Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 22-28, 2018. Unfortunately, your Milwaukee Brewers failed spectacularly last night, so no more baseball for those of you who are fans of that sport. The bright side is that means more time for interesting movies. Once again I've used my good taste to select a bunch I know you'll all like, including more Rita Hayworth, more horror, and a famous actor doing screenplay duty. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was published in 1818, which makes this year the 200th anniversary of the story. (However, the first edition of the novel was released in January 1818.) With October being Halloween and the month for horror, it should make sense that TCM is going to mark the 200th anniversary of the Frankenstein story. This is on Monday night with several lesser Frankenstein movies, as well as a new documentary on Frankenstein. That will be on at 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM. In between, at 9:00 PM, is Son of Frankenstein, the last of Karloff's Frankenstein movies for Universal with Basil Rathbone playing Dr. Frankenstein's son, what with Colin Clive having died in the meantime. There will be some Hammer Films Frankenstein movies from the 1960s at the end of the night. Unfortunately, the classic 1931 Frankenstein is not part of the night's lineup. That, and Bride of Frankenstein will be on back-to-back on StarzEncore Classics starting at 1:57 PM Friday.
I don't think I've recommended Red Stallion before. It's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns at 2:48 AM Wednesday. Ted Donaldson plays Joel, a boy living on a horse farm with his grandmother Aggie (Jane Darwell). One day while out in the woods, Joel runs into a horse that's being mauled by a bear. After scaring away the bear, Joel discovers that the horse was a mare protecting its foal, and that Mama Horse isn't going to survive. So Joel takes in the young colt and begins to raise it. The only problem is that he may not have a place to raise it for long. Grandma is fairly heavily in debt, and it looks as though the creditors may finally foreclose on the farm. Joel gets the idea that he could raise the horse to be a race horse, having learned that its mother was a thoroughbred, and then sell the horse for the money to pay off his grandmother's debts. But can you really separate a boy from his horse if the time comes to sell?
On Tuesday in prime time we get one final night 0f Rita Hayworth movies in her turn as Star of the Month. It's easy to forget that with so many stars, she too is in the cast of Separate Tables, which is on at 8:00 PM Tuesday. Hayworth plays Ann Shankland, who travels to the fading seaside resort of Bournemouth, England, to see her ex-husband, alcoholic expat writer John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster). John is one of the regulars at a long-stay hotel where everybody knows each other superficially, but they all have back stories that the others may not know. John, for example, is in a relationship with the hotel's owner Pat (Wendy Hiller). There's also the Major (David Niven in the role that won him the Oscar), who is admired by Sybil (Deborah Kerr), although her mother (Gladys Cooper) controls her like Bette Davis's mother in Now, Voyager. Mom learns something about the Major that could have consequences for everybody. There's also an early role for Rod Taylor as a medical student trying to convince his girlfriend to marry him.
A movie FXM brought out of the vault recently that I'd never heard of before is Thunder Island. I DVRed and watched one of the first airings, and it's going to be on again this week, at 7:55 AM Wednesday and 6:00 AM Thursday. Gene Nelson plays Billy Poole, who comes to some Caribbean island where he's met by Anita (Miriam Colon). Anita is from another country in the region, one that got rid of the dictator Perez, who moved to a private island in this country to go into exile. There are rumblings that Perez is thinking of coming back to power, and Anita's faction doesn't want that, so they've hired Billy as a hired assassin to kill Perez. Billy's scheme is going to involve a charted boat owned by expat Vincent Dodge (Brian Kelly), who's come down here in part to get out of the rat race and in part to get away from his estranged wife Helen (Fay Spain), who has followed with their daughter to try to patch up the marriage. Their daughter meets Perez's daughter the the private island dock, and the two become friends, which is Billy's in to getting on to the island. But it will also put a little girl in harm's way for the assassination. It's a reasonably interesting little B movie, made more interesting by the fact that one of the screenplay credits at the beginning is given to a "Jack Nicholson". Yes, it is that Jack Nicholson who would go on to become a prominent actor.
Thursday morning and afternoon has ghost stories on TCM, with one of the odder ones being Man Alive at 6:00 AM. Pat O'Brien plays Mike McBride, happily married to Connie (Ellen Drew) until he forgets her birthday one year. Her former boyfriend from college, Tolliver (Rudy Vallee) shows up, and Mike decides he's going to go off and get drunk. He and another man get plastered enough that they exchange clothes and everything and go off for a joyride. DWI wasn't nearly as frowned-upon as it is today, so this is seen as partly funny, until the car goes off the road and into a river, killing the guy who took Mike's clothes. Apparently the other guy's features were decayed enough that they couldn't recognize the body as not being Mike, so he's declared dead. He meets a riverboat operator Kismet (Adolphe Menjou), who comes up with the bizarre idea of having Mike pretend to be a ghost to try to scare Tolliver away from marrying Connie. I told you it was odd.
