Welcome to another edition of Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” Thread, for the week of September 4-10, 2017. Football season is almost here, but since it doesn't start in earnest until Sunday for the Packers, there's a lot of time to wait, time you can spend watching some good movies. Once again I've used my good taste to pick out movies I know you'll all like. We're in a new month, so we've got a new star of the month on TCM, and some other features. As always, all times are in Eastern unless otherwise mentioned.
I've mentioned several times before that Fox distributed a lot of interesting little movies running only about 70 minutes or so back in the early 60s when Cleopatra was taking up all the studio's money. A good example of this is The Purple Hills, which will be on FXM Retro this week at . The movie starts off with one guy shooting another, and then two other guys trying to meet up with the dead guy. It turns out that the dead guy is a wanted criminal, and the shooter, Shepard (Gene Nelson) is a bounty hunter looking for the money. And the guys who tried to meet the dead guy are members of the dead guy's gang. Now, it turns out that Shepard couldn't bring the body back to town to claim the reward because his horse wound up lame, and the other two guys – Barnes (Kent Taylor) and Chito (Danny Zapien) just happened to beat Shepard back to town, so they're trying to claim the reward too. The best way to solve this problem is for everybody to go to where the body is buried. The only problem is, the body is buried on Apache territory, and the Apache are none too pleased with the idea of white people coming onto their land. Further complicating matters is that the dead guy's brother has shown up looking for revenge.
Jerry Lewis died two weeks ago at the age of 91. Now that Summer Under the Stars is over, TCM has the time to do a proper tribute to Lewis, which will be on Labor Day night in prime time featuring five of Lewis' movies. There's only one with Dean Martin, The Stooge at midnight Tuesday (ie. 11:00 PM Monday LFT), and three 60s solo efforts. The fifth movie is The King of Comedy, at 10:00 PM. Lewis plays Jerry Langford, a popular late-night talk show host who has to put up with groupes every night when he leaves the studio. One night, Masha (Sandra Bernhard) tries to accost Jerry, but he's saved by Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro). What Jerry doesn't know is that Rupert is a frustrated comedian who thinks he's great and who knows he could do Jerry's job if only he got the chance. Jerry basically blows Rupert off but Rupert takes Jerry seriously and tries to get himself booked on Jerry's show. When that obviously doesn't work, Rupert comes up with the daring idea of kidnapping Jerry with help from Masha and using an appearance on Jerry's show as ransom!
At the end of the Jerry Lewis tribute to get the schedule to the star of the next day's programming, TCM has included the short Season in Tyrol, at 5:10 AM Tuesday. This one isn't a Traveltalks short, but a short made in the late 60s and surprisingly not tied in with any feature (such as Where Eagles Dare) being made at the time. No; it's just a look at the Austrian province of Tyrol and what the natives do during the various seasons. In that regard it's fairly pedestrian, but damn if there isn't a whole lot of great cinematography: Tyrol is extremely photogenic.
How to Murder Your Wife is back on TCM, at 1:30 PM Tuesday. Jack Lemmon plays a cartoonist who has the conceit of doing in real life the things that he writes about in his comic books. That, and being a confirmed bachelor, living in a fabulous Manhattan apartment with his valet (Terry-Thomas). But then one night he goes to a bachelor party and gets drunk enough that he winds up marrying a woman that night (Virna Lisi). She tries to tame him, and he uses his comic to write about that, as well as fantasies of killing a wife. All this to the chagrin of the valet, who agreed with his boss' old views on confirmed bachelorhood. And then things take a turn for the worse when the wife actually goes missing. So of course, everybody thinks that our hero has done the deed, since he's been writing about doing it all this time. But where's the body. The ending winds up being formulaic, and 60s sex comedies are certainly a dated genre. But the style of 60s Manhattan as it actually was back in the day, at least for the upper classes.
We're back to regular programming on TCM, which means that we get a new Star of the Month. This time, it's Jennifer Jones, who won a Best Actress Oscar at the start of her career in The Song of Bernadette (8:00 PM Tuesday on TCM). Every Tuesday in prime time, TCM will be running Jones' movies, such as Cluny Brown at 1:00 AM Wednesday. Jones plays Cluny Brown, the niece of a British plumber who, if she had her way, would go into plumbing herself even though it's not something women did in those days. She shows up just before a party to unstop a sink, which is where she meets Adam Belinski, a Czech philosophy professor in the UK in exile now that Hitler's taken over Czechoslovakia. Her uncle doesn't like any of this, so he sends her to a country estate to be a maid, something for which she's decidedly unsuited. The local pharmacist (Richard Haydn) meets Cluny and falls in love with her, but Adam shows up again at the country estate, and decides he should be the one pursuing Cluny instead.
Those you who like more recent movies may enjoy Black Rain, which will be on StarzEncore Classics at 5:59 AM Thursday. Michael Douglas plays Nick, a New York City cop partnered with Charlie (Andy Garcia). They witness a murder and are able to catch the murderer, a man named Sato. Sato is Japanese and a member of the yakuza, the Japanese criminal gangs, so of course he's wanted back in Japan and for some reason the Americans decide to extradite him rather than prosecute him for the murder he committed in the US. It's up to Nick and Charlie to escort Sato in the extradition, but once in Japan some of Sato's yakuza colleagues are able to dupe the American cops so Sato winds up escaping rather than in the hands of the Japanese police. Oops. Nick and Charlie want to make amends by helping the Japanese police find Sato, but Nick in particular is constantly frustrated by Japanese policing methods.
I can't recall if I've recommended the movie A Hole in the Head before, but it's going to be on TCM at 10:45 PM Wednesday. Frank Sinatra plays Tony, a widower who has a 12-year-old son. Tony owns and runs a hotel in Miami Beach, but it's not in the fashionable part of town, with the result that Tony and his kid are basically living hand to mouth. Tony's brother Mario (Edward G. Robinson) and his wife Sophie (Thelma Ritter) show up. Tony hopes he can get money from them, but Mario has had it with Tony's lax attitude towards money and is only willing to offer Tony any money on a couple of conditions. Mainly, that Tony settle down and become a better father, and that he remarry. And Sophie has picked out a perfect second wife for Tony in the person of Eloise (Eleanor Parker). Tony doesn't exactly like the idea, but considering that Eloise is Hollywood star pretty, he is at least willing to pretend to be interested in the idea. Frank Sinatra sings the song “High Hopes” which would go on to win an Oscar.
Those of you who like pretentious foreign movies are in luck, as TCM will be running a bunch of Werner Herzog movies on Thursday in prime time. I've mentioned Fitzcarraldo before, about a European circa-1900 who decides to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle of Peru; that's going to be on at 8:00 PM. The movie was a notoriously difficult shoot and there was a documentary about it called Burden of Dreams; that documentary will be on at 4:45 AM Friday. And then there's a second documentary called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe at 6:30 AM Friday. This one came from a bet that Herzog had with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Morris was having trouble completing his first documentary so Herzog told him that if he did finish, then he (Herzog) would eat his shoe. Morris eventually completed Gates of Heaven, a documentary about pet cemeteries, and Herzog remained true to his word, eating boiled leather while giving a brief discourse on how to get a film completed and the state of moviemaking.
Friday night on TCM brings a bunch of taxi movies, concluding with what I think is the TCM premiere of a really interesting little movie: Night on Earth, at 3:45 PM. Director Jim Jarmusch looked at human nature by having five different stories all taking place more or less at the same time, although because the stories are in different time zones the seem to be taking part at different times of night. In all five stories, a taxi driver picks up a fare, leading to an interesting story. In Los Angeles, Winona Ryder plays a cabbie who picks up a casting director who ultimately would like to cast her in a role. In New York, an East German immigrant has trouble getting around the city. In Paris, a blind woman and an Ivorian immigrant talk about their different problems but how it's ultimately their shared humanity. In Rome, cabbie Roberto Benigni (years before Life is Beautiful) picks up a priest and then proceeds to tell bawdy stories much to the priest's horror and, well, watch the rest. Finally, in Helsinki, a couple of guys get drunk because they've just been laid off and on the taxi ride they tell their sob story to the driver. The driver responds with an even bigger sob story.
The classic version of 3:10 to Yuma is back on StarzEncore Westerns this week, at 4:52 AM Saturday among other times (so it won't necessarily clash with the next movie). Van Heflin plays Dan Evans, a rancher out west who's struggling because of a drought. He's got a chance to make some extra money on the side, but unfortunately that chance involves working with the stagecoach company to escort outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) to the titular train, which is then supposed to take Ben to justice in Yuma. Ben tries to exert psychological pressure on Dan by constantly needling him about the job he's being forced by circumstance to take. And meanwhile, Ben also has the rest of his outlaw gang looking for him. Sure enough, the gang finds finds that Dan is accompanying Ben to the train, so they surround the hotel where Dan is staying with Ben until the train gets there. And of course, nobody really wants to stick their necks out to help Dan.