Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of September 27-October 3, 2021. The Badgers have so thoroughly crapped the bed that there’s no further point in watching them, so why not spend some time with good movies instead, since that will give you all a chance to bicker at me instead of bickering among yourselves. There’s no Star of the Month this week due to the the week being in two different months, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of good movies on both TCM and some of the other movie channels. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We’ll start off with a relatively forgotten actress who is the star of the movie Journal of a Crime, at 12:15 PM Monday on TCM. That actress is Ruth Chatterton, playing Françoise Molie, the wife of Parisian playwright Paul (Adolphe Menjou). Paul has written a new play that’s a hit, but he’s also having an affair with the star of the new play, Odette (Claire Dodd). Odette wants Paul to leave his wife, but Paul just can’t bring himself to tell Françoise. She finds out about the affair, however, and she’s understandably ticked off. So much so that she goes to one of the rehearsals and shoots Odette dead! The police, however, arrest a bank robber named Costelli and put him on trial for the crime, finding him guilty on circumstantial evidence. Not that Françoise is about to go to the police to tell them the truth. Paul eventually discovers the truth and warns Françoise that she’s gong to snap under all those feelings of guilt. Not that he turns her in himself.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the movie Under Fire before. You’ve got a chance to catch it this week, at 11:00 AM Tuesday on Epix. The setting is Nicaragua in 1979, which is the final months of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, who would eventually be overthrown by Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas. Thrown into all of this is news photographer Russell Price (Nick Nolte), who is looking for a previously unphotographed rebel leader named Rafael, who may not even be alive still. Also now in Nicaragua are Oates (Ed Harris), a mercenary acquaintance of Price; Claire (Joanna Cassidy), a fellow journalist; and eventually Claire’s boyfriend Alex (Gene Hackman), who is sent down as a correspondent for one of the broadcast networks. Their personal lives are all made more difficult by the fact that Russell has been having an affair with Claire in spite of her relationship with Alex, who eventually finds out. But professionally, and more of a problem, is that the attempt to find Rafael results in their getting too close to the rebels and sliding too far into activism
Actor Ned Beatty died in June. TCM will be remembering him on Tuesday in prime time with five of his movies. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Network. Peter Finch is the star here, playing Howard Beale, who reads the nightly news on the Union Broadcast System, a network which is failing in the ratings. That, combined with Beale’s own failing professional life, leads him to announce one night live on the news that he’s going to commit suicide on live TV. As network execs Max Schumacher (William Holden) and Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) try to figure out what to do, Beale’s increasingly unhinged commentaries lead to a sharp rise in ratings, as he’s clearly striking a nerve with the American people. This leads to Max and Diana trying to come up with ever more ridiculous programming stunts to juice the ratings. It also leads them to start having an affair, Max having been married for years to Louise (Beatrice Straight). Of course, there’s the question of what’s going to happen when the ratings inevitably start to drop again. As for Beatty, he plays Arthur Jensen, head of the conglomerate that owns UBS.
If you want a western without a frequent western star like Audie Murphy, Randolph Scott, or Joel McCrea, try Money, Women, and Guns, airing on StarzEncore Westerns at 12:38 PM Tuesday. Somewhere out west, a prospector has finally struck gold, but he’s too late to enjoy it, as a group of three masked bandits attack and kill him, although in the attack two of the men suffer fatal gunshot wounds. The prospector, who wasn’t married and had no kids, wrote out a will that gives his estate, now worth something since he’s found gold, to six people he’d met along the way. Detective “Silver” Hogan (Jock Mahoney) is brought in not only to find the various heirs, but to see if he can’t figure out who killed the prospector. One of the interesting thing is that there are some fairly well-known names among the heirs, notably Oscar-winner Kim Hunter as a widow with a young son, and James Gleason as the dead guy’s old prospecting partner.
We’ve got a couple of spotlights on TCM this week, since the week straddles two calendar months. First, on Wednesday, we’ve got 24 hours of silent movies, more or less. I say “more or less” because prime time has three documentaries. The first one is on Georges Méliès, at 8:00 PM; Méliès is the director of the famous A Voyage to the Moon.
That will be followed at 9:45 PM by a documentary on Alice Guy-Blaché, who was one of the first directors period, not just one of the first female directors. And at 11:30 PM, there’s The Great Buster: A Celebration, about Buster Keaton. As for the silent features airing, I don’t know which one is the best, since there are so many good ones, like The Passion of Joan of Arc at 2:00 PM.
If you want a more recent movie, we’ve got two from the 1990s. The first of them is Scent of a Woman, at midnight Thursday (ie. 11:00 PM Wednesday LFT) on Flix. Chris O’Donnell plays Charlie, the teenage son from a family of modest means who has received a scholarship to go to a prestigious New England boarding school, where he’s roommates with rich legacy admission George (a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman). To make some extra money over the holiday break, Charlie takes a job as a sort of caretaker/escort for Lt. Col. Slade (Al Pacino), a former soldier who’s retired now that he’s blind. Slade is a cantankerous old bastard who reveals to Charlie that he’s planning to have Charlie take him to New York for one final wild weekend before he commits suicide. Meanwhile, Charlie has a problem back at school that he fears could get him expelled. But Slade’s sheer force of personality could teach Charlie a few things about life, even willing to avoid killing himself to help Charlie out in the disciplinary hearing.
