Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of October 19-25, 2020. The days are growing shorter, so more time is going to be spent inside, time which could be used watching some interesting movies. With it being October, we finally get into TCM Star of the Month Peter Cushing's horror movies on Monday night. But there's far more than horror to be had this week. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
If you like the amiable sort of musical that Fox made during the 1940s, then there's another good one on this week: Coney Island, at 9:55 AM Monday on FXM. It's the turn of the century in Brooklyn, and entertainment at Coney Island, not just the amusement park but all the night spots, is a fairly big deal. Joe Rocco (Cesar Romero) runs one such nightclub, where he has Kate Farley (Betty Grable) as his main attraction. Not only that, but the two are romantically involved. A smooth operator shows up in the form of Eddie Johnson (George Montgomery), who tries to worm his way into the club. As he does so, he helps Kate become more successful, and he also falls in love with her, so Eddie and Joe are going to be competing with each other in matters of love as well as business. Kate gets to sing a lot of songs along the way. The role of Eddie is the sort of thing you could imagine Tyrone Power playing (and the plot here is reminiscent of Power's Rose of Washington Square with Alice Faye in the Grable part), except that he had just joined the Marines to fight in the war, so we get George Montgomery instead.
We get another night of Star of the Month Peter Cushing on TCM on Monday in prime time, and this week we start getting the classic Hammer horror movies with Frankenstein and Dracula. One of the earliest is Horror of Dracula (just Dracula in the UK), airing at 9:30 PM Monday. Christopher Lee plays Count Dracula, who has a castle somewhere in Central Europe. John van Eyssen plays Jonathan Harker, who gets a job at Dracula's castle, with the intention of destroying Dracula once and for all. Instead, he gets bitten by a vampire himself, but not before leaving a diary and asking his old friend Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) for help. Helsing arrives and on reading the diary, understands that something seriously bad is going on. But of course he can't get all of the stupid frightened locals to understand. Meanwhile, Dracula, and his vampire minions are getting to the locals one by one, which is perhaps why the locals aren't listening to Helsing, since they're already vampires.
If you want something utterly mindless, you could do far worse than watch any Chuck Norris movie. One that's airing this week is Invasion USA, at 3:40 PM Monday on Epix2 and 4:10 AM Thursday on Epix Hits. Norris plays Matt Hunter, a former CIA agent who is called into action after it's discovered that the Communists have spies who are planning an invasion of the United States, something you could probably have guessed from the title of the movie. The head of those spies is Rostov (Richard Lynch), a bad guy who does things like gun down a boat full of Cuban boat people to get at the cocaine the boat is also smuggling. Hunter and Rostov have a past together. In a previous operation, Hunter captured Rostov, and was perfectly willing to kill him, but had orders to take him alive. Rostov has nightmares over how Hunter nearly killed him, while Hunter wants revenge. Somehow, Hunter seems to be able to take on these terrorists all by himself, but then there's not much in this film that has any semblance to reality.
Every now and then, TCM's schedule gets the genre of a movie wrong. A good example this week is one they call a comedy, Wife vs. Secretary, airing at 7:45 AM Tuesday. Myrna Loy plays the wife, Linda, of Van Stanhope (Clark Gable). He's a magazine publisher with a demanding job, and an executive secretary Helen (Jean Harlow) who is quite good at what she does. Helen has a boyfriend in Dave (James Stewart; sadly this is the only film in which Gable and Stewart both appear but they don't have any scenes together), but pretty much everybody in Linda's life, starting with her mother-in-law (May Robson) thinks that Helen took the job largely so she could get at Van. Linda hadn't thought at all that her husband could ever even consider the possibility of an affair. However, once the idea is in Linda's head, she finds that everything Van does could be considered evidence that he's planning to have an affair with Helen, especially when he's suddenly called to Havana for a conference. Harlow shows she could do drama in addition to comedy and only underscores how much of a tragedy her death just a year later was.
James Cagney is always worth a watch, and he plays another of his fast-talking confidence men in Hard To Handle, which you can catch at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Cagney stars as Lefty Merrill, a promoter who always has one idea or another to try to make money, such as the dance marathon at the beginning of the movie. But the ideas always seem to go bust for him. This bothers his girlfriend Ruth (Mary Brian) somewhat, but even more it bothers her mother Lil (Ruth Donnelly). There's a depression on, after all, and Lil has decided that if she does one thing in life, it's going to be marrying her daughter off to a man of means. Lefty and Lil go after each other hammer in tongs with a bunch of witty banter. Then one day Lefty might actually make a success of it with a new cold cream. But this brings another woman, Marlene (Claire Dodd) into contact with him, and she might just take Lefty away from Ruth. Ruth may not like Lefty as a rich but boring man anyway, and Lefty certainly may not be satisfied with the stuffy life either.
