Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of September 18-24, 2017. We've got a lot of interesting and fun movies to recommend this week, so let's just get right to them. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
A movie showing up on FXM Retro that I don't think I've recommended before is Witchcraft, which will be on at 7:20 AM Monday. A couple of centuries ago, when killing witches was a common thing, the Lanier family disposed of witch Vanessa Whitlock (Yvette Rees) by burying her alive. Now, in the present day, English property developer Bill Lanier (Jack Hedley) is planning to marry one of the Whitlock descendants. But he's also doing a property development that unwittingly involves disturbing the area where Vanessa was buried alive. And it turns out that Vanessa really was a witch! So Vanessa decides that she's going to get her revenge by killing off the current members of the Lanier family! It's decidedly low-budget, but it does more or less work. Lon Chaney Jr. is given top billing as the patriarch of the Whitlock family even though he's really in a supporting role. And if you really want to be nit-picky, the name Vanessa wasn't coined until the early 18th century by Jonathan Swift, well after Vanessa the witch would have been buried alive.
TCM's theme for Tuesday morning is evil twin siblings. The morning starts off at 6:00 AM with Nazi Agent. The twins here are played by Conrad Veidt. Otto left Germany for America when he saw the writing on the wall that the Nazis were going to come to power. Hugo, however, stayed behind, ultimately joining the Nazi party. The Nazis send Hugo to America with a secret mission: he's going to get in touch with a bunch of saboteurs to lead them. Oh, and he's going to blackmail Otto into helping. This he does by telling Otto that if Otto doesn't go along, then any number of their family back in Germany are going to get sent to the concentration camps. Nice brother. So Otto does seem to go along, but of course he's plotting to foil the Nazis, ultimately by offing his brother and taking Hugo's place pretending to the rest of the ring to be Hugo until he can break up the ring. Sadly, Veidt, best known for playing Major Strasser in Casablanca, would only live one more year after making this, dying suddenly in 1943 at the young age of 50.
Star of the month Jennifer Jones was married to producer David O. Selznick, and the effects of that marriage show up in Indiscretion of an American Wife, which will be on TCM at 2:45 AM Wednesday. Jones plays the American wife Mary, who is in Italy visiting her sister and nephew (Richard Beymer). While in Italy, she's met a nice Italian man Giovanni (Montgomery Clift) and fallen in love with him, while he's fallen even more in love with her. She realizes that she has to break the relationship off, but when Mary goes to the train station to leave, Giovanni shows up, trying to convince her to stay. And they talk about their relationship. And talk, and talk. The idea is a good one – a lot of people compare this to Brief Encounter – and it should be helped by the fact that it was made in Rome. However, Jones' husband Selznick was the producer, and decided he had good ideas on how the movie should be made, which means he interfered during the production by changing screenwriters and then had edits made for the American cut.
I know I've recommended 20,000 Years in Sing Sing before. In 1940, it was remade as Castle on the Hudson, which TCM will be showing at noon Sunday. John Garfield plays the gangster (here named Tommy Gordon) who gets sent up to Sing Sing and thinks he'll be running the place because of his connections on the outside. But Warden Long (Pat O'Brien) is having none of that and is going to make Tommy reform because the warden has ideas that prison should actually be about rehabilitating people. Tommy, for his part, does gradually reform, while also trying to figure out a way to escape with fellow convicts like Steve (Burgess Meredith). And then Tommy's girlfriend on the outside, Kay (Ann Sheridan), gets in an accident and the warden thinks giving Tommy a brief furlough to see her would be a good idea. Of course things go wrong when one of Tommy's enemies shows up leading to the dramatic climax. As good an actor as Spencer Tracy was in the original, John Garfield is probably a better choice to play a gangster like this.
When my parents got their first DVD player around the turn of the century, one of the first DVDs they picked up with it was Anaconda. That movie is going to be on StarzEncore Classics at 12:48 AM Thursday among other times. Terri (Jennifer Lopez) is one of the people leading a National Geographic-type crew along with Dr. Cale (Eric Stoltz) trying to find a notoriously isolated tribe in the Amazon rain forest. Also part of the crew is cameraman Danny (Ice Cube, so with a cast like this you know you're in for a fun time even if that doesn't mean a prestige movie). While in the Amazon they run into Sarone (Jon Voight) a man whose boat has run into problems. They think he knows where to find the tribe, but it turns out that he's really looking to bag a live anaconda because that would bring a lot of money back in the US. When Dr. Cale gets a life-threatening wasp sting, Sarone sees this as an opportunity to take over the boat and run his agenda. Of course, it's not like the anacondas want to be caught.
