Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 7-13, 2019. We're back to having a Star of the Month this week, while the horror movies continue as well on TCM. But it's not just old stuff like that that's running this week; I'm actually recommending a pair of movies from the 90s, and I don't mean the 1890s. So this week more than ever there's bound to be something that's to your taste. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We finally get back to the Star of the Month on Monday night, and that star is Paul Muni. Muni won the Best Actor Oscar for The Story of Louis Pasteur, which won't be on until October 21. However, this week I'll mention a different Oscar-nominated role for him, that in The Valiant, which will be on TCM at 11:30 PM Monday. Muni plays a man who, in the film's opening sequence, shoots a man dead in a Manhattan tenement. The character then goes to the nearest police precinct and turns himself in, giving the fake name James Dyke and saying little about the crime other than that the man deserved to die. Dyke is arrested and tried, whereupon he's found guilty and sentenced to be executed. Meanwhile, out in the Midwest, an old lady, Mrs. Douglas, reads about the story in her local paper and upon seeing the condemned man's picture, has a feeling that this is actually her long-lost son, who left to pursue his fortune many years ago. Mom, despite being in poor health, insists on going to New York to see Dyke and find out if he really is her son.
I'll take a break from the Audie Murphy westerns this week to mention a rather different type of western: the spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 7:49 AM Monday. Claudia Cardinale plays Jill, a former prostitute from New Orleans who is moving west to marry the widower McBain, who has a place at a ranch called Sweetwater. However, she gets out west and finds that her husband and his children have been brutally murdered. There are people who have reason to kill McBain. First is the gang leader Cheyenne (Jason Robards); being an outlaw bandit makes him an obvious suspect. But there's also the railroad, which wants the land for its water, and the railroad leader hired Frank (Henry Fonda) to try to convince McBain to sell. And then there's the mysterious Harmonica (Charles Bronson), who gets involved in the case for his own reasons, even after a group of men who could have been sent by either Frank or Cheyenne try to kill him.
A search of the site claims that I haven't recommended before is The Angel Wore Red, which will be on TCM this week at 12:45 PM Tuesday. Dirk Bogarde plays Fr. Arturo, a Spanish Catholic priest who has decided that the Church in his country cares more about itself than the parishioners, so he decides to leave the priesthood. The only problem is, he does this right at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and the local authorities under Gen. Clave (Vittorio De Sica) are extremely anti-clerical. They wouldn't believe him if he said he left the priesthood, so he's still under threat of arrest. He tries to escape with nightclub singer Soledad (Ava Gardner), but danger is all around. Meanwhile, the local cathedral has a certain relic which all the locals believe has magical powers that will lead the side in possession of it to victory. So the secular authorities want it to demoralize the faithful. Once they find Arturo, they think they can use him to get it. They'll stop at nothing, including using a bunch of prisoners as cannon fodder.
On Tuesday in prime time, TCM is honoring Denzel Washington, as he's been honored with AFI's Lifetime Achievement Award. The AFI presentation will be running at 8:00 PM Tuesday, with a repeat at 11:45 PM for those of you out on the west coast. In between there's one movie, Glory at 9:30 PM, and after the second showing two more movies. Unfortunately A Soldier's Story is not among the movies running on Tuesday night.
Another relatively recent movie that's on this week is Mad Dog and Glory. You'll be able to see it at 4:48 PM Wednesday on Starz Comedy. Robert De Niro plays the "Mad Dog", although it's an ironic nickname. His Wayne is a crime scene photographer who is notoriously timid. That reputation changes, however, when he fortuitously winds up at a convenience store robbery, where he's able to save the life of Milo (Bill Murray). Police are supposed to save people from criminals, but the problem is that Milo is a gangster himself, and the police shouldn't be associated with such people. Milo is grateful, and offers Wayne the services of Glory (Uma Thurman), who works at a club Milo owns, for one week. Glory is only working for Milo because she needs to get out of debt, and as she spends time with Wayne, she begins to fall in love with him. She'd like to stay with Wayne after the week, but Milo has no intention of giving Glory up without her paying off her debts. Wayne, for his part, doesn't want to be associated with gangsters.
A World War I movie that I don't think I've mentioned here before is Captured!, which you will be able to see at 1:45 AM Thursday on TCM. Leslie Howard plays Fred Allison, captain of a British flight squadron that gets captured by the British, so they wind up in a POW camp. Just before going off to fight in the war, Capt. Allison married his girlfriend Monica (Margaret Lindsay). He still lusts after her, but because of being in a POW camp, the letters have stopped coming. And then another batch of prisoners is brought to the camp, this one including Lt. Digby (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who is an old friend of Fred's. Fred hopes that Digby will be able to bring him some news of Monica, since Digby knew her and knows just how much Fred still loves her. Digby doesn't want to talk about her, the problem being that Monica realized after Fred went off that she didn't really love him, but Digby instead. Isn't that little fact going to complicate things when the men try to escape as they're duty-bound to do?
