Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of October 28-November 3, 2013. It's hard to believe that this is the last week of October, which also means Halloween on the 31st and a full 24 hours of horror films. We're going to get a new Friday night spotlight on Friday November 1, and another week of The Story of Film as well. Note that this weekend is the end of Daylight Savings time, which means there's an extra hour overnight, so for any movies running early Sunday morning, you'll want to check your box guides. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
Monday morning and afternoon sees several movies from the mid-1960s airing on TCM, concluding with one I don't know that I've recommended before: Penelope, at 6:00 PM. Natalie Wood stars as Penelope, a woman married to a bank president (Ian Bannen). However, he seems to be more in love with his bank than with her, so to get his attention, she robs the bank! And then she tells the police detective investigating (Peter Falk) that she did it so he won't arrest the wrong person, but he doesn't believe her. She also tells her analyst (Dick Shawn) that she robbed the bank and committed a string of other thefts, but he doesn't seem to believe her either. In fact, he's falling in love with her! To be honest, it's not the greatest movie, but it's got a lot of nice vintage 1960s New York locations in color.
If you want another 1960s heist movie, you could switch over to the Fox Movie Channel. At 4:00 AM Wednesday, they're showing The Sicilian Clan. Alain Delon plays Sartet, a young criminal mastermind who is the most wanted man in France because he's just escaped the police again. He's been helped out of custody by elder Mob boss Vittorio Manalese (Jean Gabin), who is ready for retirement but has one last heist in mind that Sartet was helping to plan. It involves Italian jewels that are being transported to New York; the gang is going to get on the plane carring the jewels and hijack it, getting the jewels and making their escape by not having the plane land at JFK where it's supposed to. The police, however, are hot on the trail of Sartet, while Sartet finds himself falling in love with Manalese's daughter-in-law Jeanne (Irina Demick).
In between, you could watch an underrated movie that I think I might have recommended once before: Intruder in the Dust, at 9:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Based on a story by William Faulker and filmed in part on location in Oxford, MS, the movie stars Juano Hernandez as Beauchamp, a black man who is nowhere near as subservient to whites as the other black people. One day, he's found next to a white guy who's been shot, holding a recently-fired gun. So all the white people want to get together and lynch him. Lawyer John Stevens (David Brian) at least wants a trial first, but Stevens' young nephew Chick (Claude Jarman Jr. from The Yearling) is more worried. He was helped by Beauchamp some time back when he fell into an icy creek and was dragged out of it. So Chick, together with elderly Miss Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson), who has nothing to lose, start investigate and find that things aren't so cut and dry. But can they save Beauchamp before the mob gets to him?
In this week's installment of The Story of Film, we're up to Part 9, which deals with the rebellious American cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I could mention The Graduate again, since that's airing at 8:00 PM Monday, but I'd rather mention a movie that's not quite so well known: Badlands, on Tuesday at 8:00 PM on TCM. The movie is loosely based on the story of Charles Starkweather, with names and ages changed. Martin Sheen plays Kit, a 25-year-old garbage man in a small town in South Dakota who meets and falls for 15-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek). Naturally, her father (Warren Oates) disapproves of the relationship. So Kit kills him and burns his house down, and together the two young lovers run off to various parts to escape the police, building hideouts and killing lots and lots of people along the way. On its own the movie is quite good; as a retelling of the Starkweather case it's a bit lacking (Dad was remarried and the girl had a two-year-old half sister whom Charles choked to death, among other things).
Wednesday night brings October's Guest Programmer to TCM: Gilbert Gottfried, whom you'll recognize for his distinctive voice that was the original voice of the Aflac duck, among other things. Gottfried has a selection of four films that you might be surprised to see him having picked. Three of them I've recommended before; the other one is The Swimmer, at 10:00 PM Wednesday. Based on a short story by John Cheever, the movie stars Burt Lancaster as a man who, at the beginning of the movie, shows up at a house in a wealthy Connecticut suburb wearing nothing but swim trunks, and jumping in the people's pool. They know him but haven't seen him in some time, and when he hears that their neighbors have just put in a pool, he gets the idea to go back to his house, by going from one pool to the next, more or less swimming his way home. Along the way, we learn about his past, and how he wound up at the point where he makes a nutty decision like this. Ladies get to see Lancaster for most of the movie wearing only that skimpy bathing suit, although he was in his early 50s when the movie was made.