Those of you who insist on more recent stuff will be thrilled to see that I'm mentioning Code of Silence, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 12:19 AM Thursday. Chuck Norris plays Cusack, a narcotics cop in Chicago about to bust some of the Camacho gang, but the Lunas, led by Tony Luna (Henry Silva) beat the cops to the punch and start shooting Camachos dead. The surviving Camachos escalate, and that leaves Luna daughter Diana in a spot since she'd like out of the whole gang war thing. But there are further complications for Cusack. During the original botched sting, one of the cops shot a youth and gave the kid a drop gun to cover up the wanton killing. Most of the cops would rather protect one of their own than be honest, but not Cusack. He actually testifies against the murderous cop, for which the other cops respond by no longer protecting him. So Diana may not really be safe with Cusack as her protector. Sure, it's not the greatest thing ever, but with a Chuck Norris movie you know what you're getting.
Another movie that I don't think I've recommended before is White Lightning, on TCM at 8:00 PM Friday. The recently-deceased Burt Reynolds plays Gator McKlusky, a man serving time in an Arkansas prison for having run moonshine. That's bad enough, but then he learns that his kid brother, who was also in the moonshine-running business, was killed. The Feds offer Gator parole in exchange for his trying to get information on the other moonshiners. Gator takes them up on the offer, but he just as much has plans of his own. He has good reason to believe that his brother was killed by Sheriff Connors' (Ned Beatty) men, and that Connors is protecting the moonshiners in exchange for a cut. Meanwhile, Gator starts getting involved with his handler's girlfriend and has to deal with the Sheriff's goons. The movie was filmed largely on location in Arkansas.
There's a Christmas classic The Shop Around the Corner that TCM seems to run every December. Indeed, it will be on December 16 at 6:00 AM. The movie was remade as In the Good Old Summertime, which follows at 8:00 AM on December 16. I mention these because the movie got another remake in the 1990s, and that remake, You've Got Mail, will be on HBO Family at 2:55 AM Friday. Meg Ryan plays Kathleen, who runs an independent bookstore and although she has a guy pursuing her in Frank (Greg Kinnear), but she also spends her time on the Internet where she's been exchanging emails with a guy she met in a chat room who sounds promising. Enter Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), who runs one of those big chain bookstores that were big at the time the movie was made but were felled by Amazon. He's opening another shop just around the corner from Kathleen's bookstore, threatening to put it out of business, so Kathleen hates Joe for it. Of course, we know that Joe is the guy Kathleen has been emailing and he's fallen for his unknown email friend just as she has. Wait until they find out who they've been emailing.
Tschmack tried to tease me last week about the movies of 1947. Little did he know that there's a great one on this week, so I'll recommend it just for him: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, at 8:00 PM Saturday. Gene Tierney plays Mrs. Muir, a widow with a young child Anna (Natalie Wood) in England around 1900 who decides that what she needs is a change in life to get out out of London. She goes to the seaside in the southwest, and in the first cottage she looks at renting she and the real estate agent are scared out by an apparent ghost! The agent doesn't want her to toake the cottage because of that, but she does, and it turns out that the place is indeed haunted by the ghost of a previous owner, a sailor named Capt. Gregg (Rex Harrison). He tries to haunt the Muirs out of the house, but when that doesn't work, he agrees to let her stay on the grounds that she write his memoirs for him. Imagine, a proper lady writing a salty sailor's memoirs! Along the way, Muir meets a man among the living, Mr. Fairley (George Sanders) who seduces her, but things aren't quite what they seem.
Finally, I'll mention this week's Noir Alley selection, Follow Me Quietly, which TCM is running at midnight Sunday (ie. 11:00 PM Saturday LFT) and 10:00 AM Sunday. There's a killer on the loose in the big city, known as The Judge who kills on rainy nights and thinks it's his duty to take the law into his own hands. Police detective Harry Grant (William Lundigan) has been assigned to the case, and he's pursuing it doggedly, even though the clues seem to be leading nowhere. He's got a partner in Sgt. Collins (Jeff Corey), and then also gets a reporter Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick) who's decrying that the murder hasn't been solved yet. As happens too often in the movies, Grant and Gorman wind up starting a bit of a romance. Meanwhile, the real killer might be right under Grant's nose if he could only see it. This was a decided B movie, but RKO made a lot of really interesting B noirs in the late 1940s and this is one of them.