Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of October 30-November 5, 2017. This is the week that the US switches from Daylight Savings Time back to standard time, so clocks are going to go back one hour in the overnight from next Saturday to Sunday and that may screw up some movies airing then if you're trying to record them. With a new month coming, we're also going to get a new Star of the Month on TCM. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is showing several movies on Monday dealing with the Red Scare of the 1950s. Among them is Big Jim McLain, at 12:45 PM Monday. John Wayne plays Jim McLain, who is sent to Hawaii (still a territory at the time, of course) by a congressional committee investigating Communist activity on the islands, which as in many anti-communist movies of the era is portrayed as being a lot like the Mob. (Senator Ester Kefauver led a committee investigating organized crime's links to interstate commerce around the same time.) Anyhow, Jim goes there with his partner Mal Baxter (James Arness) and find that the Communists are quite the formidable foe, having infiltrated all the unions like the Mob would do in On the Waterfront a few years later. Alan Napier is the leader of the local Communist cell. Nancy Olson plays a medical student who meets Jim McLain early on and eventually becomes his love interest. This movie is often considered terrible, but it's not quite that bad, instead of being more like a sub-par episode of Hawaii Five-O. Much of the scorn heaped on it is because of it's stridently anti-communist nature.
Tuesday is Halloween, so we get a bunch of Halloween movies. It's nice to see that Mad Love is among them, at 10:00 AM Tuesday on TCM. Colin Clive plays concert pianist Stephen Orlac, married to beautiful actress Yvonne (Frances Drake). One day he gets in a train crash, and it leads to his hand becoming injured to the point that they're no longer suitable for playing the piano. That's a problem. But Stephen hears of a doctor Gogol (Peter Lorre), who is involved in experimental transplant techniques. And Gogol has even found a dead man for a suitable hand transplant. However, it turns out that that man, Rollo (Edward Brophy) was a knife thrower who was executed for murder. And Orlac finds that his new hands still retain the habit of wanting to throw knives, as opposed to playing the piano. Indeed, Orlac is unable to control his new hands' desire to throw knives! Worse is that Dr. Gogol has a thing for Yvonne, and what a thing it is. The “Hands of Orlac” story has been put to film several times, but this is a really fun version of the story.
Tuesday being Halloween, it might be a good time to play dress-up, and one of the stereotypical costumes is to dress up as a member of the opposite sex. Among the many great movies that have used this device is Tootsie, which will be on Starz Encore Classics on Tuesday at 7:39 AM and 6:38 PM. Dustin Hoffman plays Michael, a struggling actor in New York City with roommate Jeff (Bill Murray) and girlfriend Sandy (Teri Garr). He's unable to get acting gigs until one day when a promising opening on a soap opera comes up. Unfortunately, he learns that they're looking for a middle-aged woman, which obviously leaves him right out of the job. Except that he decides to dress up as “Dorothy” and apply for the job that way. And he gets the job, without anybody at the soap opera knowing the disguise. Further, he becomes a big hit as Dorothy! This understandably causes all sorts of problems. Not only is there the possibility that people will discover the ruse; there's also the fact that Michael finds himself falling in love with costar Julie (Jessica Lange), and that Julie's father Les (Charles Durning) has a thing for Dorothy.
Wednesday is Nov. 1, the start of a new month, which means that we're going to get a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, it's James Stewart, who made so many movies at MGM back in the day that TCM is able to run movies not just in prime time Wednesdays, but on Wednesday mornings as well. The month kicks off with Stewart's first role in The Murder Man, at 6:00 AM. Of course, Stewart isn't the star here; that honor goes to Spencer Tracy, who had just come over to MGM from Fox and hadn't yet become the good-guy Tracy he would with movies like Boys Town. Here, Tracy plays Steve Grey, a newspaper reporter who gets the nickname of “The Murder Man” because of his uncanny ability to break murder cases for his paper. His latest case involves a stockbroker (back in the days when shady stock dealers were common) who was gunned down in broad daylight gangland-style. Steve immediately begins to build a case against the dead man's business partner, and it results in the guy ultimately being sentenced to the death penalty. But it unsurprisingly turns out that there's a lot more to the case than Steve has been letting on….