Gottfried's other three selections are:
Of Mice and Men at 8:00 PM, starring Lon Chaney Jr. as Lenny, the mentally retarded lunk of a man who is looked after by George (Burgess Meredith) on a Depression-era farm;
Freaks at midnight Thursday (11:00 PM Wednesday LFT), Tod Browning's story of circus sideshow characters and the "normal" person who falls for one of them; and
The Conversation at 1:15 AM Thursday, in which Gene Hackman plays a man doing surveillance who discovers that the "good" guys he's working for are plotting a murder.
Thursday is Halloween, so we get a bunch of horror movies from Hammer films during the morning and afternoon. Thursday night means one final night of Vincent Price movies. Price made several movies based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe, some of which are airing this Thursday, starting at 8:00 PM with The Pit and the Pendulum. In this one, Price plays the Nicolas, the son of a member of the Spanish Inquisition. One day, Francis (John Kerr) comes from England to learn what happened to his late sister Elizabeth, who was also Nicolas' wife. It's clear to Francis that Nicolas doesn't want him around, but why? Nicolas claims his wife died of a blood disease, but investigating leads Francis to believe that perhaps she was actually buried alive! This is a movie that's slow at first, but you'll want to stick with it (it's only 80 minutes) for the climax. Although this was low-budget horror from Roger Corman, Corman did an excellent job with what he had.
Friday being November 1, it means we get a new Friday night spotlight on TCM. This month, it's screwball comedies, more or less. These are the sort of movies I really like, to the point of having blogged about all of this week's selections previously, in which the theme is journalism in screwball comedies:
Newspaperman Clark Gable schlepps heiress Claudette Colbert up the East Coast in It Happened One Night at 8:00 PM;
Newspaperman Cary Grant tries to get newspaperwoman Rosalind Russell not to run off with Ralph Bellamy in His Girl Friday at 10:00 PM;
Newspaperman Spencer Tracy hires detective William Powell to get him out of a lawsuit involving heiress Myrna Loy in Libeled Lady at 11:45 PM; and
Newspaperman Fredric March discovers that Carole Lombard's story about radiation poisoning isn't true, in Nothing Sacred at 1:30 AM Saturday.
Now that we're done with October and the horror movies, we're going to get a new series in the Saturday just before noon time slot on TCM. That series starts with Maisie, Saturday at 10:30 AM. Ann Sothern plays Maisie, a chours girl with a heart of gold who gets herself involved in the lives of others and uses her wisecracking mouth and common sense to help everybody. Maisie was so popular and presumably profitable based on its low budget that MGM wound up making about 10 films in what may not have been intended to be a series originally. The plot of the first one sees Maisie get stuck in Wyoming when the show she was heading for went broke. She works her way to the ranch managed by Robert Young, who doesn't like women. But, the ranch owner (Ian Hunter) is coming for a visit with his wife (Ruth Hussey), who hasn't been faithful. he finds out and commits suicide, leaving young on trial for murder! Let's just say that future entries in the series are a bit lighter than this.
And now on to the overnight programming during the end of Daylight Savings Time. TCM is running Silkwood at 12:15 AM Sunday. So far, so good. Silkwood is based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep. She's a divorced mother from Texas who goes to Oklahoma to get a job at a nuclear reprocessing facility that is the basis for hte local economy. Things seem good at first until one of the workers tests positive for radiation. Slikwood gets the impression that things aren't all they're cracked up to be, and that everybody is being put in grave danger by management. Management of course deny this, but are they also actively trying to prevent her from going public with her story? Also in the cast are Kurt Russell as Karen's new boyfriend in Oklahoma, and Cher as their lesbian housemate.
Silkwood runs 131 minutes, putting it into a 2:15 time slot that would go to the first 2:30 AM Sunday (or is it the second 1:30 AM). At that time, TCM has on its schedule an 82-minute documentary called Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film. That's followed, allegedly at 4:00 AM, by a whole host fo short experimental films ranging from five to 15 minutes which, put together, add up to about an hour and a half, and all of which are listed on the schedule as being at 4:00 AM. So there's clearly an hour missing someplace, in addition to however TCM is putting the experimental films into a two-hour slot.
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