I didn't realize that the 1990 movie Flatliners had gotten a remake a few years back. The original is on this week, at 4:31 PM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Kiefer Sutherland plays Nelson Wright, a medical student who says to some of his classmates that today would be a good day to die. Not that he really wants to die, of course; instead, he's got a morbid curiosity of whether there's an afterlife and what it's really like for people who have near-death experiences. It would be incredibly unethical science to experiment on people to find out about the afterlife, so instead he comes up with the brilliant idea of experimenting on himself. He “flatlines”, and during those seconds has an experience of being a bully in childhood, something he doesn't want to communicate to his friends. So his classmates: David (Kevin Bacon), Rachel (Julia Roberts), Joe (William Baldwin), and Randy (Oliver Platt) decide that perhaps they should undergo the experience Nelson did, in order to learn the secret Nelson might have learned. It turns out traumatic for all as they start having hallucinogenic memories from the experience.
I've recommended the Burt Lancaster movie The Killers before. The movie was remade in the 1960s in what became Ronald Reagan's final film, and the 1960s version of The Killers will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Thursday. A pair of gunman, Charlie and Lee (played by Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager respectively) show up at a school for the blind, looking for one of the teachers, Johnny (John Cassavetes). He knows they're coming and doesn't seem to care that they're going to kill him, which frankly nonplusses the two gunmen. Charlie can't get it out of his mind why Johnny was seemingly OK with being killed, so he starts playing amateur sleuth. In his investigation, he talks to Johnny's old friends Earl (Claude Akins) and Mickey (Norman Fell), who reveal that Johnny was a race-car driver who fell in love with Sheila (Angie Dickinson) and crashed in part from spending too much time with her instead of preparing for the races. Sheila, meanwhile, was the moll of gangster Jack Browning (that's Reagan, in a rare bad-guy role), and the two repay Johnny by getting him a job that in really is part of a robbery of a US Mail truck. It all leads to tragedy, since we know from the beginning what happens to Johnny.
Another movie that starts off with a dead body is Death of a Scoundrel. TCM is showing it at 2:00 PM Friday. George Sanders plays the scoundrel, a man named Clementi Sabourin, whose dead body is found to open the movie by one Bridget Kelly (Yvonne de Carlo). She relates Sabourin's story to the cops. He was a Czech survivor of the World War II concentration camps and, wanting to get away from the Communists by any means necessary, turns in his own brother (Sanders' real-life brother Tom Conway) to the Communists. In America, he catches Kelly stealing a man's wallet, which happens to have a cashier's check in it. Sabourin uses that cashier's check to invest fraudulently in a drug manufacturer. The gambit pays off, but it leads Sabourin to bilk one person after another, be it wealthy widow Mrs. Ryan (Zsa Zsa Gabor, who had been married to Sanders at one point), Ryan's secretary (Nancy Gates), or oil executive Wilson (Victor Jory). So Sabourin has a lot of enemies, any one of them who could have killed him.
I've mentioned the French film Purple Noon several times before, I think most recently when TCM ran it on Alain Delon's day in Summer Under the Stars back in August. The same Patricia Highsmith story was used decades later for the Hollywood movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, which will be on HBO Zone multiple times this week, including at 3:20 PM Saturday. Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, a young man of modest means in 1950s New York. He meets Mr. Greenleaf, whose son Dickie (Jude Law) is over in Europe, refusing to come home. So Mr. Greenleaf offers Ripley $1,000 plus expenses to go over there and persuade Dickie to come home. Dickie has no plans to do so, but agrees to a plan to keep stringing his father along in an attempt to get more money from Dad. Tom wants to get into the social circle of the well-to-do, and has a sexual thing for Dickie as well. It eventually results in Tom killing Dickie, but when Tom is mistaken for Dickie he realizes he can impersonate Dickie and keep the charade going, even if it eventually results in his getting caught.
This week's TCM Essential is the always-relevant Ace in the Hole, at 8:00 PM Saturday. Kirk Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a big-city reporter who's gotten fired from a whole bunch of newspapers around the country and is now in Albuquerque, NM only because his car is broken down. But he takes the opportunity to introduce himself to the editor of the local newspaper and offer his services. Editor Jacob Boot (Porter Hall) gives him a job, but doing human interest stories that Tatum finds beneath him. But then while at a gas station out in the sticks, he hears about a man who was searching for Navajo artifacts in the caves up in the hills and got stuck by falling rocks. Tatum is able to get into the cave and talk to the man, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), and realizes he's got a big story on his hands. As he reports the story, a crowd of people come to gawk, and Chuck tries to figure out a way to stretch the story. Meanwhile, Chuck wants to get Leo's wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) to be part of the story, but it turns out she's estranged from Leo….
TCM: Horror of Dracula, Monday at 9:30 PM
Wife vs. Secretary, Tuesday at 7:45 AM
Hard to Handle, Wednesday at 8:00 PM
The Killers (1964), Thursday at 8:00 PM
Death of a Scoundrel, Friday at 2:00 PM
New serial The Leap for Life, Saturday at 9:30 AM
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043338/ Ace in the Hole, Saturday at 8:00 PM
Invasion USA, Oct. 19 at 3:40 PM on Epix2 and 4:10 AM Thursday on Epix Hits
Coney Island, Monday at 9:55 AM on FXM Retro
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134119/ The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saturday at 3:20 PM on HBO Zone
The Deer Hunter, Friday at 8:00 PM on Flix (and Oct. 28 at 10:00 PM)