Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of September 3-9, 2018. We've finally reached football season, and there is something interesting airing against the football games, so you'll definitely want your DVR running. There's also a new Star of the Month on TCM, a new spotlight reminiscent of one they did a decade ago, and interesting stuff on some of the other movie channels, too. I've used my erudition to pick out a bunch of movies I know you'll all like. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
If you want something light and fluffy, you could do far worse than to watch Pillow Talk at 3:15 PM Monday on TCM.
No, not that Pillow Talk, but the Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie. Day plays Jan Morrow, an interior decorator in New York who's having trouble in that her business phone is on a party line – for those not old enough to remember, several different numbers shared a line. Jan shares her line with songwriter and ladies' man Brad Allen (Rock Hudson), who's constantly on the line with his multiple girlfriends. Since Jan needs it for her business, she hates Brad for hogging it all the time. Of course, you know that the two are going to meet each other in real life, she not realizing who he is. Brad figures it out, and puts on a phony identity to try to woo Jan. Complicating things is Brad's best friend Jonathan. Jonathan is one of Jan's clients, and he's been trying to win over Jan, who is saving herself for Mr. Right. What's Jan going to to when she finds out the truth about Brad? Thelma Ritter earned her fifth Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, but lost yet again.
In the late 1930s, Darryl F. Zanuck tried to make a star out of Annabella. She fell in love with Tyrone Power and married him, putting the kibosh on her Fox career, but before that, one of the movies she made was The Baroness and the Butler, which FXM Retro is running at 6:00 AM Wednesday. Annabella plays the Baroness, the daughter of the prime minister of Hungary, Count Sandor (Henry Stephenson). Their butler is Johann Porok (William Powell), a man who has some political views of his own, although as a butler in those days you're not supposed to be too vocal about them. Still, he's able to run for parliament without his boss finding out about it. And more surprisingly, he gets elected as a member of the opposition party. And if that's not ridiculous enough, Porok and Count Sandor come to the agreement that Porok will keep his job as butler while also working in Parliament! Porok falls in love with the Baroness, sahed of My Man Godfrey, but in this case there's a problem in that she's already married to a Baron (Joseph Schildkraut). Unsurprisingly, he tries to use this to his benefit.
You probably recall the movie Grand Hotel (8:45 AM Tuesday), based on a book by Vicki Baum. Ten years later, Baum wrote a sequel set against the backdrop of the Nazi regime, and that book was turned into the movie Hotel Berlin, which will be on TCM at 4:00 PM Tuesday. This one tells the story of German underground leader Martin Richter (Helmut Dantine), who winds up at the hotel to meet Nobel-winning physicist Koenig (Peter Lorre), who has escaped from a concentration camp but realizes he's got the Nazis on his tail. Raymond Massey plays a general who was part of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, at the hotel looking for help from his friend the Baron (Henry Daniell). Faye Emerson plays Massey's former lover, herself trying to find a way out of Germany. George Coulouris plays the bad Nazi general whose job it is to catch Richter and otherwise keep everything under control. Everybody's paths cross in various ways.
In the recent best movies of all time thread, somebody mentioned Color of Night. I have a feeling the poster meant The Color of Money, it whatever. Color of Night is going to be on this week, at 3:15 AM Tuesday on More Max. Bruce Willis plays Dr. Cape, a New York psychiatrist who has a difficult patient who unfortunately wound up committing suicide. Cape goes west to get away and visits his psychiatrist friend Dr. Moore (Scott Bakula). Moore is having trouble with his group-therapy group, so he asks Cape to sit in. Cape does, leading to far more than he bargained for. Moore takes a quantum leap into getting murdered, and it's up to Cape to try to solve the case as if his own life depended on it, because it probably does. I mean, everyone around him screwed up, and Rose (Jane March), who he's screwing, is even more messed up. It's a ludicrous, reminding me of something equally nuts like Dead Again.
Tuesday night on TCM brings a new spotlight, this time looking at the Black Experience on Film. Every Tuesday and Thursday in prime time, various members of the African-American Film Critics Association will be discussing the movies presented. The spotlight kicks off at 8:00 PM with Within Our Gates, a movie that it's amazing it ever survived at all. Pioneering black director Oscar Micheaux made this silent about a light-skinned black woman (Evelyn Preer) who travels north to try to raise money for a southern all-black school only to find racism among a lot of supposedly more liberal whites, and opposition among some of the blacks who have their own agendas.
On Thursday, the movies include To Kill a Mockingbird at 10:30 PM, which has a black man in 1930s Alabama being defended in a capital rape case by lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning role).
