama anthologies and for the screen.  One of the latter is Patterns, which will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Saturday.  Van Heflin plays Fred Staples, an engineer in a midwestern branch of one of those big conglomerates that populated the US business landscape in the post-WWII years.  He's brought to New York by the CEO, Ramsey (Everett Sloane) to join the corporate board, and even though he's not certain he's cut out for New York, he relocates with his family (his wife is played by a younger Beatrice Straight) and begins in the corporate headquarters.  Nominally, he's working for one of the firm's VPs, Bill Briggs (Ed Begley Sr.) , but as Staples settles in, he learns that he's really been brought to New York because Ramsey thinks Briggs is too old and should be forced into retirement, and that Staples is here to take over Briggs' job.  We've seen how that works in the NFL.

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