Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of October 25-31, 2021. October 31 is Halloween, so as you can guess, there are a whole bunch of horror movies. However, I expressly tried to pick movies from a wide range of genres, not just horror. So we get some sci-fi; a western; and more from Star of the Month Lucille Ball. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
One of this week’s TCM Imports is Yo Yo, which will be on at 4:00 AM Monday. Pierre Étaix, who was a clown in real life, plays the clown Yo Yo in the final segment, as well as Yo Yo’s father in the first two thirds. Dad was a wealthy businessman in 1920s France who had everything he could want in life, except for the love of his life, who is now in a traveling circus. So when the Depression hits and Dad loses everything, he jumps at the chance to join with The Woman (Claudine Auger) in the circus, which is how young Yo Yo winds up becoming a clown himself. Time passes and Yo Yo grows up, becoming successful first entertaining his fellow French soldiers fighting the Nazis; then, with the advent of television, Yo Yo is able to become much more financially successful. So much so that he wants to bring back his childhood joy by finding the villa Dad had owned in the 1920s and restoring it to its glory. However, Yo Yo learns that money doesn’t necessarily bring happiness….
You can be forgiven if you thought the next movie had something to do with Clint Eastwood: The Ballad of Josie, airing at 8:23 AM Monday on StarzEncore Westerns. Josie is actually a woman, the widow Josie Minick, played by Doris Day. Her husband has recently died and she’d like to get custody of the son from the boy’s Grandpa Alpheus (Paul Fix). The Minicks had a spread in Wyoming that they hadn’t been using, so Josie goes there with an aim of actually running it for real, something that the women of the day were not really expected to do. Worse, she intended to raise sheep in what is traditionally cattle country, which alarms even the one man who is likely to support her, Jason Meredith (Peter Graves). Cattle rancher Arch Ogden (George Kennedy) decides to start a range war as a result. Meanwhile, Wyoming is still a territory with dreams of becoming a state, and Josie further agitates things by fighting for women’s suffrage. The cast includes Andy Devine as a judge, and early Good Morning America host David Hartman as the sheriff.
There are several animal-based horror movies on TCM on Tuesday, which gives me the chance to mention a movie that I haven’t selected before: The Pack, at 11:15 AM. Having nothing to do with everybody’s favorite football team, this is instead a movie about Jerry (Joe Don Baker), a scientist about to winter with his family and dog on an island that’s a vacation spot in the summer. Unfortunately, there are a lot of idiots who get dogs for their summer on the island, and then let the dogs become strays when it would become too much of a hassle to keep the dogs after the summer. The dogs aren’t stupid, so they’ve decided to team up and become the titular pack, attacking whatever they can find, which is ultimately going to mean attacking not just animals, but the few people planning to spend the winter on the island. Too bad the radio is out, too. Is the family dog going to turn on them? A warning that some dog lovers may be appalled by this.
After the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation had run its course, it was time to put those characters into feature movies. The second of those was Star Trek: First Contact. It shows up this week at 2:00 PM Tuesday on Epix2. The Borg are about to invade Earth, and Starfleet sends Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) over to the Romulan border since they’re worried about his having been briefly assimilated by the Borg some years earlier. But Picard gets what’s going on and returns to Earth, ever so slightly too late. The Borg have sent a sphere down to Earth through a temporal vortex in order to go back in time to just before warp-drive inventor Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) made first contact with the Vulcans in order that they can assimilate Earth back in the late 21st century and not have to deal with humans in the 24th. All of the cast from the TV series return; in addition there’s Alice Krige as the Borg Queen and Alfre Woodard as Cochrane’s assistant.
TCM’s look at the New Wave continues on Tuesday night, this time with Japanese New Wave movies. This includes The Warped Ones at 11:15 PM. (The movie was first released in the US dubbed with the title The Weird Love Makers, but the last time TCM ran it it was the original.) Akira is a manipulative bastard who cavorts with prostitute girlfriend Yuki and cons people while berating them for not liking jazz music. The journalist Kawashigi gets Akira sent to a reformatory, and after he gets out, he wants to get revenge on the journalist. So together with Yuki and a third petty criminal Masaru, they start going on another crime spree as well as looking for the journalist. Kawashigi now has a girlfriend Fumiko, and Akira finds them in some sort of artist colony. He tries to get revenge on the journalist and his pregnant girlfriend, while the journalist goes around the bend too and thinks about killing Akira. Add in the possibility of abortion, and you’ve got one strange little movie.
