Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of October 18-24, 2021. For those of you who care about baseball, your Brewers’ season is over, so there’s nothing left to care about. With that in mind, why not watch some good movies instead? There’s more from Star of the Month Lucille Ball, as well as a couple of interesting British movies. This being October, I’ve also got a horror movie to recommend. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday is the birth anniversary of actress Miriam Hopkins, so it’s unsurprising that TCM is spending the morning and afternoon with her movies. One movie that doesn’t show up so often is Men Are Not Gods, which will be on at 3:00 PM Monday. Hopkins, who went over to Britain to make this one, plays Ann Williams, secretary to theater critic T.H. Skeates (A.E. Matthews). He’s just written a scathing review of a husband-and-wife version of Shakespeare’s Othello, with the leads being played by Edmond (Sebastian Shaw) and his wife Barbara (Gertrude Lawrence). Before the review goes to press, Barbara sees Ann and gets her to change the review to something more positive. Given a second chance, Edmond is able to make the play become a hit; also, it introduces Ann to Edmond and the two begin to fall in love. This is an obvious problem in that Edmond, as has been mentioned, already has a wife, but also because Ann has a boyfriend in reporter Tommy (a very young Rex Harrison).
I don’t think of it as a western, but I see that The Beguiled is going to be on StarzEncore Westerns this week, at 3:24 AM Monday. Clint Eastwood stars as John McBurney, a Union soldier in Louisiana during the Civil War who has been severely wounded. He’s discovered by Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), a student at an all-girls’ boarding school run by Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page). Standard procedure in such cases is to turn the Union soldier over to Confederate patrollers for them to become prisoners of war. But when Martha sees such a procession of Union captives, she knows it means death for McBurney and decides to keep him prisoner at the school while she, the students, and her assistant Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman) can nurse him back to health to make him a POW at some later time. Everybody at the school, not having had a man for a long time, if at all considering how young some of them are, begins to fall in love with McBurney, which leads to conflict. McBurney also has his own ideas, of course.
The look at the New Wave in cinema continues on TCM on Tuesday night, this week looking at British movies. That gives me a chance to mention Room at the Top, at 10:00 PM Tuesday. Laurence Harvey plays Joe Lampton, a young working-class man in post-war Britain who, having lost his parents in a bombing, takes a job as an accountant in a factory town. He’d like to move up the ladder and be seen as higher-class, the latter being a tough thing to do in a country that’s still class-conscious. When Joe joins in with an amateur theater group, he meets Susan Brown (Heather Sears), who’s also a member and who just happens to be the boss’ (Donald Wolfit) daughter. Marry her, and it could be an in with the boss to achieve Joe’s dreams. And Susan certainly likes Joe. But Joe has also met Alice (Simone Signoret). She’s a Frenchwoman who is 10 years older than Joe and has much more experience. She’s also in a loveless marriage with a British husband George (Allan Cuthbertson). Joe and Alice begin an affair, and you just know it’s not going to end well.
If you want an older-school slasher movie, you could always try the original version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’ll be on Flix at 12:45 PM Tuesday. A group of five twenty-something friends are driving a van somewhere in Texas one summer’s day, when one of the women, Sally (Marilyn Burns) realizes they’re near an old graveyard where her and her wheelchair-bound brother’s grandfather is buried. This leads her to suggest they go see the old house where Grandma and Grandpa used to live, which by now is abandoned and overrun, making it fairly creepy. But supposedly there’s a swimming hole nearby, and when two of the group decide to go swimming, they find another house that’s seemingly empty although there are signs of human life. Sure enough, it’s not empty at all, there’s a leather-faced guy (Gunnar Hanson) who has butcher experience and a chainsaw, and he seems intent on picking off the members of the group one by one. But why? And why does the crazy hitchhicker they meet show up again? You’ll note [catts] never mentioned this as one of the things that makes Texas so great.
A third British movie this week is A Canterbury Tale, at 4:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. Non-actor John Sweet plays Bob Johnson, an American serviceman stationed in the the UK in the time just before the D-Day invasion. He wants to visit Canterbury before he gets shipped off, but because of blackout rules, he gets off one stop too early, in a small village. Also getting off the train there are Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), a “land girl” who will be doing agricultural labor while the men are off fighting in order to deal with her MIA boyfriend, and British soldier Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), former small-town cinema organist who has been drafted into the war and is going back to his camp. On their first night in town, a mysterious man pours glue into Alison’s hair. The three investigate, and it’s fairly quickly obvious who the culprit is, but despite the usual synopsis of the movie, the crime and its investigation are not the real story. Instead, it’s about the small village and the effect it has on the people who come there, as well as the pilgrimage in a metaphorical sense that all of the characters undertake as they go to Canterbury. Sweet was a US Army sergeant at the time, and after the war, lived in North Carolina, became a teacher, and died there in 2011 aged 95.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned Dazed and Confused before. It’s got an airing this week at 1:45 PM Wednesday on Showtime 2. More of a slice of life movie than one with a fully fleshed-out plot, it’s set in a suburb of Austin TX on the last day of school in 1976. The area has a weird tradition of the students who will be seniors next year looking for the people moving up to freshman in order to paddle them and initiate them into high school; watch for a very young Ben Affleck as the leader of the guys doing the paddling. Jason London plays Russell “Pink” Floyd, the captain and quarterback of the football team who is being pressured by coach to sign a pledge not to do drugs or anything else illegal. But he, like everybody else, is looking to score sex, pot, and booze at the big parties that are going to be held now that school is out for the summer. Matthew McConnaughey plays a creep who graduated a few years back but is still looking for teenage girls to get laid with. For those of you of Blair Kiel’s age, you may want to watch and see how much it reflects your high school experience.