Also at the start of a new month, we start to get some movies on FXM Retro that haven't been on in a while. One of these is Damnation Alley, which will be on at 1:25 PM Wednesday atn 11:35 AM Thursday. The movie starts with nuclear war, which is never a good thing for the characters involved. In this case, there are a couple of Air Force officers out in California who survive because they were underground. When they pick up a radio broadcast that is apparently coming from Albany, NY, from other survivors, they get in their armored special military vehicle, and set out on a trek to get to the source of that broadcast. George Peppard plays Major Denton, the leader of the Air Force crew, with Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent) as junior officer and Paul Winfield because the group has to be integrated. When they reach Las Vegas, they pick up a woman (Dominique Sanda), and later pick up a bratty child along the way. And then there are the challenges they have to face are giant cockroaches and a monster flood. The acting isn't very good, but it's entertaining.
If you like those old Frank Morgan B movies, there's another one on this week: The Ghost Comes Home, at 1:30 PM Thursday on TCM. Morgan plays Vern, father in a boring small-town family. He suddenly gets word from an overseas friend that the friend wants to donate a bunch of money to Vern's town, and that Vern should come visit to help the friend decide how to donate it. This means a transpacific boat voyage, but Vern misses the boat after getting arrested on a drunk and disorderly. Vern eventually returns home, but it turns out that while Vern was in jail, the boat he was booked passage on sank, and the family (wife Billie Burke and daughter Ann Rutherford, who is the day's honoree on TCM) had taken out an insurance policy in case anything happened to Vern, and they already cashed in on that policy when they heard the boat sank! But now, with Vern very much alive, it means the family is going to have to face charges of insurance fraud.
Friday night on TCM brings a bunch of conspiracy theory-type movies. The night starts off with The China Syndrome, at 8:00 PM. Jane Fonda plays Kimberly Wells, a newscaster who does those human-interest kind of stories. Together with her cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas), they're doing a report on a nuclear power plant, when a mild earthquake causes one of the warning sensors to go off. This is obviously a problem, especially with Richard taping the footage. The plant has to shut down until the all clear which means losing a lot of money. And then one of the nuclear engineers, Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) does some research of his own and discovers that the power company didn't do proper inspections when they were building the plant, which means a catastrophic failure might be in the cards. And the company knows that Jack knows this, since they're trying to off him before he can get the news to Kim. Regardless of your views on nuclear power, The China Syndrome is a well-made movie.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns, one that I don't think I've recommended before is Breakheart Pass, at 8:28 PM Thursday and 2:35 AM Friday. There's a diphtheria outbreak at Fort Humboldt in Nevada, so the military arranges for a special train to carry medical supplies to the garrison, as well as relief soldiers. Also on board the train is the governor Fairchild (Richard Crenna) and Marica, the daughter of the fort's commander (Jill Ireland). Joining them is a US Marshal (Ben Johnson), who has caught a suspected criminal Deakin (Charles Bronson) and can only take this train to bring him to trial. One problem is that the rail line goes through some Indian territory so they're worried about an Indian attack, but far more worrying is the fact that people start disappearing from the train, which is a pretty obvious sign that they've been murdered. There must be something more going on here, and as the movie goes on we learn that nobody is who they seem to be.
I thought I'd recommended Trooper Hook before, but a search of the site says no. It's going to be on TCM at noon Saturday. Joel McCrea plays Sgt. Hook, leader of a cavalry unit who has to deal with an Apache raid. Hook is able to defeat the band and capture them. But it turns out there's a problem. The leader Nanchez has captured white woman Cora (Barbara Stanwyck) and taken her for a wife. And she's already bore Nanchez a child. Cora had already been married before getting captured and unsurprisingly, her husband (John Dehner) wants her back. Not that the boy is his, but the plan is to return both cora and the boy. The Apache, also understandably don't like losing Cora, and especially don't like losing the boy. And then Nanchez escapes and hatches a plan to get the boy back by waylaying a stagecoach. McCrea and Stanwyck are good as always, and look for a bunch of recognizable character actors.
Finally, I'll mention that TCM is running a couple of compilation movies on Sunday in prime time. At the beginning of this century, a couple of filmmakers put together a whole bunch of short movies that had been made in the first half-century of movies, and called these avant-garde shorts Unseen Cinema. The result was a seven-disc DVD collection, which was ultimately culled down when the presented selections on TCM back in 2006. The first set shows up at 8:00 PM; the second follows at 10:5 PM Sunday. One of the clips has a 17-year-old Charlton Heston in a scene from Peer Gynt; I think this is also the collection that includes Mechanical Principles: