Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of September 12-18, 2016. While we're waiting for the Packers to go to the Giant Stapler and beat the crap out of the Vikings, why not enjoy some good movies? There's more slapstick comedy, and more from Star of the Month Gene Hackman, as well as other stuff. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start this week with a lesser-known Tony Randall movie: Island of Love, at 6:00 PM Monday. Robert Preston, fresh off The Music Man, is the star here. He plays Steve, a World War II veteran on the run from a mobster (Walter Matthau). It turns out that mobster wanted to make his girlfriend (Betty Bruce) a movie star. Steve was hired and failed, bilking a substantial sum of the boss' money in the process. So Steve is off to one of the Greek islands he was stationed on during the War. It's on the way there he meets Paul (Tony Randall). Paul is a screenwriter, and Steve gets the idea to make a movie on the island, and cast the mobster's girlfriend. This was filmed on location on the Greek island of Hydra before Greek island tourism became a big thing; one gets the impression that the producers had some money they had made in Greece that they couldn't get out, and so had to spend it making a movie or something.
The AFI recently honored film score composer John Williams. So, TCM is spendning an evening with the movies for which he composed scores, as well as showing the AFI tribute at 8:00 PM. One of Williams' most memorable scores is Jaws (9:15 PM); TCM doesn't have the rights to show Star Wars. I'd like to recommend a different movie, however: The Sugarland Express, at 12:30 AM Tuesday. Goldie Hawn plays Lou Jean, who at the start of the movie is seen taking a bus to a prison in Texas, where she's going to visit her husband Clovis (William Atherton). However, Lou Jean has ulterior motives. She wants to break her husband out of prison. It turns out that Lou Jean was an accomplice in her husband's crime, with the result that their infant child was put in foster care. Even though Lou Jean is out of prison and working, the state is planning on letting the foster parents adopt the child. And Lou Jean is not about to let that happen. So she and Clovis try to get to the child. They run into a policeman along the way (Michael Sacks) and carjack him, forcing him to take them in his police car to where the kid lives.
TCM's spotlight on slapstick contines on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Laurel and Hardy (The Music Box, 10:15 PM Tuesday) and Abbott and Costello (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 9:30 PM Wednesday) are well-remembered comedy teams. Not so well remembered are Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. They made a string of movies at RKO in the 30s until Woolsey (the one with the glasses) died. The movie of theirs that TCM is showing is Hips, Hips, Hooray, at 12:45 AM Wednesday. In this one, the two men play lipstick salesman, selling flavored lipsticks. Their success gets them a job with Miss Frisby's (Thelma Todd) company, where Wheeler tries to help Daisy (Dorothy Lee, who once again winds up being Bert's love interest). However, the two men pick up the wrong bag, leading to the belief that they're actually trying to steal bonds. As they try to get away from the police, they mistakenly wind up entering a transcontinental auto race. The opening has a song sung by Ruth Etting, who would be the subject of the Doris Day/James Cagney film Love Me Or Leave Me 20 years later.
I'm pleased to see that The Day Mars Invaded Earth is back on the FXM Retro schedule, at 4:45 AM Wednesday. Kent Taylor plays Dr. Fielding, a NASA scientist working on the first probe to Mars. However, the probe goes wrong, burning up shortly after landing on the red planet. We can tell that there's something more that's gone wrong, thanks to the bad special effects showing looking at Dr. Fielding's face through shimmering, oppressive heat. Fielding returns to his family out in California, and soon he, his wife (Marie Windsor) and children start to get the impression something is not what it seems, seeing family remembers who aren't where they should be and then denying they were ever where the other one says they were. Things get particularly bad when the daughter sees an exact likeness of her in her bedroom! So what exactly is going on? Well, you'll have to watch until the end. This is the sort of zero-budget thing Fox was distributing a lot in the early 60s to deal with the massive cost overruns of the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra, but this is one that actually works pretty well.
If you like relatively recent movies, you could do worse than to watch Throw Momma From the Train, at 12:35 AM Thursday on StarzEncore Classics. Billy Crystal plays Larry, a writing teacher who is frustrated because he hasn't had success and, in fact, has had his idea stolen by his ex (Kate Mulgrew). His students are universally terrible writers, especially Owen (Danny DeVito). Owen lives with an overbearing mother (Anne Ramsey). One day he sees Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, and comes up with a brilliant idea: Owen will deal with Larry's ex, and Larry will deal with Owen's mother, a criss-cross just like in the Hitchcock movie. Needless to say, Larry is horrified. But Owen's mom is just so bad that perhaps the world would be better off without her? Everybody in the movie is good, but Anne Ramsey as the mother from hell is great, and she earned an Oscar nomination for it.
