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Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 29-November 4, 2018.  Thankfully, the baseball season is almost over, while the Badgers are headed for one of the mediocre bowls.  So why not deal with the disappointment by watching some good movies?  It's Halloween, so there's some horror, but there's a lot of other interesting stuff too.  Note that overnight between Saturday and Sunday is the end of Daylight Savings Time, so I didn't select anything running overnight between Saturday and Sunday.  As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

 

If she doesn't die in the next 24 hours, child star Baby Peggy will be turning 100 tomorrow.  TCM is spending a bit more time on its Silent Sunday Nights lineup tonight with Baby Peggy, although technically the first selection isn't a silent.  It's the documentary Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room, at midnight tonight, looking at Peggy's screen career, how her parents caused all sorts of problems with it -- she was basically washed up by the age of 7 -- and then how she found peace later in life (she was 92 when the movie was released and attending film festivals with adoring fans seeing a renaissance of her movies).  That documentary will be followed by two of her movies, The Family Secret at 1:15 AM, and Captain January, where she ends up with a lighthouse keeper, at 2:30 AM

 

With Halloween being on Wednesday, there is a large number of horror movvies on the first couple days this week. First up I'll mention the 1958 version of The Fly, at 12:15 AM Tuesday on TCM. Devid Hedison (credited as Al) plays the title character, more or less, a scientist named André who at the beginning of the movie is being crushed to death in a hydraulic press by his wife Hélène (Patricia Owens). Police detective Charas (Herbert Marshall) is going to prosecute Hélène for murder, but with the help of André's brother François (Vincent Price), the true story comes out. André was a scientist, working on a device that would transport matter. After a series of experiments, he eventually takes the fateful step that if he's ever going to try it on a human, he's going to have to try on himself first. However, as he's about to transport himself, a fly enters the transporter chamber, with the result that the two creatures that wind up on the other side aren't André and the fly, but André's both with the head and arm of a fly, and André's head and an arm on the body of a fly, which is why Hélène really wants to find that fly. As you can deduce from the start of the movie, she's not successful in time….

 

For non-horror in the run-up to Halloween, I could mention Missing, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 5:54 AM Monday.  Charles Horman (John Shea) is an idealistic American journalist who travels to Chile in 1973, which just happens to be a bad time to travel there as the country is becoming enough of a mess that the opposition asks the military to step in, which they do, and it results in a bunch of people being disappeared.  Charles, despite being American, is among the disappeared, and his conservative father Ed (Jack Lemmon) and liberal wife Beth (Sissy Spacek; Beth is Charles' wife) go to Chile to investigate.  Unsurprisingly, they're stonewalled at every turn, and as they continue to try to find their relative, they begin to discover that perhaps the Americans might have been involved in some way.  This was directed by Costa-Gavras who was no stranger to political thrillers with movies such as Z, and has fabulous performances by Lemmon and Spacek.

 

If you've ever wanted to see Humphrey Bogart in a horror movie, you're in luck: TCM is showing The Return of Doctor X at 3:00 PM Tuesday.  Wayne Morris plays a reporter who suspects something fishy when he goes to interview actress Lya Lys and finds her stabbed to death, only to see her the next day at the newspaper very much alive and suing for libel!  That, and she's unnaturally pale.  So he starts investigating, and with the help of doctor friend Dennis Morgan, he learns about another doctor, John Litel, who is researching synthetic blood and bringing animals back to life, along with his assistant Bogart, who is just as pale as Lys.  It turns out there's a good reason for the paleness: the synthetic blood can indeed bring people back to life, and Bogart is one of those people.  But the effect is short-lived, to the point that people constantly need fresh blood.  You can see why Bogart hated this movie, but it's really a lot of fun.

 

October is almost over, but you've still got a chance to catch The Hunt for Red October, which HBO2 will be running at 10:30 PM Monday.  Sean Connery plays Marko Ramius, the captain of the Red October, first of a new class of Soviet subs that can run extremely quite, making detection next to impossible.  That would give the Soviets an advantage if anybody ever got the idea to start nuclear war from sub-based missiles.  Ramius takes the sub out, and promptly kills the political oficer on board and goes on radio silence, leading to questions in Washington as to what's going on.  Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) thinks Ramius may be trying to defect, and that would give the Americans a vital opportunity to inspect the sub.  Others in Washington think Ramius may be going rogue with the possibility of a nuclear attack imminent in that case.  The Soviets are willing to destroy the sub since they don't want the Americans to get their hands on it.  Thankfully, neither the Americans nor Soviets really want World War III, but can they prevent it anyway?

