Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" Thread, for the week of September 30-October 6, 2019. If you're one of those people like Goldie who only DVRs the Packer games instead of watching them live, I've got a good selection of movies you can watch during the game while bitching here about the game. Due to a quirk in the calendar, we don't have an actual Star of the Month on TCM this week, since most of the week is in a new month but the Star of the Month will show up on Mondays, starting October 7. In any case, there are more than enough interesting movies on the various channels to make up for that. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
TCM is marking the birth anniversary of Deborah Kerr on Monday morning and afternoon. They're kicking things off with the movie that brought Kerr to the attention of Hollywood, I See a Dark Stranger, at 6:15 AM. Kerr plays Bridie Quilty, a young Irish woman who hears from her father his blowhard stories about what he did during the 1916 uprising against the UK. These stories radicalize Bridie to the point that she wants to join the IRA to do what she can for the cause against Britain. So when Miller (Raymond Huntley) comes along, she's easy to manipulate into joining what she thinks is the cause. However, this being the height of World War II, Miller's strain of the IRA is really working with the Nazis, and the operation Bridie gets involved with is one to free a Nazi. This isn't what she expected, and it's up to British intelligence agent Baynes (Trevor Howard) to foil the plot. Along the way, he falls in love with Bridie on a chase through various parts of the UK. He being British, however, means that she's not so willing to reciprocate.
For those of you who like 1980s movies, this week's selection is Empire of the Sun, which will be on at 8:35 AM Tuesday. A young Christian Bale stars as Jamie Graham, a spoiled kid who lives in the International concession part of Shanghai in 1941, an area of the city where westerners had secured special rights from the Chinese government. Japan invaded China many years previously, but left the international area alone because they weren't at war with the west. But then Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, and all the western countries are at war with Japan, necessitating the evacuation 0f Shanghai. During the chaotic evacuation, Jamie gets separated from his parents, and is somehow even able to live alone for a few months before he winds up in an internment camp. He grows up quickly but clearly survives, since the action suddenly jumps ahead a couple of years to just before Japan's surrender, Jamie having made himself into an indispensable smooth operators. His love of planes and respect for the pilots at the air base next to the camp helps.
I know I've recommended the two earlier versions before, but I'm not certain if I've mentioned the 1948 vers1ion of One Sunday Afternoon, which is going to be on TCM at 1:00 PM Tuesday. Dennis Morgan plays Biff Grimes, a dentist at the turn of the century who is recently out of prison after having spent ten years in the clink. On the titular Sunday afternoon he gets an emergency visit from old friend Hugo Barnstead (Don DeFore) who needs some dental work done. Perhaps old friend is wrong and it should be former friend, as Biff reminisces to what went wrong between him and Hugo. Hugo was always a smooth operator. In love, he and Biff went on a double date with fast Virginia (Janis Paige) and more staid Amy (Dorothy Malone). Hugo stole Virginia right out from under Biff, leaving Biff with Amy. And then in business it was Hugo's crooked business dealings that left Biff holding the bag and going to prison. So Biff has a chance to gain revenge on Hugo; will he do it? This version was turned into a musical with the Technicolor treatment, but doesn't include the song “And the Band Played On” that was so memorable in the second film version, 1941's Strawberry Blonde.
John Gilbert was a big star in the silent era, but his star faded rapidly with the introduction of talking pictures, largely because the movies he was given weren't very good. His first starring role in a talkie was in Redemption, which will be on TCM at 7:15 AM Wednesday. Gilbert plays Fedya (the normal Russian nickname for Fyodor, the Russian version of Theodore; since I'm a Ted and majored in Russian at college, how do think I got the name Fedya?), a Russian man with a penchant for gambling and booze. He meets Lisa (Eleanor Boardman) and falls in love with her, although she's already in love with Fedya's friend Victor (Conrad Nagel). Fedya wins Lisa away from Victor and marries her, but then meets the gypsy girl Masha (Renée Adorée) and falls in love with her even though she's going to lead him to tragedy. It's based on a story by Tolstoy, whose overwrought style doesn't always translate well to the screen, especially when filmmakers were still struggling with the transition to sound. Gilbert hated it so much that he begged for it not to be released until after his next picture, which wasn't much of a success either.
One of October's TCM Spotlights is called "short and Sweet", looking at movies that all clock in at under 75 minutes. There's dozens of them, airing all day and night Wednesday. Among the movies in this first week of the spotlight is Ex-Lady, airing at 5:15 AM Thursday. Bette Davis plays Helen Bauer, a high-class fashion illustrator hosting elegant parties and living out of wedlock with advertising executive Don Peterson (Gene Raymond). His parents don't approve of this, so eventually Don gets Helen to agree to marry him and make the relationship "legitimate". However, things quickly go south as Don loses an important contract while the couple is away on their honeymoon. He tries to make it up by working late at the office, when in fact he's really seeing Peggy (Kay Strozzi), the wife of another client. Helen finds out and decides that she's going to get back at Don by having a relationship of her own, with a man who isn't really right for her, Nick (Monroe Owsley). Perhaps if they got a divorce and went back to their old arrangement everything would work out better.
A search of the site claims that I haven't recommended Lost in Translation before. StarzEncore Classics is showing it at 6:21 PM Thursday, so this is your chance to catch it. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, an American actor in Japan to do a lucrative commercial shoot for Suntory whiskey. It's a break from his home life and his marriage, which has hit a bit of a rough patch. Being in a foreign culture, he spends a bunch of time at the hotel bar, which is where he meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent college graduate who isn't so sure what she wants to do with her life. She's in Japan with her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi), a photographer who is busy with a photo shoot, so she's got a lot of free time too. As you can probably guess, Bob and Charlotte wind up spending their free time together and even begin to fall in love with each other despite the fact that each of them has a marriage to go back to. I found this one much better than something like Brief Encounter whch I felt ws trying to justify the wife's indiscretion too much.
Since Tuesday is the first day of a new month, we're getting some new monthly themes on TCM. I've already mentioned "Short and Sweet" above, but this being October, it's unsurprising that the theme is horror. In fact, there are two themes. On Thursdays it's various things related to Halloween, with this first Thursday in October being witches. It's not all horror, night starts off at 8:00 PM with Bell, Book, and Candle which is a comedy and not a horror at all.
On Fridays in prime time, we get the "Monster of the Month", which is Godzilla. So we're getting one Godzilla movie after another, starting at 8:00 PM Friday with the original Godzilla followed at 9:30 PM with the cut for American audiences, Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Mothra vs. Godzilla shows up at 12:30 AM, which is a lead-in to TCM Underground, which starts at 2:00 AM Saturday with the original Mothra.
Yet another Audie Murphy movie that I don't think I've recommended before is Showdown. It's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns, at 1:38 AM Friday. Murphy plays Chris, a drifter who rides into town with his friend Bert (Charles Drake). Except that Bert isn't much of a friend, getting drunk and starting a fight, getting both men chained to a post because the town doesn't have a jail. Also chained to the post is outlaw leader Lavalle (Harold Stone), together with several of his gang, who wants to get the hell out of town so he tries to dig to escape. Eventually he does, and Chris and Bert don't have much choice but to go along. Bert shows how he was even less of a friend by having stolen $12,000 in bonds while in town, and Lavalle wants them. Bert might be willing to give them up in exchange for his escape, but how will he and Chris clear their names? Further complicating matters is that Bert supposedly also has a girl in town, Estelle (Kathleen Crowley), but she doesn't believe Chris' claims about what happened to the two men.
If you want some silly mindless stuff, you could do a lot worse than to watch the 1978 version of Piranha, which is going to be on ThrillerMax at 4:25 PM Saturday. You can probably guess from the title what the movie is about. A couple of people discover an abandoned fish hatchery turned into a no-longer-used military installation, and decide to go swimming. What they don't know is that when it was a military institution, a Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) was doing experiments in coming up with piranhas that could live in more temperate climates, which would then be released in Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong. Maggie (Heather Menzies) and Grogan (Bradford Dillman) go looking for the disappeared couple and find this place, Maggie deciding to drain it so she can look for the bodies. Of course, she doesn't know about the piranhas in the pool and that by emptying is she's sending them down river, where all sorts of people including a water resort are using the river. Can all those downriver people be saved in time?
This week's Noir Alley selection is Trapped, which is going to be on TCM at 12:15 AM Sunday and again at 10:00 AM Sunday. This one stars Lloyd Bridges as Tris Stewart, a counterfeiter who's currently in jail. However, somebody else is passing bogus $20 bills, and these look amazingly like the ones that got Tris put in jail. That would probably be because these new bills were printed off the same plates Tris had been using. So the feds make a deal with Tris to let him out if he'll cooperates. Which, of course, he has no plan to do; he immediately escapes to Los Angeles to see his girlfriend Meg (Barbara Peyton) and go about getting the start-up money necessary to go back to churning out fake twenties. The Secret Service isn't stupid, so they get a man of their own, Downey (John Hoyt), to try to infiltrate Tris' operation. This one came out a year before Mister 880, another docudrama about counterfeiting, but this is much grittier and, like a lot of noirs, uses a bunch of Los Angeles locations that no longer exist.
Finally, I'll mention two aging stars working together in Rooster Cogburn, which will be on TCM at 8:00 PM Sunday. John Wayne stars as Cogburn, reprising his role from the 1969 movie True Grit. The old star his playing off of is Katharine Hepburn, who plays Eula Goodnight. She's the daughter of Rev. Goodnight, working at a missionary school on an Indian reservation. A gang led by Hawk (Richard Jordan) has killed an army patrol and taken their Gatling gun and nitroglycerine for use in a bank robbery, which is why Cogburn is heading out toward Indian territory. The gang also wound up at the missionary school, shooting the place up and killing several Indians as well as Rev. Goodnight. So of course Eula follows along with Cogburn. She starts to think she should be helping out if not running the search, since she wants to bring her father's killers to justice. Of course, she's not exactly fit for the purpose, but along the way she and Cogburn are going to fall in love and she'll teach him a few things.