Since football season has started up again, why not mention a movie starring football star Jim Brown? This time, it's ...tick...tick...tick…, at 1:15 AM Friday on TCM. Brown plays Jimmy Price, a black man who's gotten himself elected sheriff of a southern county because the blacks were united and presumably the whites weren't, or were actually in the minority all along. He of course has to deal with racism, in the form of ex-Deputy Springer (Don Stroud) and an establishment that doesn't want a black man as sheriff. But at least he's got an ex-sheriff (George Kennedy) who has a sense of honesty, and a mayor (Frederic March) who just wants to keep the federal authorities from investigating. Matters hit a head when there's a hit-and-run accident, and Sheriff Price arrests the son of a very wealthy man for the crime. Of course, Daddy doesn't think his son could possibly be guilty, and he's going to do whatever it takes to get his son out of jail.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns, one that I think I haven't recommended before is The Hangman, at 10:50 AM Friday. Robert Taylor plays the titular character, a US Marshal named Bovard who has come to a town looking for the fourth man involved in a bank robbery. Somebody was killed in that robbery, so it's the death penalty for all, and the other three guys have already been caught. Anyhow, in town, she meets the widow Celia (Tina Louise, several years before she became Ginger), who it seems knows more than she's letting on. Marshal Bovard and the local Sheriff Weston (Fess Parker) both develop a relationship with Celia, while everybody else in town seems more concerned with protecting the fourth guy (Jack Lord, later Detective McGarrett on Hawaii Five-O), since he's such a nice guy and he may have been duped into the robbery anyway.
A movie you probably all know is airing again this week: the 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate, at 3:30 PM Sunday on StarzEncore Classics. (At least, that's what the listings say; the dreadful 2004 remake is airing several times this week on The Movie Channel.) Laurence Harvey plays Korean War hero Raymond Shaw, who returns home to an unhappy family. Mom (Angela Lansbury) has remarried a blowhard of a senator (James Gregory). Meanwhile, Raymond and everybody else in his unit is having terrible nightmares about what happened in Korea, something that involves the Communists and a garden club show. Raymond's commanding officer, Maj. Marco (Frank Sinatra), eventually comes to believe that everybody in the unit was brainwashed by the Communists, and that Raymond is being used for, well, what? Janet Leigh also stars as a woman Marco meets on the train and who takes a liking to him, although what's going on with her is a mystery.
Friday brings another night of Gene Hackman movies to TCM. One that I don't think I've mentioned before is A Covenant With Death, at 8:00 PM. This one only sees Hackman in a small role as a policeman. The star is George Maharis, who plays Judge Ben Lewis, a Mexican-American in 1920s New Mexico. He's young for a judge, and isn't sure of himself as a result. And he has to preside over a difficult case. Brian Talbot (Earl Holliman) was convicted of killing his wife, and is sentenced to hang as a result. To try to get out of the hanging, he tries to kill his hangman and escapes. Well, that's open and shut. But there's a bigger problem. As all of this is happening, another man is confessing to having murdered Mrs. Talbot. So you have an otherwise innocent man trying to get out of his execution and killing somebody along the way. What to do?
Overnight between Saturday and Sunday there's TCM Underground once again. A movie showing up this week is one that's as cheesy as it's title: Dracula's Dog, at 2:00 AM Sunday. Soviet soldiers in Romania dig up some graves, and in one they find a man and a dog with stakes through their hearts. So, they rather stupidly pull the stakes out, and it results in the two coming back to life! The man was Veidt (Reggie Nalder), one of Dracula's servants, and the dog had been bitten by Dracula. But, to stay alive, the two need a master. They discover that Dracula's last living descendant is a doctor living in Los Angeles, so the two make the trek to America to find the doctor (Michael Pataki) and turn him into a vampire so that they can serve him. Jose Ferrer takes a big step down from his Oscar-winning days as a police inspector following the two vampires from Romania to try to catch them. At least the dog does a halfway decent job.