Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of September 28-October 4, 2020. We're at the boundary of two months, so this is another of those weeks when we don't have a Star of the Month on TCM thanks to that quirk of the calendar. However, there are certainly a lot of movies that are worth watching anyway, not just on TCM but on some of the other channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM runs 31 Days of Oscar in February, so they can't really run birthday tributes for people born that month. One example is King Vidor, so TCM is giving us a morning and afternoon of his movies on Monday, which includes the interesting Our Daily Bread at 10:30 AM. John and Mary Sims (Tom Keene and Karen Morley respectively) are a married couple of city dwellers who have lost their jobs in the depression and desperate for money. They hope their uncle can help, but he's short on funds too. However, he has an abandoned farm that he's willing to let them use, not that the couple really knows much about farming. But they don't have any other opportunities, and as they try to make do, they meet a whole bunch of people who have skills but no place to live, so a sort of squatters' community gets set up on the farm, starting with an immigrant farmer with no land, Chris (John Qualen). Eventually joining the community is femme fatale Sally (Barbara Pepper); she tries to woo John away from Mary. An imperfect but interesting piece of Depression-era filmmaking.
A search of the site claims I haven't recommended Day of the Outlaw before. It's on this week, at 5:45 AM Monday on on StarzEncore Westerns. Robert Ryan plays Blaise Starrett, a rancher who has a problem that's a trope in westerns: homesteaders coming in to farm, and putting up barbed wire. So Blaise goes into town with the intention of intimidating Hal Crane (Alan Marshal), using force if necessary. There's also a subplot involving Hal's wife Helen (Tina Louise). But all of that runs up against another complication. Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) leads a gang of outlaws that comes riding into town, intent on doing what outlaws do and not having any consideration of the difference between rancher and farmer. The situation is constantly on the brink of violence, with Jack's iron leadership over the gang being the only thing preventing violence from breaking out. But what happens if Jack should lose his grip?
The “Women Make Film” spotlight continues on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning on TCM. This week, I'll mention the film Antonia's Line, at 10:00 AM Wednesday. Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy) is a woman who, at the start of the movie, is elderly and about to die, surrounded by family. Flash back 50 years, to when World War II had recently ended. Antonia returns home to her native Dutch village together with her young adult daughter Danielle (Els Dottermans), Dad having died during the war. The family had a homestead in the village, so Antonia plans to start farming there. Bas, who runs the farm next door, doesn't see how a woman can run a farm all by herself, but Antonia is determined to do it without a man. Meanwhile, there are a whole bunch of quirky characters in this small town. When Bas' wife dies, he and Antonia realize that men need women, and women need men, but they can all also be independent. Along the way, Antonia becomes matriarch to four generations of women. Other than being a bit too quirky at times, this one is definitely worth a watch.
Another of the movies that started showing up again in the FXM rotation recently is The Flight of the Phoenix. It's got another pair of airings this week, at 12:35 PM Wednesday and 3:30 AM Thursday. James Stewart plays Frank Towns, pilot for Aramco, flying a plane a beat-up old plane full of people going from one of the oil rig camps in the Sahara out to Benghazi. A sandstorm comes up, blocking the carburetor and forcing them down in the middle of nowhere in the desert, without a radio. Former British Army officer Capt. Harris (Peter Finch) insist he can walk to the nearest oasis to get help, but Towns is skeptical. One of the passengers, Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger), then says that he's an aircraft designer, and that it wuold be possible to take the parts of the plane still working and construct something that will be airworthy just long enough to get everybody to safety. They're skeptical of this as well, but since there's no other hope, they go along with the plan even though Dorfmann is German and memories of the war are still fresh. The cast also includes Richard Attenborough as the co-pilot, and Ernest Borgnine and George Kennedy among the passengers. The movie was remade in 2004, and that remake will be on HBO at 8:35 AM Monday (and three hours later for those of you with the west coast feed).
With the wildfires out west, it's interesting timing that TCM is going to be running Ring of Fire, at 2:15 PM Thursday. Frank Gorshin plays Frank, a hoodlum on the run together with his girlfriend Bobbie (Joyce Taylor) and partner-in-crime Roy (James Johnson). In small-town southern Washington, they get picked up by local police officer Steve Walsh (David Janssen). However, he makes a mistake and Frank is able to get Steve's gun, forcing Steve to drive the three fugitives to the end of a deserted road out in the forest, from where the four are going to make an escape across the forest; with so many ways out, the police won't be able to find them. Except that the young criminals aren't dressed for such a hike and don't know the trails. Worse is that it's been very dry and the forest is a tinderbox. With one of the criminals being a smoker, well, you just know that something is going to get lit up and these four people are going to be trapped in a burning forest. I just hope the movie finally gets shown in the proper aspect ratio.
