Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of September 10-16, 2018. The real Packer games finally return, and after the Packers beat the crap out of Chicago, why not unwind with some good movies? Once again, I've used my erudition to select a slate of movies I know you'll all find interesting. We've got the TCM Guest Programmer this month, more Dean Martin movies, the Black Experience in Film series on Tuesday and Thursday, and interesting stuff on other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
After a break for Summer Under the Stars, we get back to the Guest Programmers on TCM. This month, it's actor Keith Carradine, who has appeared in a bunch of movies going back to the 1970s. He sat down with Ben Mankiewicz to select four of his favorites, and those selections will air Monday in prime time:
Captains Courageous at 8:00 PM, in which Freddie Bartholomew gets rescued in the middle of the Atlantic by a fishing boat and learns from Spencer Tracy how to be a man;
Random Harvest at 10:15 PM, a screaming chick flick for Goldie in which Greer Garson falls in love with amnesiac Ronald Colman, who then develops a second case of amnesia and has to fall in love with Garson all over again;
Performance at 12:30 AM Tuesday, starring Mick Jagger as a rock star who winds up sheltering gangster James Fox; and
Thieves Like Us at 2:30 AM, one of Carradine's own movies.
A movie with a plot that will seem familiar to you is Living on Love, airing on TCM at 11:30 AM Tuesday. Whitney Bourne plays Mary, a midwestern girl living in New York and not very successfully. She's fallen behind on her rent, to the point that her landlord basically gives her an ultimatum: she's going to have to share her apartment. That's bad enough, but she's going to have to share it with a guy, Gary (James Dunn), who is also having trouble making rent. You see, Gary works as a night watchman, so he'll sleep there by day and she will by night. (What happens on the weekends?) Unsurprisingly, neither of them likes the way the other leaves the apartment, so they each start playing elaborate practical jokes on their unseen roommate. But they do wind up meeting on the outside, neither realizing who the other is. Now wouldn't you know it, but when they meet, they fall in love. So you can only imagine what's going to happen when they find out they've fallen in love with the roommate they hate. This is a remake of the much better Rafter Romance.
A quick search of the site shows that it's been just over three years since I last recommended Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and now is a good time to mention it again since it's back on FXM Retro. You can catch it there at 10:05 AM Wednesday. Tony Randall plays Rockwell Hunter, the low guy at an ad agency who is in danger of losing his job if the agency loses its biggest client, Stay-Put Lipstick. This would also put the kibosh on his marrying his girlfriend Jenny (Betsy Drake). But Rockwell's niece Angel is a fan of the actress Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield), and when the Marlowe fan club learns of her coming to town, Rockwell decides he's going to see if she'll endorse Stay-Put. She eentually decides yes, but she has an interesting price: Rockwell has to pretend to be her boyfriend, because she's having difficulties with her current boyfriend Bobo (Mickey Hargitay), and she wants to make him jealous. This phony relationship causes an international sensation, and when Marlowe starts taking things much further than Rockwell expected, it threatens to throw his life into even more chaos.
I think I recommended Without Reservations before, but it's been quite some time. It's going to be on TCM at 10:00 AM Thursday. Claudette Colbert plays Christopher "Kit" Madden, a woman who has written a best-selling novel that was optioned to be a Hollywood movie. So she's traveling to LA by train. While on the train, she meets a pair of Marines who shave recently been demobbed after the end of World War II: Rusty (John Wayne) and Dink (Don Dr Fore). Part of why Kit is on her way to Hollywood is because Cary Grant (who has a cameo) has pulled out of the movie. When Kit gets to know Rusty, she realizes that he's exactly the type that she was writing about in her book. But there's a catch: Rusty has read the book, and he hates it, thinking the writer's political views are nuts. Rusty, for his part, doesn't realize that he's been on a train with the author of that book. As they go across country, they begin to fall in love with each other, but what will happen when Rusty learns the truth?
Speaking of John Wayne, you've got another chance to see him this week in Rooster Cogburn, which will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 12:11 PM Wednesday. You'll recall the character of Rooster Clyburn from True Grit, and that movie was so popular that this sequel was made. This time, Marshal Cogburn is after the outlaw Hawk (Richard Jordan), who has stolen some nitroglycerin which he intends to use in a bank robbery. The trail takes Cogburn to an Indian settlement, where the missionary Goodfellow (John Lormer) is trying to convert the Indians, with help of his daughter Eula (Katharine Hepburn). But Hawk has already been through there and killed Rev. Goodfellow along with some of the Indians. Whoa, who survived, wants the killers brought to justice, and is not going to let Cogburn stop her from going along to find the killers, along with an Indian boy. Despite their political differences, Hepburn and Wayne really enjoyed working with each other.