Wednesday night on TCM is dedicated to the early years of Universal Studios. They produced the early classic horror, so since this is October, it’s unsurprising that the night includes Dracula at 9:45 PM and Frankenstein at 5:00 AM Thursday. But in between, there’s also the Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front at 11:15 PM, as well as a documentary on studio founder Carl Laemmle that I think is a TCM premiere. That documentary will be on at 8:00 PM Wednesday and gets a second showing at 1:45 AM Tuesday.
I picked a Richard Linklater movie last week, and I’ve got another one this week: Before Sunrise, at 12:45 PM Wednesday on Showtime. Ethan Hawke plays Jesse, an American student who’s been spending his summer traveling around Europe in the days when Americans could do that. He’s on the last leg, from Budapest to Vienna, where he’s going to get on a train back to the States in the morning. Also on that train is Céline (Julie Delpy), a young French woman returning from visiting her grandmother in Hungary. The two strike up a conversation, and forward Jesse asks Céline to get off the train with him in Vienna and spend his last day in Europe seeing the sights of Vienna together. If they turn out not to like each other, well, it’s only one day, but if there’s more to their relationship than just seeing the sights, well, who knows what the future holds. There’s a lot of lovely scenery of Vienna as the two walk around the city discussing their views on life and such. The movie turned out to be a hit and spawned two sequels.
A search of the site claims it’s been almost five years since I mentioned The Facts of Life. It’s on again this week at 10:15 PM Thursday on TCM as part of the salute to Star of the Month Lucille Ball. Ball plays Kitty Weaver, in a middle-class suburban Los Angeles marriage to Jack (Don Defore). They’re stuck in a rut, doing the same things with the neighbors and friends Larry and Mary Gilbert (Bob Hope and Ruth Hussey) and the Masons (Philip Ober and Marianne Stewart), including staying at the same resort in Mexico for vacations together. One year, however, Jack Weaver and Mary Gilbert both have things that prevent them from heading down to Mexico for a few days, while the Masons get Montezuma’s revenge at the resort. So it’s just Kitty and Larry on the fishing trip together. They find that each other’s foibles aren’t as bad as they had thought in the past, and that, with their marriages being a bit stale, perhaps they’re falling in love. But giving up everything they know would be quite the big step. Are they ready for it?
Just before the marathon of horror films on TCM, they’re running Flamingo Road, at 6:00 PM Friday. Joan Crawford plays Lane Bellamy, who works in one of those traveling carnivals until it goes bust and is forced out of a small southern town by the sheriff, Titus Semple (Sidney Greenstreet). But when Deputy Fielding Carlisle (Zachary Scott) goes to evict the carnival, he finds they’ve already left, with only Lane staying behind. Rather than arresting Lane, Fielding falls in love with her as if the two are doing a remake of Mildred Pierce or something. Titus is none too pleased with this since he was hoping to use Fielding as part of the political machine’s desire to have a pliable legislature. So he has Lane arrested on trumped-up prostitution charges! Once Lane gets out of jail, she decides to go to work at the road house where the political machine organizes its corruption, even if this puts her in danger and even if you wonder why they would have given her a job in the first place. She plans to get the dirt on the local politicos, and even marries a lawyer who opposes the sheriff in the process. Gotta love these Joan Crawford potboilers.
If you want something other than a traditional horror movie on Halloween, try switching over to FXM, which has recently put the musical version of Carousel into the rotation, including at 3:30 AM Sunday. Based on a play by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár that was turned into a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, the movie tells the story of Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae), who at one point was a carnival barker operating the carousel in a small New England town. He meets mill worker Julie Jordan (Shirley Jones) and falls in love with her, although their romance causes each of them to lose their jobs for different reasons. Julie has a child on the way, and to make money, Billy reluctantly agrees to join his friend Jigger (Cameron Mitchell) in a robbery. The robbery goes bad and Billy dies as a result. Fifteen years later, still waiting to get into Heaven, he’s given a chance to go down to earth for one day to try to make amends to his wife and now teenaged daughter. The movie is best known for its songs, notably MacRae singing “Soliloquy” and Shirley Jones singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.
Since Halloween is Sunday, it’s expected that there are a whole bunch of horror movies. TCM starts its horror marathon at 8:00 PM Friday. The Universal Frankenstein that I already mentioned gets another airing at 8:00 PM Saturday as part of a double feature of movies about Dr. Frankenstein’s monster; the other one is Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein at 9:30 PM. I mentioned Cat People last week; that one shows up this weekend 10:00 AM Sunday, which I assume means Eddie Muller is presenting it as part of Noir Alley even though I wouldn’t call it noir. And at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT), there’s the 1970s Donald Sutherland version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.