Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of September 17-23, 2018. I know you're all thrilled with the Wisconsin Badgers' performance yesterday, so why not deal with the painful loss by watching some good movies? Once again I've used my discerning taste to select a bunch of movies I know you'll all find interesting. There's more from Star of the Month Dean Martin, more in the Black Experience in Film series, and good stuff on some of the other channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is honoring Roddy McDowall on Monday morning and afternoon. One of his movies that I don't think I've recommended before is The Third Day, at 6:00 AM. George Peppard is the star here, as Steve Mallory, a ladies' man who has just gotten into a car crash with girlfriend Holly (Sally Kellerman). He walks away from the crash, but he's got a bad case of amnesia, and doesn't remember much about his life. It turns out his life is complicated. First, he's got a wife named Alexandria (Elizabeth Ashley), whose father (Herbert Marshall) owned the company and who named Steve the manager in case of incapacitation, which sure enough happened. Dad, meanwhile, has a nephew in Oliver (that's McDowall), who thought that he was going to be the one to get the top job in the family business. And before the crash there was already a lot of conflict about how to modernize the company. There's also Holly's boyfriend (Arte Johnson, later of Laugh-In) who has an obvious grudge against Steve.
With the recent passing of Burt Reynolds, I guess I should mention 100 Rifles, which is going to be on StarzEncore Westerns at 10:28 AM and 9:46 PM Monday. Reynolds plays Joe Herrera, who at the start of the movie has his eye on General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas), a Mexican general in Sonora circa 1912. Lyedecker (Jim Brown) has his eye on Herrera, because Herrera robbed a bank in Arizona and ran off to Mexico; Lyedecker is trying to get the reward money. Herrera, for his part, is planning to use the money he robbed to buy the titular guns for the Yaqui people who are being victimized by Verdugo and his men. Raquel Welch plays Sanita, representative of the Yaqui whose father is killed in the opening scene. Herrera, as it turns out, is half Yaqui himself. Herrera has no plans to go back to America with Lyedecker, and Lyedecker doesn't really get the chance to take Herrera back because Verdugo winds up on their trail. So Lyedecker throws in with the Yaqui more because that way he can keep his eye on Herrera. Dan O'Herlihy plays the head of the railroad who doesn't so much care about what violence is going on between the various groups so long as his trains keep running on time.
The "Black Experience in Film" series continues on Tuesday on TCM with black musicals. Probably the least seen on these movies is New Orleans, which will be on at midnight Wednesday (ie. 11:00 PM Tuesday LFT). Dorothy Patrick plays Miralee Smith, a young woman who moves down south to New Orleans circa 1917 with her mother. She's being trained in classical music, but this being the Big Easy there's a new sound coming. And Miralee's maid Endie is played by Billie Holiday, so when she starts singing you know Miralee is going to fall in love with the new sound. Miralee goes to the club run by Nick (Arturo Dr Cordova), where people like Louis Armstrong play, but Nick eventually goes north to Chicago to make it big, while Miralee's mom takes her away to continue her classical training. Everybody does make it big, but would they be happier if they could all see each other again? All the time you watch this you can't help but wish the real jazz musicians were getting more time to perform and that the framing story would just go away.
The StarzEncore family of channels seem to have the rights to a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock's old movies, as among others they're running Rear Window this week, at 7:52 AM Wedensday on StarzEncore Classics. James Stewart plays Jeff, a photojournalist who broke his leg on an assignment and has been recuperating in his apartment with the help of nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter). He's become bitter over it, which isn't helping his relationship with long-suffering girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), a supermodel in the days before they were called such. With no internet and little to do, Jeff takes his telephoto lens and looks out his apartment windows at the other apartments across the way, and finds something that shocks him: Thorwald (Raymond Burr) and his wife argue, and his subsequent actions lead Jeff to think that Thorwald has actually murdered his wife. Of course, he can't get Stella or Lisa to believe him, and his policeman friend Lt. Doyle (Wendell Corey) isn't much help either. So Jeff keeps looking, and looking....
Wednesday night on TCM brings another night of Dean Martin movies, this time looking at the movies he made as part of the Rat Pack; or, more specifically, several movies with Frank Sinatra. Of course you know Ocean's Eleven, at 8:00 Wednesday, so I'll recommend something lesser known, 4 for Texas at 12:30 AM Thursday. This one is a comic western, starting off with Joe Jarrett (Martin) and Zack Thomas (Sinatra) on a stagecoach in 1870s Texas together. The coach gets held up by Matson (Charles Bronson), but the two men fight off Matson and his gang. It turns out that the coach is carrying $100,000 for the railroad, so of course Jarrett and Thomas would like to get their hands on that money. Jarrett does, and plans to open a floating casino in Galveston, but he has to deal with the people running the town, notably corrupt banker Burden (Victor Buono), with Zack working for Burden not realizing his corruption. Anita Ekberg is there as Zack's eye candy, while Ursula Andress is Jarrett's girlfriend.