Following Ring of Fire, you can switch over to StarzEncore Classics for another movie with someone on the run: Witness, at 3:48 PM Thursday. This time, the man on the run is a cop, John Book (Harrison Ford). But before that, we meet a young Amish woman Rachel (Kelly McGinnis) who is traveling through Philadelphia with her son Samuel (Lukas Haas) to see family in Baltimore. Samuel goes to use the facilities, and in the bathroom, he witnesses a a drug deal gone wrong, resulting in a stabbing murder. Book is put on the case, hiding the Amish family at his sister's house for a night while he can figure out what to do. Unfortunately for him, there are dirty cops (what a surprise), so Book flees into Amish country to hide from the dirty cops and drug dealers there, blending in by pretending to be Amish. Of course there's a culture clash, and things get much more complicated when John starts falling in love with Rachel.
October begins on Thursday, so it's not surprising that already toward the end of this week we start getting horror movies on TCM. Friday in prime time is a night of classic horror, including Cat People at 9:30 PM. Kent Smith plays Oliver Reed, a marine engineer who while at a visit to the zoo one afternoon runs into Serbian immigrant sketch artist Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon). They fall in love and marry, even though Irena isn't certain when they get married. Strange things start happening, such as a bird dying in Irena's hand. She reveals that she came from a village that has a curse about certain people turning into evil big cats, and her fear that she might be one of those people. Oliver doesn't particularly believe but tries to get his wife help, while Oliver's having a female co-worker might just trigger Irena's jealousy. Producer Val Lewton had the theory that audiences shouldn't necessarily be shown the horror in graphic detail, but let the audience's own fears play on their minds, and it's something that works very well for this movie.
BK posted a screencap of Buford T. Justice to mock me in another thread this past week, so I'll note that Smokey and the Bandit II is on this week, at 1:05 PM Friday on Showtime Extreme. (The original is also on, but I recommended that not too long ago). Burt Reynolds returns as the Bandit, who didn't exactly make much money off that original beer run, and spent all the money and fame on booze, losing girlfriend Carrie (Sally Field) in the process. The two Enoses (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams), who made the proposal in the original, are back, with a job for the Bandit and his friend Cletus (Jerry Reed) that they can make a substantial sum of money by delivering a mystery package from Miami to the Republican Convention in Dallas in a limited time window. Carrie learns about the subtantial sum of money on offer and decides to leave Buford's son again to be with the Bandit. This makes Buford want to catch the Bandit more than ever. But what about the plan from the end of the first movie to make a run up to Boston and back?
You don't have to be a fan of Clint Eastwood to enjoy Million Dollar Baby, which will be on TCM at 6:00 AM Saturday. Of course, that's because this isn't the Eastwood film but a 1941 movie with the same title but a completely different plot. May Robson plays Cornelia Wainwright, a wealthy ex-pat widow in Switzerland who has just learned that a large part of her wealth has come from her husband having swindled a business partner many years ago. So she wants to find some of the other guy's descendants and give them some of her wealth to set things right. Through the help of her lawyer James Amory (Jeffrey Lynn), they find one granddaughter, Pamela (Priscilla Lane), a department store clerk living in a rooming house across the hall from her composer boyfriend Peter (Ronald Reagan). So Cornelia moves into the rooming house and befriends Pamela, with the eventual plan of having Amory give Pamela the money without Pamela knowing the truth about Cornelia. James falls for Pamela, and the money threatens to change both Pamela and Pete, whose political views (of course, nobody at the time knew what Reagan would go on to do) are opposed to such ostentatious wealth.
Finally, on Sunday, we get a night of Buster Keaton in prime time. But before prime time, at 6:00 PM, there's going to be a documentary about Keaton directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Prime time itself kicks off at 8:00 PM with Sherlock Jr. Keaton plays a movie projectionist with a girlfriend (Kathryn McGuire). However, she's got another man called The Sheik (Ward Crane) pursuing her, and that man has higher social status. He also frames Keaton for the crime of stealing a pocket wach. Meanwhile, Keaton has always dreamed of being a detective, and this case, combined with events going on in one of the movies he's screening finally give him the chance to do some detective work, solve the case, and get the girl… or so he hopes.