It's been a while since I've seen Foxy Brown, but it's back on StarzEncore Classics this week, at 2:07 AM Wednesday. Pam Grier plays Foxy Brown, a woman whose brother Link (Antonio Fargas) is a low-level drug dealer and whose boyfriend Michael (Terry Carter) is a narc who's planning on going into the equivalent of the witness protection program. Apparently Link gets word of what's going on and uses his contacts to get Michael killed, which makes Foxy none too happy! She wants revenge, and in investigating the murder, she discovers that it was likely carried out by people using a "modeling agency" that's really a front for a high-end prostitution ring. So Foxy decides that she's going to try to pass herself off as a prostitute to get a job with that agency, so she can investigate the murder from the inside. But she's found out, at which point the bad guys drug her and kidnap her to a farm that's a front for drug production. Can Foxy escape and save the day? Did you really think the movie was going to have an unhappy ending?
Now that we're in September it's time for another Star of the Month on TCM. This month that's Dean Martin, and TCM will be running his movies every Wednesday in prime time. Dean Martin started his career with Jerry Lewis, so of course TCM is running a couple of Martin/Lewis movies on Wednesday, including At War With the Army at . Martin and Lewis play Puccinelli and Korwin respectively, who were a nightclub act before World War II. (They were of course a stage act in real life before Hollywood came calling.) Puccinelli wound up as a drill sergeant at a base in Kentucky, and frankly he'd rather be fighting the real war overseas. Korwin gets drafted as a private, and being incompetent at basic training, gets treated like dirt by his old partner-turned-CO. But the have to do the base holiday show together.... Perhaps the highlight is their spoof of Going My Way. A young Polly Bergen appears as Dino's love interest.
The early sound era saw a bunch of movies that looked at the life of one person over the course of decades, with Cimarron probably being the most notable. Another example of the genre is The World Changes, which TCM is showing at 12:30 PM Thursday. Paul Muni plays Orin Nordholm Jr., whose parents came from Scandinavia and pioneered their way west to the Dakotas in the middle of the 19th century. Orin falls in love with Selma Peterson (Jean Muir), daughter of the other big family in the area. But Orin wants more, so he goes off and leads a cattle drive, putting him in contact with meat-packer Clafflin (Guy Kibbee) and his daughter Ginny (Mary Astor). Orin goes into the meat-packing business and marries Ginny, but the marriage results in a bunch of spoiled brat sons, which is going to be the ruin of the Nordholms when the Great Depression comes near the end of the movie. In and around all this the movie inserts historical figures like Buffalo Bill Cody (Douglass Dumbrille).
This week's selection from StarzEncore Westerns is The Hunting Party, which will be on at 3:57 AM Friday. Gene Hackman plays Brandt Ruger, a rancher who is very possessive of his wife Melissa (Candice Bergen). She's a schoolteacher who one day is kidnapped by the outlaw Calder (Oliver Reed), who has never learned how to read and figures a kidnapped teacher will teach him. She warns him how jealous her husband is, but he doesn't care. While Melissa is holed up with Calder, she begins to develop Stockholm Syndrome, although to be fair getting away from a possessive husband helps and besides, the hostage case that engendered the term "Stockholm Syndrome" hadn't happened at the time the movie was released. Brandt learns of his wife's abduction and learns who's responsible, at which point he and his henchmen set about killing all the members of Calder's gang with their new-fangled high-power rifles.
Speaking of westerns, who ever imagined Lucille Ball in a western? Well, if you make it a comic western, then it might make sense. That's the case with Valley of the Sun, which will be on TCM at noon Saturday. Ball plays Christine, who runs a watering hole in Yuma in the Arizona territory in the years just after the Civil War. She's engaged to Jim Sawyer (Dean Jagged), who's a government agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, assigned to look after the affairs of the Apache. Like many of these agents, Sawyer is corrupt as he'll, robbing the Apache blind. Into all this comes Jonathan Ware (James Craig), an Army officer who's seen the plight of the Indians and doesn't like on bit what the government is doing to them. So he's helped a couple of Apache escape, for which he's been court-martialed and now on the run. So when he meets Christine, he falls in love with her and knows he has to break up her schedule marriage to Sawyer.
I'm definitely recording the TCM Sunday night lineup because it's something I want to see even though it's up against the Packers' drubbing of the Chicago team. That movie is the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, at 8:00 PM Sunday. In the very early days of movies, prints would be distributed in sequence, sort of like a phone chain. Dawson City, Yukon, was the end of the line for one of the distribution chain, and about 40 yeaars ago researchers found several hundred reels of nitrate film that had been landfilled there, but didn't get destroyed because of the cold, dry climate that preserved them. (A similar find happened a few years back in New Zealand, which was the end of another distribution line.) This is the story both of Dawson City at the time the movies were made, and of the finding and restoration of the movies. It will be followed at 10:15 PM by another documentary, Fragments, that looks at lost movies that have only been preserved in part. One of the interesting things is how back in the old days studios could preserve their copyright by sending print images of frames of the movie to the Library of Congress; those images have been played flipbook style to revel the moving image footage in the original movies.