I've got multiple movies from the 1980s to mention this week. One of them is The Presidio, which is going to be on at 7:21 PM Thursday. On the Presidio military base in San Francisco, a female MP is investigating what looks like a possible break-in and in doing so gets shot and killed. The perpetrators flee the scene, heading off base into San Francisco where they cause a police chase that results in a crash killing one of the civilian police officers. So we have a case with dual jurisdiction, and that's where things get complicated. The San Francisco detective assigned to the case is Jay Austin (Mark Harmon). He was in the military earlier in his life and served at the Presidio, so he actually knew the MP whose murder he's now investigating. Worse, his commanding officer at the time, Lt. Col. Caldwell (Sean Connery) is still the head of the MPs at the base, and the two of them didn't get along, which is part of what led to Austin leaving the military. Austin may also know the chief suspect in the case. Finally, for no good cinematic reason, Caldwell's daughter (Meg Ryan) starts a relationship with Austin.
The horror movies continue on TCM on Thursday night, and one that I've always found really interesting is The Seventh Victim, which airs at 10:45 PM Thursday. A young Kim Hunter plays Mary Gibson, a student at a girls' school whose parents have died and whose tuition is being paid by her older sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). However, Jacqueline has gone missing and hasn't paid Mary's school fees in six months, so Mary has to leave for the city to try to find her sister. She discovers that Jacqueline sold her profitable beauty salon, and that she had a boyfriend in lawyer Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont, later of Leave It to Beaver). Further investigation leads to a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway); Mary and Gregory get the distinct feeling that he's got something to hide. They keep digging and learn that Jacqueline may have joined a cult called the Palladists, and that this cult may be putting her life in danger. The Seventh Victim is one of producer Val Lewton's horror movies for RKO's B unit, which depended heavily on the viewers being able to use their intelligence to imagine the unshown horror, rather than relying on monsters and gore. The movies work better for this.
If you liked Edna Ferber's sprawling Cimarron, then you'll like the equally sprawling movie made from another of her works, Giant. TCM is showing it at 4:30 PM Friday. Rock Hudson plays Texas rancher Bick Benedict, who goes east with his sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge) to buy a horse, but returns with much more: a wife named Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). In Texas they become more successful, eventually having several kids who grow up to be a young Dennis Hopper and Carroll Baker among others. A constant thorn in their side, however, is Jett Rink (James Dean). He was a cow-hand for Luz, and when she dies she bequeaths some of her land to him. He's always been resentful of not being in Bick's social class, and has also held a spot in his heart for Leslie. So instead of selling the land he inherited from Luz back to Bick, he decides to prospect for oil, eventually striking it big in one of the movie's more memorable sequences. Hudson got his only Oscar nomination for this film, losing to Yul Brynner in The King and I.
A movie that's only 25 years old is The Last Seduction, which will be on 5Star Max at 2:55 AM Saturday. Linda Fiorentino plays Bridget Gregory, a beautiful but nasty woman who should have it all, being married to successful doctor Clay (Bill Pullman). However, she doesn't like him, and decides to punish him by convincing him to sell some of the cocaine used for medicinal purposes in his practice. Clay is apparently so mesmerized by pussy that he goes along with this (has this guy never watched a noir movie?), and sure enough after selling to the drug dealers, he finds that his wife has gone and absconded with the money. She's headed to a small town, where she meets the unsophisticated Mike Swale (Peter Berg), whom she sees as the perfect mark for her next scheme. Clay, meanwhile, is trying to get that money back, sending detectives to find Bridget. Bridget with her next scheme thinks perhaps she's come up with a way to get rid of Clay once and for all.
The other 80s movie is actually showing up over on TCM, which doesn't just run antique movies. That 80s film is The First Deadly Sin, which TCM is running at 6:00 PM Saturday. Frank Sinatra plays Edward X. Delaney, a New York police detective nearing retirement who has to deal with terminally ill wife Barbara (Faye Dunaway) as well as some pressing professional problems. It seems as though there's a serial killer on the loose in New York (remember those? Somehow they went away after Columbine-style mass shooting became the thing to do to gain notoriety.) who kills his victims in a particularly gruesome way, with an ice-axe. We already see who the killer is, so there's not much mystery, while Delaney has to deal with the Hollywood trope of a new boss (Anthony Zerbe) who clashes with Delaney at every turn. This was based on a novel by Lawrence Sanders which spawned three more books although even Sanders didn't get to the seventh deadly sin. There wasn't a movie sequel and this would be the last starring role for Sinatra. In fact, the Edward Delaney character was introduced by Sanders in a much earlier book turned into a movie, The Anderson Tapes.