The Black Experience in Film spotlight continues on Thursday night with an evening of "strong black women", starting at 8:00 PM with Claudine. Diahann Carroll plays the title character, a single mother in 1970s Harlem who has six kids and is raising them on welfare while taking under-the-table jobs as a maid on the side. One day in front of her how's house she meets Roop (James Earl Jones), who is a sanitation worker on the back of the garbage truck. The two start a relationship that progresses pretty quickly into sex, but there's the problem that if they go too far together, the welfare case officer could take away the bulk of Claudine's benefits. There's also Claudine's eldest son Charles (Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs), who's becoming a man, wi6h the concomitant rebellion and radical 70s behavior that might not be the best thing. Eldest daughter Charlene is also growing up too fast....
It may be hard to believe, but next February will mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. The movie is going to be on Showtime 2 at 11:15 AM Friday. Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are a couple of slacker teens in high school in a Los Angeles suburb who are in danger of flunking out of high school if they can't ace their history paper, which would also mean an end to their friendship since Ted's dad is threatening to send him to military school. But they're in luck when Rufus (George Carlin) suddenly drops in, claiming to be a time traveler from the future and that the history of the world depends upon Bill and Ted doing well on this paper. So Bill and Ted go back in time and pick up a bunch of famous historical figures (an evergreen idea for sketch comedy) like Joan of Ark, Sigmund Freud, and Genghis Khan and much to their surprise bring them back to modern-day Los Angeles. But getting them to the school on time might be a problem.
The last time a thread devolved into a discussion of great movies, somebody mentioned 5 Fingers. It's going to be on FXM Retro this week, at 1:10 PM Saturday. Supposedly based on a true story, this tells the tale of Albanian-born Ulysses Diello (James Mason), valet to the British ambassador to neutral Turkey in World War II. He wants a better position in life, as does Countess Anna (Danielle Darrieux), who's waiting out the war in Ankara in relatively impoverished circumstances. Aiello comes up with the idea that, since he can get access to the ambassador's papers, he'll sell secrets to the Germans, with Anna as a go-between, for a substantial sum of money for both of them, in the hope that after the war he can retire to South America, hopefully with her. Anna, for her part, resents being stuck with such a low-born man. And British intelligence, in the form of Travers (Michael Rennie) is on the case. And the Nazis sure don't want to be double-crossed either.
I haven't mentioned Running on Empty in a while, and that one is going to be on TCM at 5:45 PM Saturday. River Phoenix plays Danny Pope, teenage son in a family with younger brother Harry, and parents Arthur (Judd Hirsch) and Annie (Christine Lahti). One day on the way home from school, he sees a couple of black sedans getting close to the house, which he knows means one thing -- the feds are on his parents' trail again. Many years earlier, when Danny was just a baby, his parents bombed a military research facility, accidentally killing a janitor; the whole family has been on the run ever since. And now that Danny is closing in on adulthood, it's difficult for him, especially since he's inherited his mother's musical talents and could get a scholarship to Juilliard. In his new school, he also meets a classmate Lorna (Martha Plimpton), daughter of the music teacher, and falls in love with her. But will he have to abandon her, or his family?
Our final selectin is The Emigrants, which will be on TCM at 2:00 AM Sunday. Skåne is a province in southern Sweden, and in the 1840s eking out a living there is particularly difficult. There's no mechanized agriculture, and the crops have failed for the past several years, leaving farmers like Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) and his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann) in dire straits. There's also a stultifying religious atmosphere for anybody who doesn't believe the official Swedish Lutheran line. Karl's younger brother Robert (Eddie Axberg) has been working as a farmhand for a rich landowner and is being treated terribly, along with his friend and co-worker, so they want to leave too, along with some religious dissidents. When they learn of the promise that America brings, they decide to take the difficult decision to move to America and settle in Minnesota. It looks as though TCM is running the version edited for American audiences with dialogue dubbed into English; the Swedish original was a half hour longer if you can imagine, since this was an extremely slow-moving movie. After the characters decide where in Minnesota they're going to settle, the movie ends but leaves room for a sequel, The New Land, which follows at 4:45 AM Sunday.