You'll recall that playwright Neil Simon died at the end of August at the age of 91. TCM obviously couldn't do a tribute during Summer Under the Stars, so the tribute had to weait until September, and is coming up this Friday in prime time. Thanks to TCM Underground, it's only going to be half of the evening lineup, consisting of three movies:
The Odd Couple at 8:00 PM, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as Felix Unger and Oscar Madison respectively (note that Carole Shelley, who plays Gwendolyn Pigeon, also died at the end of August);
The Goodbye Girl, which won Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar as the actor who winds up rooming with single mother Marsha Mason, at 10:00 PM; and
Lost in Yonkers at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT).
The movie I'd like to have seen in the tribute is Barefoot in the Park, but the TV rights to that are apparently held by Starz/Encore, since it's going to show up on StarzEncore this Saturday at 12:59 PM (and again three hours later for those who only have the west coast feed). Connie (Jane Fonda) is a free spirit who has just gotten married to conservative lawyer Paul (Robert Redford). They've gotten their first apartment together, a fifth-story walkup near Washington Square Park in Manhattan, and Paul doesn't particularly like it both for its physical problems and because of all the wacky neighbors, notably dirty old man Victor Velasco (Charles Boyer). Connie, meanwhile, tries to hook Victor up with her mother Ethel (Midlred Natwick). Can either of the two relationships survive?
Speaking of TCM Underground, this week's pair is Breakin' at 2:15 AM Saturday, followed by Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo at 4:00 AM. In the original Breakin', Lucinda Dickey plays Kelly, a dancer trained in jazz who goes out west to Hollywood. One day, she sees the street act of Shabba Doo and Boogaloo Shrimp who are engaging in a form of dance completely unknown to her, break dancing. She, as happens to a surprising number of artists, is intrigued by a form of art completely alien to her, and she actually takes it seriously and thinks it might have some classical potential. Everybody around her isn't certain she's doing what's best since these seem to be aimless people. The movie was enough of a success that a sequel was made. Shabba Doo would go on several years later to star in Lambada if anybody remembers that dance craze. Ice-T has a small role, and in one of the early dance sequences, there's an uncredited appearance by Jean-Claude Van Damme. 
Moving forward to Saturday night, we get a pair of movies about contagions on TCM. I believe the first is a TCM premiere: Panic in the Streets at 8:00 PM. Richard Widmark plays a doctor for the Public Health Service who is given the task of investigating a suspected case of pneumonia plague in a man who's recently entered the country at the port of New Orleans. The disease is highly contagious, so it's important to find all the people this man came in contact with. The problem is that he was in cahoots with gangster Jack Palance, who obviously doesn't want to be found.
There's a similar theme in The Killer That Stalked New York, at 10:00 PM Saturday. This time, the disease is smallpox, and the carrier is a woman (Evelyn Keyes) smuggling diamonds in from Cuba. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is carrying on an affair with her sister. This one is based on a true story.
For those of you who like more recent movies, we've got one from this century on this week: Gosford Park, at 7:40 M Thursday on Starz Cinema (not the regular Starz; this is Channel 531 on DirecTV and check your guide for your provider). William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and his wife Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) are a wealthy couple with a nice country estate in 1932 Britain, hosting a weekend hunting party for a whole bunch of people, including a Countess (Maggie Smith), actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), and others. But then William is found dead, stabbed in the back. He had a lot of enemies, so almost anybody could have done it. Not just his guests, but many of the servants have good reasons for wanting McCordle dead. The movie however, is only tangentially about the murder mystery, and really more about the relationships between the various people at the house what with Britain's much more stratified class system of the 1930s. Watch for Alan Bates as one of the "downstairs" people, and a younger Helen Mirren among the cast.
Finally, I'll mention a film I don't think I've recommended before, Hard to Get at 6:00 AM Sunday on TCM. Dick Powell plays Bill, a manager at an "auto court" (think the auto camp in It Happened One Night with a full service station attached). One day, wealthy Margaret (Olivia De Havilland) comes driving up to get some gas, $3.48 worth which was a much bigger deal back in the 1930s. Although she's wealthy, she doesn't carry cash and can only get a check (people still use such barbaric technology?) to Bill tomorrow. Bill obviously isn't about to be conned, so he makes Margaret work the debt off cleaning out the bungalows! Bill, for his part, has an idea of taking the auto court idea nationwide, but he doesn't have the capital necessary. Margaret has a wealthy father (Charles Winninger) who could finance the scheme, but she wants to humiliate Bill so she comes up with a plan to get Bill to introduce himself to Dad in such a way that Dad will hate him. Things don't quite work out that way. Dick Powell gets to croon "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby".