Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 21-27, 2019. The Badgers completely sh!t the bed on Saturday, so since their season is effectively over, that's three hours of your life you can get back each week. And if you're still heartsick over it, why not deal with it by watching some interesting movies. There's a mix of lousy but hilarious, movies that are quite good, and movies you can just sit back and watch with a bowl of popcorn without doing much thinking. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday brings another night of the films of Star of the Month Paul Muni to TCM. This week, the focus is on biopics, including one that has relevance to a later movie I'm recommending, Juarez, at 2:00 AM Tuesday. Muni plays Benito Juarez, who led a popular struggle in Mexico against an unpopular ruler installed from abroad. When the US was busy with the Civil War in the 1860s, France realized the US might not be able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. So they decided to interfere in Mexico, with Emperor Napoleon III (Claude Rains) sending Maximilian of Austria (Brian Aherne) to rule Mexico for France. Of course, the Mexicans didn't like this and Maximilian was doomed from the start, and even more so once the Union won the Civil War. Bette Davis plays Carlota, Maximilian's wife, who returned to Europe and went insane, dying 60 years after her husband. A young John Garfield plays Porfirio Diaz, advisor to Juarez. Well-made, but one of the less remembered movies of 1939.
Another movie that's returning to FXM Retro this week is The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, which is going to be on at 1:15 PM Monday. As you can guess from the title, this is a look at the famous gangland killing in Chicago on Valentine's Day, 1929. In the massacre, a bunch of Al Capone's (Jason Robards) henchmen rounded up rival gang leader Bugs Moran (Ralph Meeker) in a garage and killed him and a bunch of Moran's underlings. The movie obviously starts off before the fateful day, looking at the events that led to Capone's decision to wipe out Moran, and how the killing was planned and carried out by Capone's lieutenant Jack McGurn (Clint Richie). Also, we get to know all of the main people involved on both sides better for it. One interesting thing is that this is told in docudrama style, with voiceovers from Paul Frees introducing us to each character and telling us what happened to them after the massacre if they survived; it's a technique that really helps the movie. The other surprise is that the movie was directed by lower-budget horror master Roger Corman, who makes this a pretty entertaining movie.
TCM is honoring the Marx brothers on Tuesday morning and afternoon with a bunch of their movies, even though it's not the birthday of any of them. Probably the most fun movie in the day's lineup is The Story of Mankind, which is on at 4:30 PM. By the late 1950s when the movie was made, mankind had come up with nuclear weapons that threatened to annihilate the planet, so a celestial court comes up with the idea that mankind should not be allowed to continue to exist. A “High Judge” (Cedric Hardwicke) presides over the case, with Mr. Scratch (Vincent Price) prosecuting it and Ronald Colman, in his final film, playing the Spirit of Mankind, defending man against the accusations by showing all the great things man has done throughout history. In a series of thoroughly inaccurate vignettes, a cast of famous stars play the great names of history. As for the Marx brothers, they appear separately; Chico is a monk, Harpo is Isaac Newton(!), and Groucho Peter Minuit. It's a series of bizarre casting decisions including Peter Lorre as Nero, Hedy Lamarr as Joan of Arc, and Dennis Hopper as Napoleon, among others. Panned by critics, this one is actually well worth a watch because it's such a train wreck.
For all those fans of 80s movies, one that's airing this week is Tango & Cash, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 5:22 AM Wednesday. Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell play Tango and Cash respectively, a pair of Los Angeles police officers who are polar opposites in terms of personality, but both quite good at their jobs. They've been making a whole bunch of drug busts, all of them being low-level operatives of drug kingpin Yves Perret (Jack Palance). Perret wants them stopped so he can have a free hand, and decides to do it by concocting an elaborate scene that will set the two cops up at another drug bust where there's a dead FBI agent. That and a doctored tape puts the two in prison, where Perret's underlings who were already sent there thanks to Tango and Cash's earlier busts are eager to exact revenge. The two cops realize that they're going to have to escape prison and figure out a way to get the goods on Perret while evading the law. Thoroughly unrealistic, but you could do worse for a buddy cop movie.
I see that the immensely entertaining Mommie Dearest is on this week, at 9:05 AM Wednesday. Based on the scathing memoir by Christina Crawford (Mara Hobel as a child and Diana Scarwid as an adult), this tells the story of Christina and her adoptive mother, renowned Hollywood actress Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway). Joan, despite her success, wanted a family. She'd been through two failed marriages and couldn't well have a kid out of wedlock (well, she could have done like Loretta Young). Adoption seemed like the answer, but reputable agencies saw her strenuous career and the failed marriages, so they said no. So MGM lawyer and Joan's boyfriend at the time Greg Savitt (Steve Forrest) decided to grease the wheels and use his good name to get Joan a child, Christina, and then another. To hear Christina tell it, Joan was an awful mother, being an insane neat freak as well as abusive to her, as in the famous "no wire hangers" scene. The movie has Joan's nastiness continuing well into Christina's adulthood. The movie was a critical misfire, but so much campy fun.