There’s another night of Lucille Ball movies on TCM on Thursday, including one of her stranger films, The Big Street at 10:00 PM. Lucy plays Gloria Lyons, a nightclub singer who likes to keep herself in style and needs a rich boyfriend to do so. Thankfully she has one, but it’s in Case Ables (Barton MacLane), the crooked owner of the club where she sings. Also in love with her is Little Pinks (Henry Fonda), who meets her after saving her murse dog. However, there’s no way she could ever love him as he’s just a busboy who earns nowhere near enough to keep her in that style to which she’s become accustomed. She even goes so far as to get him fired. But in the heat of an argument, jealous Case decides to ruin Gloria’s career by pushing her down a flight of stairs, effectively crippling her. Pinks takes this as his chance to play savior to Gloria, and in that case she’ll have to love him. So he takes her down to Florida for her health, which she continues to treat him like dirt. It’s such an odd movie because it can never figure out whether it wants to be a zany comedy or a serious melodrama, and winds up not quite succeeding at either.
I see that the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is going to be on FXM at 3:05 AM Friday, so it gets a mention this week. A UFO lands on one of Washington DC’s grassy parks, and unsurprisingly, the denizens are rather wary of what might be inside. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) gets out and claims to be on a peaceful mission, but for his troubles he gets shot. He’s able to escape from the military prison hospital however, and as an alien has some rather remarkable powers of healing. He goes into hiding by taking a small apartment next to widow Helen Benson (Patricia Neal), who has a young son Bobby (Billy Gray), and a new love interest in Tom (Hugh Marlowe). Klaatu takes a liking to the boy, and with the boy’s help is able to tell government scientists he was sent to Earth to tell earthlings that their new nuclear weapons could kill them all, and the aliens aren’t about to let them become spacefaring and keep nuclear arms. When the good people of earth don’t listen, Klaatu has more dramatic ways to get them to listen. But will Klaatu’s robot Gort kill them all?
If you want an action movie, try Plunder of the Sun, airing on TCM at 2:00 PM Saturday. Glenn Ford plays Al Colby, an insurance adjuster stuck in Havana. To get the money to get back to the States, he agrees to play courier, taking a package on a ship from Havana to Mexico. Unfortunately, the guy who is paying him dies during the voyage. So Al opens up the package, and finds a couple of odd papers and a medallion of sorts. Meanwhile, everybody else on board is a bit strange, as though they’ve got secrets to hide, much as Al’s benefactor did. Those people include the old guy’s traveling companion, and now romantic interest for Al, the lovely Anna (Patricia Medina); and an archaeologist Jefferson (Sean McClory). That archaeologist bit is important because it turns out the papers contain the secret to finding one of the old temples that contains a fortune in treasure somewhere deep within its bowels. That is, if the treasure hasn’t already been plundered by people 2000 years before, or if the attempt to get in and find it doesn’t kill them all first.
For a different sort of horror, you could try Sorry, Wrong Number, which will be on TCM at 3:45 PM Sunday. Barbara Stanwyck plays Leona Stevenson, née Cotterell, the wheelchair-bound daughter of a pharmacy executive (Ed Begley). She meets Henry Stevenson (Burt Lancaster) when he’s pursuing Leona’s best friend Sally, so Leona steals him away from the friend. After the wedding, she gets Henry a job in Dad’s business. Several years later, Henry is now vice-president and doesn’t return from the office one night, while Leona is mostly confined to her bed. She makes a bunch of phone calls trying to find Henry, but during one of them, the wires get crossed and she hears of a plan to commit a murder! She can’t get the operator or the police to believe her, unsurprisingly, so she starts to play detective from bed. Henry may be meeting a Mrs. Lord, and when Leona calls Mrs. Lord, it turns out to be Sally, informing Leona that Henry may be in legal trouble. But what sort of trouble – and how does all of this involve Leona?