Welcome to another "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of October 8-14, 2018. By the middle of the week, you're all going to be either depressed that the baseball team lost, or in nervous anticipation of the next series. Either way, why not deal with it by watching some good movies? Once again, I've used my good taste to pick out a bunch of movies I know you'll all find interesting. There's more from Star of the Month Rita Hayworth, some stuff appropriate for Halloween, and a lot more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
A movie that's coming back to FXM Retro after a long absence is Goodbye Charlie, which will be on at 6:00 AM Monday. Charlie is a ladies' man who goes after every pretty woman he sees, which is a problem when he does it on Hollywood producer Sartori's (Walter Matthau) yacht with Mrs. Sartori. The enraged producer shoots Charlie as he's jumping off the yacht; the body is never found. While Charlie's best friend George (Tony Curtis) is dealing with the estate, somebody found a woman with amnesia (Debbie Reynolds) who, it turns out, seems to know an awful lot about Charlie. It turns out that the woman, christened Virginia, is actually Charlie brought back to life as a woman! Charlie was heavily in debt, so as a woman he decides the best way to make that money is to use womanly charms on the people who wronged him in life, most notably Sartori, who shouldn't have been throwing stones at Charlie since he's a womanizer himself.
The Tuesday morning and afternoon lineup on TCM is a bunch of documentaries, although the first movie really isn't a documentary: Resisting Enemy Interrogation, at 6:00 AM Tuesday. This one is actually a training film, made by the Army Air Force's Motion Picture Unit during World War II, and using several Hollywood stars whose names you might recognize to tell a story designed to give flyboys a vital lesson. In this film, a bomber with a crew of five gets showt down over Italy, and the crew are taken to a POW camp. Instead of the sort of torture you'd see in a propaganda film designed for domestic consumption, the Nazis here (Carl Esmond, and American turncoat Kent Smith, among others) figure out what makes each of the men tick, and use that to get the Americans to inadvertently reveal various little bits of information that the Nazis can piece together to get a fuller picture of what the Americans are going to do. In some ways, it's chilling watching what these Nazis are capable of doing. Arthur Kennedy plays one of the crew, and Lloyd Nolan plays a debriefing officer providing the film's narration.
For those of you who want something relatively recent, HBO2 will be running Mickey Blue Eyes at 2:15 PM Tuesday (I think they also have a west coast feed which would have it three hours later). Hugh Grant plays Michael Felgate, who works at an art auction house in New York and has fallen in love with teacher Gina Vitale (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He wants to marry her, but she's not so certain, because of her family connections. But they do get married, despite Michael learning just what those connections entail. Gina's father Frank (James Caan) is a mid-level mobster in the Graziosi (Burt Young) crime syndicate, and of course the fear is that once Michael marries into the Mob, the Mob will try to get its hooks into him. As you can probably guess, the Mob learns that they can use an auction house as a convenient place to launder money, by having lesser family members paint “art” and auction it off for people who owe debts to the Mob to buy. Things don't quite go according to plan, and Michael finds himself deeper into the Mob world than he ever would have thought.
On Tuesday night we get another night of Rita Hayworth movies, including one I don't think I've mentioned before, Tonight and Every Night, at 1:45 AM Wednesday. In the later stages of World War II, a photographer for Life magazine comes to London to do a story on a theater that has the distinction of never having closed down due to the Nazi bombing raids. Well,except for when the government ordered them closed; no other theater remained open every night. Hayworth plays Rosalind, one of the principal performers at the theater, and the photographer learns her story which intertwined with that of the theater. Her first romance was with one of the male performers, Tommy (Marc Platt), but then she meets flyboy Paul (Lee Bowman), and falls in love with him, a romance that may or may not last. This is loosely based on an actual underground theater in World War II London, except that the real theater did striptease and burlesque.
It's been a while since I've recommended Broken Lance, which is going to be on StarzEncord Westerns at 12:05 AM Wednesday. Joe Devereaux (Robert Wagner) is the youngest son of wealthy rancher Matt (Spencer Tracy), returning home after a stint in prison. During his time in prison, Dad got old, and Joe's three half-brothers: Ben (Richard Widmark), Denny (Earl Holliman) and Mike (Hugh O'Brian) are more or less running the place. And they don't like Joe for multiple reasons, among them the fact that Dad dotes on him, and that Joe is the son of a different mother, Matt's current wife (Katy Jurado). So the older brothers make Joe an offer he can't refuse, as they say, to leave the ranch and live a good life somewhere else. Of course, they have ulterior motives in that Joe basically took the fall for a crime the other brothers committed. Complicating the fact is that Joe is in love with Barbara (Jean Peters), the daughter of the governor (E.G. Marshall) who is an old friend of Matt, but the governor was never really happy with Matt's having married an Indian. This is a remake, set out west and 60 years earlier, of the interesting Edward G. Robinson movie House of Numbers.
