Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of September 14-20, 2020. After the Packers beat the everloving sh!t out of the Minnesota Football Team today, why not watch some good movies to come down off of that high? There's a lot of interesting stuff, including a night of shorts on TCM on Monday in prime time; some time travel fantasies on Wednesday in prime time; and a couple of 1980s movies for people who like more recent stuff. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
For those of you who like pre-Code movies, one that doesn't get too many airings is on this week: Union Depot, at 7:15 AM Monday on TCM. Chick (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and Scrap Iron (Guy Kibbee) are a pair of hobos who wind up at a train station to try to get out of town. In the bathroom, Chick finds a bag with a man's suit that just happens to fit him and has a wad of money in one of the pockets. There, he meets Ruth (Joan Blondell) and thinks she's a prostitute, although she's really an honest chorus girl in need of fare for a ticket to a job out west. Meanwhile, a man named Bushy (Alan Hale) with a violin case full of counterfeit money shows up at the station, as does a man Ruth claims is following her. All of their stories intertwine along with some Secret Service agents who are tracking Bushy without knowing who he (or possibly she) is. With the multiple story lines, it's always lively as it jumps from one plot line to another.
A fairly popular subject for historical dramas is the HMS Bounty and the mutiny that took place aboard the ship. One movie version I don't think I've mentioned so much is the 1984 movie The Bounty, which will be on Epix at 12:50 AM Tuesday. Anthony Hopkins plays Capt. Bligh, who recruits Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) to be Master's Mate to John Fryer (Daniel Day-Lewis), with a mission of bringing breadfruit trees from Tahiti to Jamaica. Discipline was tough in those days, especially considering how many of the men were impressed into service. Bligh is forced to confine men to the ship in Tahiti when a couple of sailors desert, having seem women for the first time in months, and that's what eventually leads to the mutiny with Christian leading a bunch of men and their Polynesian girlfriends to Pitcairn Island. Bligh was able to make it back to Britain, where he stood court-martial, and this movie uses that as the framing device, which obviously gives more weight to Bligh's testimony since Christian wasn't around to give testimony.
We've got several 1930s movies this week on TCM, including Star of Midnight at 12:15 PM Tuesday. William Powell plays Clay Dalzell, a New York attorney with a woman pursuing him in the form of Donna Mantin (Ginger Rоgers). One night out in Chicago, a young man's girlfriend disappears and he believes she's gone to New York, so he eventually shows up to ask Clay to help him find the girl who, it turns out, has made it on the stage in a play that requires her to wear a mask – she's clearly got reasons for not wanting to be discovered. People who may know something include gossip columnist Tommy Tennant, but when he shows up at Dalzell's apartment to discuss it, somebody shoots him and tries to kill Clay. Clay is stupid enough to leave his prints all over the gun, so the police naturally suspect him, and in true Thin Man style (all the studios wanted to copy the successful formula of The Thin Man), Clay and Mantin try to solve the case to save Clay's hide. Powell and Rоgers work well together, but the supporting cast isn't as good as in the Thin Man movies.
This week's movie that showed up on the FXM schedule a few months back is Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. It's going to be on FXM this week at 6:00 AM Wednesday. Peter Fonda plays Larry, a would-be NASCAR driver who needs money to build a more competitive car. Together with his friend Deke (Adam Roarke), he has a plan that will have them rob a shipment of cash delivered to a supermarket somewhere in northern California. The robbery goes seemingly well, but when Larry gets out of the supermarket, he finds… his girlfriend Mary (Susan George) sitting in the getaway car! (Deke is holding the supermarket manager's wife hostage.) Larry can't really go off on his own because Mary finds the money, so he picks up Deke with Mary in tow, something which displeases Deke to no end. Meanwhile, the cops are in hot pursuit, led by Capt. Franklin (Vic Morrow). Not the greatest, but there's a lot here for vintage car buffs.
At the end of last year, TCM showed the movie Repeat Performance for the first time. It's going to on again this week, at Midnight Thursday (or 11:00 PM Wednesday LFT). Joan Leslie plays Sheila Page, an actress who at the beginning of the movie shoots her husband Barney (Louis Hayward) dead just before midnight on New Year's Eve. She meets her gay poet friend William Williams (Richard Basehart) looking for help, and he takes her to her producer John Friday (Tom Conway) before suddenly disappearing. Her outfit suddenly changes, and John tells her it's New Year's 1946, when it should be New Year's 1947! Apparently Sheila is being given the chance to relive the past year, with her feeling she now has the chance to stop all the bad things that happened over the past year from happening again. But it's not even a couple of hours into the repeat year that things are different from the previous year. Can one influence the future, or are things fated to happen with no way of changing them?