One of the “Short and Sweet” movies that I don't think I've recommended before is High Pressure. It's showing at 7:00 AM Thursday on TCM. William Powell plays Gar Evans, a business “promoter” who has a reputation for selling people on all sorts of crazy schemes. “Colonel” Ginsburg (George Sidney) has found an inventor who claims to be able to make synthetic rubber out of sewage (the movie was released in 1932, not long after the invention of neoprene, and before synthetic fibers like polyesters became common). Ginsburg needs capital, and Gar is just the person to get people to invest in the bogus company. Gar needs his long-suffering girlfriend Francine (Evelyn Brent) as a talisman, but she's fed up with Gar and wants to marry another man. Meanwhile, Ginsburg can't find the inventor, and if the inventor doesn't show up, the producers of natural rubber are going to get the company shut down on securities fraud. It doesn't help that Gar's secretary has invested her and her fiancé's life savings in the bogus company. Two veteran character actors appear: Frank McHugh as Gar's best friend, and Guy Kibbee as the phony president of the company.
A look through the StarzEncore Westerns schedule shows a lot of 1950s westerns that I've recommended before. One that I don't think I have is Border River, which will be on at 9:55 PM Friday. Joel McCrea plays Clete Mattson, an officer in the Confederate Army in the dying days of the Civil War. It's already a lost cause for the South, but Mattson and his men have stolen a shipment of Union gold and taken it across the border to Mexico. Well, technically it's Mexico because Mexico has its own problems between Juarez and the puppet emperor Maximilian, this is a “free zone” run by a corrupt general, Calleja (Pedro Armendáriz). He'll keep you safe from the outside authorities or sell you anything – for a price. And if you can trust him. Mattson finds this is the only person he can buy weapons from, but is Calleja going to sell them? Making matters more complicated is the presence of the lovely Carmelita (Yvonne De Carlo), whom Calleja expects to be his woman but with whom Mattson has also fallen in love.
“Sticks Nix Hick Pix”, as Variety famously wrote back in 1935. Well, TCM is running a bunch of those “hick pix” on Friday morning and afternoon, including Mountain Justice at 10:00 AM. Josephine Hutchinson plays Ruth Harkins, a nurse living in Appalachia with a terrible father Jeff (Robert Barrat) who beats her, her kid sister Beth (Marcia Mae Jones), and mom Meg (Elisabeth Risdon). She wants to be a nurse, and the local doctor, Barnard (Guy Kibbee), wants the locals to have better health care, so Barnard and his fiancée Phoebe (Margaret Hamilton) arrange for Ruth to go to the big city to study, something that pisses off Ruth's dad. There, she meets and falls in love with lawyer Paul (George Brent), which is going to piss off Dad even more. Eventually, the beatings get so bad that Ruth accidentally kills her father in self defense. She's going to go on trial, and wouldn't you know that there's that sophisticated lawyer around who could defend her. I can't imagine the rural folk of the day enjoying being portrayed like this.
Since we're closing in on Halloween, it's time for some more Halloween movies. Among them is a short version of the Edgar Allan Poe story The Tell-Tale Heart, which will be on TCM at 11:30 AM Saturday. The story concerns two roommates, a Young Man (Joseph Schildkraut) and an Old Man (Roman Bohnen). The old guy is mean to his younger roommate, eventually getting to the point that the young guy kills the old guy. But the young man has a conscience, and he believes he can hear the old man's heart beating under the floorboards, constantly tormenting him. Will it finally drive him to admit that he committed murder? MGM was able to make some amazingly good shorts back in the day.
Finally, I'll mention this week's Noir Alley selection, Force of Evil, which is going to be on at 10:00 AM Sunday. John Garfield plays Joe Morse, a lawyer working for an ambitious gangster who is involved in the illegal numbers racket and wants to consolidate it. Currently, there are a whole bunch of small-time operators, with one of those being Joe's own older brother Leo (Thomas Gomez). Joe tells Leo about all the benefits of joining up with the numbers syndicate, but Leo says no, he's just fine with where he is in life, and that he doesn't want the stress of dealing with the big-time gangsters, especially since he's got a bad heart that can't take the stress. Joe, for his part, is determined to make the syndicate a success, even if it means that the small guys are all going to be crushed – including his brother. For Joe's boss Tucker (Roy Roberts) is planning to fix the numbers game to wipe everybody out on July 4. Complicating matters is that Joe falls for Leo's secretary Doris (Beatrice Pearson), whom Leo treats like a daughter