October 31 is on a Wednesday this year, so it only makes sense that TCM is dedicating prime time on Wednesdays in October to Halloween movies. Each Wednesday, they're putting a spotlight on a different actor. This week it's Christopher Lee, who made all of those gothic horror movies over at Britain's Hammer Films from the late 1950s to the early 1970s like Horror of Dracula at 10:00 PM Wednesday.
But also, TCM has a "monster of the month", which is The Mummy. On Sundays in prime time before Silent Sunday Nights, they're showing movies from the original series and other mummy movies, such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy at 8:00 PM Sunday.
This month's TCM Spotlight is on funny ladies, airing every Thursday night in October. Illeana Douglas (granddaughter of Melvyn Douglas) is hosting, along with comedy legend Carol Burnett. Last week saw several movies from the 1930s, and this week moves on to the 1940s. Among the movies is The More the Merrier, at 2:00 AM Friday. Charles Coburn won an Oscar playing Benjamin Dingle, a "dollar a year" man in World War II going to Washington to do a business deal with the government. But with the war on, all of the hotels are booked solid. He finds that Connie Milligan is subletting half of a large apartment, so he shoehorns his way to the front of the line. The only thing is, Connie is a woman (Jean Arthur), and engaged to bigwig undersecretary Pendergast (Richard Gaines). Then Dingle meets military man Joe Carter (Joel McCrea), in town on a secret mission and in need of a place to stay. So Dingle sublets half of his half of the apartment to Joe, and even plays matchmaker for Joe and Connie despite the fact that she's engaged.
For those of you who like baseball, you may enjoy The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, which will be on StarzEncore Family at 2:15 AM and 8:44 AM Friday. After the success of the first two movies in the franchise, especially in Japan where baseball is as popular as it is in America, a third movie was put in production. In this one, the manager of the best little league team in Japan says that he would love to have an American team come over and play them. Small-time con artist Marvin (Tony Curtis) sees this as an opportunity: if he can get a team over to Japan, he can sell the American rights to the games and make a big profit and get out of debt. So he approaches the Bad News Bears and tells them he's already got a contract in place when he doesn't, and takes the kids off to Japan. While Marvin is trying to get a contract in place, the kids have various culture-clash adventures of the sort you'd expect from a low-budget sequel that's desperate for ideas.
TCM is running Barnacle Bill at 2:15 PM Friday. Wallace Berry stars as Bill, a fisherman on the California coast who spends what little money he earns on booze and fast women, although there's on older woman running the rooming house he lives in named Marge (Marjorie Main), who would be right for him if he were ever going to get married. However, he may just have to grow up and take some responsibility when Virginia (Virginia Weidler) shows up. She's the daughter he hasn't seen in years, who clearly needs parental guidance, but who knows if she'll get it from Bill. Meanwhile, he's got other problems, in that the fish wholesaler has been cheating him and the other fishermen out of an honest price for their fish. That, and there are people who want to repossess Bill's boat since he's so heavily in debt. This is the sort of movie where Marie Dressler would have been in the Marjorie Main part, except that she died several years earlier.
Halloween is this month, so a lot of cable channels are showing horror stuff that fits in well with the holiday. One of the tropes that's become popular in the last half century is the zombie flick, which takes a truly bizarre turn in Lifeforce, which will be on StarzEncore Classics as 1:49 AM Saturday. Halley's Comet is nearing another perigee, so mankind is sending out a manned mission to explore it. Whta the mission, led by Col. Carlsen (Steve Railsbeck) finds is shocking: a bunch of bat-like creatures, and what appear to be three dead humans. But Earth loses contact with the shuttle, and sends another shuttle to discover what happens. They find the first shuttle in bad shape with Carlsen the only survivor of whatever happened, the other crew members having been sucked dry. Of course, they're also nuts enough to bring the three dead humans that were found on the comet back to earth. It turns out that they're some sort of zombie-like creature that survives by sucking the lifeforce (hence the title) out of humans, and now they're trying to take over all of Britain as a prelude to taking over the entire world!
Here at x4 we have Grave Digger; this week TCM has The Night Digger (aka The Road Builder) at 6:15 PM Saturday. Patricia Neal plays Maura, a woman living in one of those aging manor houses in England together with her elderly mother. It's one of those places that's tough to keep up even if you don't have an elderly mother to look after, and making it even more difficult is the fact that Maura is recovering from a stroke (as Patricia Neal herself had suffered some years earlier). But things may begin to look up for Maura when highway construction comes to their neck of the woods. Among the crew is Billy (Nicholas Clay), one of the road builders (hence the UK title), and he starts making a little extra money on the side by helping Maura out with the maintenance. He also gives Maura and her mom reason to believe that he might be a distant cousin from the northwest of England, although that might also be a ruse to get at the manor house. But then there's a murder in the area, and it follows the pattern of several other murders that oh so conveniently occurred near towns where the highway Billy's crew is building went through, so Billy becomes an obvious suspect.