Another popular subject for movies is the Arthurian legend. We have another 1980s movie this week, in the form of Excalibur, which is on StarzEncore Classics at 5:55 PM Wednesday. When Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) dies, he buries the sword Excalibur into a stone with the help of Merlin (Nicol Williamson), with anybody who's able to pull it out being able to claim the right to become king. Well, who would be the one to pull it out but Uther's bastard son Arthur (Nigel Terry)? Not that the knights of what would become the Round Table are thrilled at first, but they relent and Arthur rules from Camelot. Arthur courts Guinevere to form an alliance with her family, while Sir Lancelot (Nicholas Clay), who had loved Guinevere, is forced to leave Camelot so as to remain loyal to Arthur. Not loyal to Arthur is his half-sister Morgana la Fey (Helen Mirren), who comes up with a plot that threatens to destroy Arthur and Camelot.
There have been quite a few well-known movies based on the works of British writer Somerset Maugham. One of the lesser-known movies is The Painted Veil, which TCM is showing at 10:30 AM Friday. Greta Garbo plays Katrin, an Austrian woman who is married off by her father to British medical researcher Walter Fane (Herbert Marshall). He heads to Hong Kong, still a British colony at the time, and Katrin follows him. She finds herself neglected by her husband, who is dedicated to his research. So when she meets British embassy officer Jack Townsend (George Brent), they of course strike up a relationship since Jack treats her nicely. But you just know that Walter is going to find out about it eventually. All of that stuff is going to amount to a hill of beans when there's a cholera epidemic out in the Chinese hinterland, and Dr. Fane goes off to fight it. Katrin follows to try to patch things off with her husband, but it could have tragic consequences for both of them.
Some actors could elevate mediocre material simply by their presence in a movie. One of those is Edward G. Robinson, as we can see in the 1939 movie Blackmail, airing on TCM at 6:30 AM Saturday. Robinson plays John Ingram, who works in the oil industry, fighting oil well fires, a job that he's gotten quite good at, with a wife Helen (Ruth Hussey) and kid Hank (Bobs Watson). However, he's got a past, which is that many years ago he was put on a chain gang, from which he escaped, so he's been a fugitive for quite a few years now. Into Ingram's life comes William Ramey (Gene Lockhart), looking for a job with Ingram's company. William knew Ingram, having been one of the people who helped get Ingram convicted and put on the chain gang in the first place. And now he's claiming to have a proposal to clear Ingram's name, although that's not why William is really here. Instead, he gets Ingram put back on the chain gang, and now all Ingram wants to do is escape and get revenge on Ramey.
A classic western that I don't think I've mentioned in a while is Shane. Shane comes back this week, at 10:32 AM Sunday on StarzEncore Westerns. The Starretts: Dad (Van Heflin), Mom (Jean Arthur), and son Joey (Brandon de Wilde) are one of many settler families homesteading out west in a part of Wyoming that has traditionally been open range for cattlemen like the Rykers. As you probably know from watching a bunch of old westerns, this is a recipe for conflict. Into all this comes Shane (Alan Ladd), a former gunfighter who would like to settle down. He gets a job on the Starrett farm and immediately falls in love with the mother, while young Joey looks up to Shane as a hero. In the coming battle between the homesteaders and the ranchers, Shane just wants there to be peace and doesn't want Joey to grow up to be like him, but he's going to be forced into action when Ryker decides to send away for another gunfighter, Wilson (Jack Palance), to come to the area to try to force the farmers into submission.
We probably shouldn't discuss politics at x4, although that might be a bit difficult to do when you get a good movie like All the King's Men showing on TCM at 6:15 AM Sunday. Reporter Jack Burden (John Ireland) is given the assignment to cover the quixotic campaign for county treasurer in a backwater county of one Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford). Stark loses the campaign in part thanks to intimidation by the local political machine, but when he finds that the money that's supposed to be going to building safe schools is being embezzled, Stark goes into overdrive and starts running a populist campaign for governor, blustering his way into getting the little people who he claims have been oppressed by the moneyed interests for far to long into voting for him. Amazingly, he wins the gubernatorial election with the help of savvy political aide Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge). But power goes to his head, and Willie shows he could be just as corrupt as the machine before him was.