TCM is spending Thursday morning and afternoon with the movies of Deborah Kerr. This includes I See a Dark Stranger, at 8:00 AM. Kerr plays Bridie Quilty, a young woman who grew up in Ireland and heard all sorts of stories from her father about his days in the IRA and the fight for Irish independence from the UK. As a result, she’s learned to hate all things British. Now all grown up, it’s World War II. Ireland is officially neutral, but Bridie would love to join up with the IRA to work with the Nazis against the British. They don’t want her, but Miller (Raymond Huntley), a Brit working for the Nazis, is able to recruit her to become a spy, putting here near a British military base. It’s here that she meets Baynes (Trevor Howard), a member of British intelligence. He falls in love with Bridie; she winds up with some important secrets; and he has to pursue her across Britain as she gets more and more entangled with things she doesn’t really know how to deal with. A very good movie, and much better than Hollywood’s doe-eyed view of Ireland.
People like Goldie who want to get stoned and watch a rom-com that doesn’t require much thinking will probably enjoy Nine Months, on StarzEncore at 7:13 PM Thursday. Hugh Grant, in his first big Hollywood role, plays Sam Faulkner, a child psychologist who is in a relationship with ballet teacher Rebecca Taylor (Julianne Moore). She’s thinking of having children, but Sam doesn’t want that, considering the issues that he’s seen working with families like the Dwyers (Tom Arnold and Joan Cusack). And then Rebecca gets pregnant, telling Sam that this is one of those small percentage of cases in which the birth control failed. Sam isnt certain what to do, convinced he’s not ready to be a father and getting all sorts of conflicting messages from his clients and his friends. But since this is a rom-com, you can guess how it was going to end. The movie’s box office fortunes weren’t helped by the fact that a few weeks before the movie’s opening, Grant was arrested for procuring the services of a prostitute.
Friday is October 1, and as you all know, at the end of the month comes Halloween. So, unsurprisingly, we get a bunch of horror-related stuff on all sorts of channels. TCM is no different, and on Friday morning and afternoon they’re going to be showing a bunch of horror movies from the first half of the 1930s. This would be a good time to mention the double feature of The Mystery of the Wax Museum (3:45 PM) and Doctor X (5:15 PM). Both of these were filmed in Technicolor, which which had not evolved into the recognizable technology it would have from about 1935 on. Instead, the cameras had a more limited color palette that made reds look pinkish and blues and greens look like a lighter green, with yellows being OK and whites looking a bit grayish. It’s not particularly good if you’re trying to get realistic colors, but for a horror movie, the unreality actually works.
For another football movie, you can try Black Sunday, at 11:45 PM Friday on TCM. Bruce Dern plays Lander, a man who was a POW in Vietnam and is now a pilot of one of those Goodyear blimps. He’s also a divorcé suffering from mental health issues as a result of the divorce and his time in Vietnam. It’s because of this that he’s come to the attention of Dahlia (Marthe Keller), a member of Black September, the group that murdered members of the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Munich Olympics. After surviving an assassination attempt by Mossad agents, Dahlia makes her way to the US, specifically Miami. Mossad agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) is working with CIA agent Corley (Fritz Weaver), and it’s Corley who is eventually able to put two and two together thanks to an issue of Sports Illustrated. Black September are plotting to commit a terrorist attack at the Super Bowl, which is where Lander comes in. He’s going to be flying the blimp that will deliver the bombs that will kill everybody in the Orange Bowl. What I find amazing is that the NFL approved the use of actual Super Bowl footage (Super Bowl X, to be specific) in the movie.
If you want to see a better Mickey Rooney movie than the one I mentioned last week, how about Requiem for a Heavyweight? It will be on TCM at 2:00 PM Saturday. Anthony Quinn plays the heavyweight, a man named “Mountain” Rivera who’s at the end of his career where the doctors won’t give him a license to box any more. His best friend is his trainer Army (that’s Rooney), but he also thinks his manager Rennick (Jackie Gleason) is on his side. In fact, Rennick has been betting against Mountain and getting gangsters to bet against him. When the bet goes wrong, the gangsters really want their money, which they suggest Mountain earn by going into pro wrestling. Army takes Mountain to the employment agency where sympathetic social worker Grace (Julie Harris) comes up with a possible job offer for him. But Rennick turns out to be such a piece of work that he’s willing to sabotage Mountain’s job interview in order to try to force him into the degrading world of professional wrestling. All three male leads give excellent performances.
We started off with a 1930s movie, and we’ll finish with another early 1930s movie: Mata Hari, at 11:30 AM Sunday on TCM. Greta Garbo plays the famous spy, who in early 1917 is a performer at a swanky Paris club. This is before the October Revoluation took the Russians out of World War I, so they’ve got a military attaché in Paris, Gen. Shubin (Lionel Barrymore), who has been busy seeing Mata Hari not realizing she’s a spy. The head of French intelligence, Dubois (C. Henry Gordon), knows there’s a spy in his midst, but doesn’t know who it is. Meanwhile, the Russians send a pilot, Lt. Rosanoff (Ramon Novarro), to Paris with some important coded dispatches for Shubin. It’s Mata Hari’s job to get a copy of those dispatches. Further complicating things is Mata Hari’s effect on all men, which she used to get documents from people; Rosanoff falls for her too not realizing his commanding officer has been in a relationship for her. And then she gets caught.