 

Before he was an astronaut getting hit on by Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman was in Fail-Safe, which will be on TCM at 9:45 PM Friday.  The nuclear command out in Omaha has detected an incoming 9object and sends planes up to investigate, but something goes badly wrong.  A bomber crew mistakenly gets the order that they're supposed to go to Moscow and drop their load, which is a nuclear missile!  Worse, the plane passes the "fail-safe", the point of no return beyond which the plane crew is trained to engage in radio silence and complete its mission no matter what.  And the Americans can't scramble a plane to shoot the crew down.  So the president (Henry Fonda) gets on the hotline with his Soviet counterpart to discuss the situation, while various advisors try to figure out what to do.  Hagman plays the president's interpreter, while Walter Matthau is a political scientist who has a rather unorthodox view of the situation.  Watch also for Dom DeLuise in a rare dramatic role.

 

And for a third movie with Cold War themes, you can watch Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! on FXM Retro at 11:25 AM Thursday and 7:15 AM Friday.  Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, married in real life, play Harry and Grace Bannemann, a married couple living in one of those bedroom commuter communities in Connecticut.  He works in PR in New York, while she spends all her time doing various good civic deeds.  In fact, she does so many that sometimes he feels neglected by her and the two kids who watch TV constantly.  Meanwhile, there's neighbor Angela Hoffa (Joan Collins), whose husband Oscar is constantly away on business so she feels neglected too.  Ah, but that's only half the conflict in the story.  The other half comes when the Army plans a new base for their community, and Grace is selected to be the head of the committee opposing it on NIMBYism grounds.  Harry had been in the Navy, but the man who would be base commander and is trying to put the base over, Capt. Hoxie (Jack Carson), is so inept that the army needs a PR guy.  Harry is just the man for the job, so they get his reserve status transferred to the Army and have him try to convince the town of the necessity of the base.  You can figure out the rest of the predictable complications.

 

On Halloween, I'll recommend the excellent Dead of Night, at 6:00 PM Wednesday on TCM.  Mervyn John's plays Walter Craig, an architect who has to drive out to a country manor to discuss a possible job.  When he gets to the house, he finds a bunch of odd people he has the distinct feeling of having seen before in a dream.  One doctor doesn't believe this, but everybody else seems to think it's possible, especially when he seems to be able to predict what happens next.  Each of the people has their own story of the supernatural to tell.  Perhaps the best 0f the stories involves Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist whose dummy seems to be taking on a life of its own.  The Caldecott and Chalmers characters from The Lady Vanishes also show up in a story about golfing buddies with a strange bet.  Other stories involve a mirror that seems to be a portal to another reality, and a hearse with "rooms for 0nd more".  And the ultimate resolution of the architect's dream is quite memorable.

 

If you want one of those short Saturday matinee westerns that don't require much thinking, StarzEncore Westerns is running Pioneer Justice at 1:43 AM Thursday.  Lash LaRue plays Cheyenne Davis, a US Marshal, who is brought on a case in the town of Bufflo Gap together with his partner Fuzzy (Al St. John) when a couple of deputies get killed.  The local sheriff (Henry Hall) is no help, and he might just be in with the corrupt bad buys.  Judd (Jack Ingram) seems to be the head of the putative bad guys, as there are a bunch of people who want to grab up all the land and seem perfectly willing to use violence to get what they want.  Perhaps there's somebody behind Judd, however.  Meanwhile, there's pretty Betty (Jennifer Holt), whose brother was killed by the bad guys, who wants justice, and who serves the function of being eye candy.  Needless to say, Cheyenne figures it all out and gets the bad guys after a couple of fights, and the good guys live happily ever after.

 

If you don't think the Baby Peggy movies are old enough, you're in luck.  On Thursday night on TCM they're having another look at early women directors, which means we get some of the names I've mentioned before.  Alice Guy-Blaché was the first of them all, and the night kicks off with three of her movies between 8:00 PM and 9:15 PM, including Falling Leaves, which was controversial at the time for its portrayal of a tuberculosis patient.  Then at 9:15 PM we get a short and a feature from Lois Weber, who made social issue movies such as Where Are My Children?, dealing with eugenics (good because it got those lower-class people to stop churning out babies) and abortion (evil because bored middle-class housewives were getting abortions so they could keep up with their string of affairs.  Mable Normand apparently also directed some of her shorts (starting at 10:45 PM), and then there's some even more obscure stuff.

 

We'll conclude with The Subject Was Roses, at 6:00 PM Sunday on TCM.  Martin Sheen is Timothy Cleary, who has just returned home from World War II to his parents living 9n a small apartment in the Bronx.  Mom Nettie (Patricia Neal, in a triumphant return after a serious stroke) and dad John (Jack Albertson) love their son, but after so many years they don't quite love each other any more.  Timmy always looked up to his parents, but his time in the war made him grow up.  And now that he's grown up, he's come to see his parents as the imperfect people they are.  Dad's been seeing other women, and Tim wants to keep his parents together, so he buys Mom roses is Dad's name.  When she learns the ruse, she decides stepping out herself might not be such a bad idea.  And Tim begins to realize he might need to go off and live his own life.  Can the family stay together?  Neal was nominated as Best Actress, but Albertson won the Oscar, surprisingly in the Supporting Actor category.

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