TCM has been running “counter-culture” films on Thursday nights this month. This Thursday is probably the most interesting Thursday of the series, as they present a bunch of rock concert films/documentaries. I've mentioned Gimme Shelter before; that one will be at 11:45 PM. There's also Jimi Hendrix, which concludes the night at 5:30 AM Friday. As you can probably guess, this one is about the famous guitarist who died tragically young at the age of 27, and includes a whole bunch of performances from the Monterey Pop Festival. There is also other archive footage of Hendrix playing various sorts of guitar muisc, as well as interviews with people like Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and members of Hendrix's own band. Those of you who are into guitar playing and rock music will enjoy this one.
I was going to select something off of StarzEncore Westerns which was airing Friday, but it turns out I recommended the movie three months ago. So instead I'll point out that the channel is running The Guns of Fort Petticoat at 9:50 PM Monday. Audie Murphy plays Lt. Hewitt, with the Union Army toward the end of the Civil War. He's stationed out in the territories west of Texas, where there are still Indian tribes, and one day Hewitt's commanding officer decides to engage in battle with them and massacre them. Of course the Indians are going to fight back, so Hewitt deserts to tell the homesteaders that the Indians are going to be coming for them. However, he finds that that there are only female homesteaders left, as all the men have gone off to fight. Oh, and the men are fighting for the South, so they don't exactly like the idea of Hewitt telling them what to do. They eventually come to believe him and his idea that they should gather together in a central location and learn how to fight for when that battle comes. And when it does come, they're badly outnumbered….
If you enjoy zombie movies, you may enjoy the silly B movie Zombies on Broadway, which TCM will be running at 6:00 AM Saturday. Jerry and Mike (Wally Brown and Alan Carney respectively) are a pair of press agents working for a nightclub owner Ace (Sheldon Leonard). There are two problems. One is that Ace is a gangster. The other is that Ace's new club is called “The Zombie Hut” – so Ace naturally wants a real undead zombie as the club's main attraction. So our two not-so-intrepid heroes go down to the Caribbean island of San Sebastian, where they've heard of a professor Renault (Bela Lugosi) who knows a thing or two about zombies. Once on the island, the face all sorts of complications, as they find an American nightclub singer (Anne Jeffreys) who wants to get back to the States, find that Renault really is involved with zombie experiments, and natives who take the zombie stuff seriously.
For those of you who don't have the Starz/Encore package, something I mentioned half a year ago is now going to be on TCM: The War Wagon, at 10:30 PM Saturday. John Wayne plays Taw, a man who's now a bit of an outlaw because he was in his mind framed and sent to prison five years ago. Pierce (Bruce Cabot), the man responsible for that, now owns Taw's former ranch and is mining gold on the property and shipping it out. The gold is what gives Taw an idea: he's going to rob one of Pierce's gold shipments! The only thing is, Pierce has the latest in technology, which means an armored wagon (the titular “war wagon”) with machine guns protecting the gold. So Taw hires a gunman Lomax (Kirk Douglas) who was also an old nemesis; an explosives expert (Robert Walker Jr.) who unfortunately also has a drinking problem; and an inside man on Pierce's ranch (Keenan Wynn). Oh, and Howard Keel is hilariously miscast as an Indian. This one fits in well with the other 60s caper/heist movies, with the one difference being that it's set out west.
If you want to record something during the football, try According to Mrs. Hoyle, which will be on TCM at 1:45 PM Sunday. Spring Byington plays Mrs. Hoyle, an older woman living in one of those apartment hotel things that were more common in past generations than they are now. The owners evict the residents, mostly because the big owner, Morganti (Anthony Caruso) is a gangster, and obviously wants to use the place for other purposes. Well, they evict everybody but a young woman Angela that Morganti has his eyes on, and Mrs. Hoyle because she's just too damn sweet to hurt by evicting her. Of course, that sweetness has an effect on the other gangsters when they move in and she seems to be reforming them. But is she really reforming them, or are they just using her? After a robbery in which the stolen goods are found in Mrs. Hoyle's place, matters come to a head….