Welcome to another edition of Fedya’s “Movies to Tivo”, for the week of September 6-12, 2021. College football started its season in earnest yesterday, and normally, your Wisconsin Badgers wait until later in the season to disappoint you. This time they let you down right at the beginning so you don’t have to waste time waiting for the inevitable debacle. Instead, you can use that time to watch a bunch of interesting movies. We’ve got stuff from the 1930s through to the 1990s, in a whole bunch of genres. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
There’s been more interest in H.P. Lovecraft since the premier of the TV series Lovecraft Country. A half century earlier, there was the movie The Dunwich Horror, which will be on Epix at 6:25 AM Monday. Sandra Dee plays college student Nancy, studying under history professor Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley Sr.). Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) shows up, interested in a book Armitage was talking about, the Necronomicon. What Nancy doesn’t realize is that Wilbur and his family have a sordid past, and that he wants to use her as part of a strange ritual. Wilbur had been born with an evil twin brother, a difficult labor that drove his mother insane. Or is Wilbur the evil twin who has locked up his brother? Armitage and one of Nancy’s classmates, Elizabeth, realize that Nancy is in grave danger, having been drugged into staying at the Whateley place, and go there to try to help her, even if it puts them in danger themselves.
Next up is a movie everybody’s heard of:
Well, maybe not everybody. A Streetcar Named Desire will be on TCM at 6:15 AM Tuesday. Vivien Leigh plays Blanche Dubois, who heads from the old family estate of Belle Rive down to New Orleans after some financial and personal problems that become clear later in the movie. New Orleans is where Blanche’s sister Stella (Kim Hunter) lives with her husband Stanley (Marlon Brando). Stanley is a bit of a brute, but he’s also the one person who can see through Blanche’s stories. Blanche needs a man, and Mitch (Karl Malden) is a guy with an elderly mother who is probably in need of a woman too. But he too discovers that Blanche isn’t all she seems, and is ultimately having mental health issues. How can Stanley and Stella deal with this if they can’t have her in their cramped apartment any longer? If you like the sort of Southern Gothic that Tennessee Williams wrote, then you’re going to love this movie.
Hollywood has always been unoriginal, and one of the things they’ve done frequently is to make an English-language remake of a foreign movie. One example is The Man With One Red Shoe, appearing on ThrillerMax at 3:35 AM Tuesday. Tom Hanks plays the titular man, a concert violinist named Richard Drew who was forced to wear one dress shoe and one red sneaker on a transcontinental flight when one of his fellow musicians played a practical joke on him. Unfortunately, mismatched shoes is also a perfect ruse in the spy business, and Richard is about to get caught up unwillingly in such business. CIA director Ross (Charles Durning) and deputy director Cooper (Dabney Coleman) are locked in a battle for control of the organization. Ross has one of his agents pick out a random non-spy for Cooper’s agents to follow, and the guy with the mismatched shoes is perfect for that. The presence of all these strange people following Richard certainly presents problems for him, especially because he’s been busy having an affair with his drummer Morris’ (Jim Belushi) wife Paula (Carrie Fisher).
TCM is looking at several child stars on Tuesday in prime time. Among them is Margaret O’Brien, who is the star of Big City, at 2:30 AM Wednesday. Danny Thomas plays a Jewish cantor, David Feldman, who finds an abandoned baby one day. Also showing up are David’s friends, Protestant minister Philip Andrews (Robert Preston) and Irish Catholic policeman Patrick O’Donnell (George Murphy). The three take custody of the baby, who eventually grows to be Margaret O’Brien as Midge, but there’s the issue that she could probably do better in a more traditional family. So the local judge Abercrombie (Edward Arnold) decides that if one of the men gets married, he and his wife might be able to get full custody of Midge. Needless to say each of the three men starts looking for love in order to be able to get that full custody, with O’Donnell trying to woo a nightclub singer Shoo Shoo (Betty Garrett) and the other two going after teacher Miss Bartlett (Karin Booth). However, nobody seems to be asking Midge what she’d like, and she’s got ideas of her own.
Another of the movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation that a search of x4 claims I haven’t mentioned yet is Fräulein. It’s got another airing at 11:35 AM Wednesday. Dana Wynter plays the Fräulein, a woman named Erika Angermann living with her father in Cologne in early 1945. On one very eventful day, escaped POW Maj. MacLain (Mel Ferrer) shows up at the house, shortly after which it’s hit in an Allied air raid, killing Dad. Erika decides to go to her uncle in Berlin, who’s been forced to put up a pair of Nazis, the Graubachs. After the Soviets conquer Berlin, the evil Graubachs try to use Erika as bait for the Red Army before “rescuing” her from being a Trümmerfrau by offering her a job that she doesn’t realize is prostitution. Eventually Maj. MacLain gets stationed in Berlin, finds Erika, falls in love with her, and tries to get her to America. But the Graubachs have one more trick up their sleeves. A reasonably well-made, if not particularly realistic, movie.
I’ve recommended the Robert Montgomery movie Hide-Outon several occasions. MGM remade it in the early 1940s as I’ll Wait for You, which will be on TCM at 1:00 PM Wednesday. Robert Sterling plays the gangster, Lucky Wilson, who has to make a getaway from the big city after getting shot in the arm. His underlings take him to a farm to recuperate, one owned by the Millers (Fay Holden from the Andy Hardy movies and Henry Travers from It’s Wonderful Life), who have an adult daughter Pauline (Marsha Hunt still alive a couple of months shy of 104) and younger daughter Lizzie (Virginia Weidler). The Millers don’t know the truth about Lucky, and as you can guess even if you hadn’t seen the original, he and Pauline begin to fall in love. But there’s a police detective on the case, Lt. McFarley (Paul Kelly), and since there’s that pesky Production Code, you know that he’s going to have to bring Lucky to justice even though Lucky might be beginning to reform.
If you want to see a fun movie with classic stars who are quite a bit older, you could do worse than to catch Out to Sea, airing at 6:35 AM Friday on StarzEncore, and three hours later if you only have the west coast feed. Jack Lemmon plays Herb Sullivan, recently widowed and trying to get on with life. To “help” him, his brother-in-law Charlie (Walter Matthau) takes him on a cruise to Mexico, except that he doesn’t tell Herb until they board the boat that he’s actually gotten them both hired on as dance partners for the lonely old women who take such cruises. (Barney Miller and Donald O’Connor are among the other dance partners.) Charlie, of course, is simply looking for one of those rich old ladies to romance for her money, eventually meeting Liz LaBreche (Dyan Cannon) and her mom Mavis (Elaine Stritch). What he doesn’t know is that they’re looking for a rich guy’s money. Herb, meanwhile, meets Vivian (Gloria De Haven), which might actually be love. Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner) is a hoot as the martinet of a boss to the dance partners.
Up against the first airing of Out to Seais an interesting sci-fi/disaster movie, Transatlantic Tunnel, at 6:00 AM Friday on TCM. In some not too distant future, engineer Richard McAllan (Richard Dix) gets the brilliant idea of building a transatlantic tunnel from England to North America. He’s able to get funding from wealthy Lloyd (C. Aubrey Smith) and his daughter, and sets off to start building the tunnel. Of course, such an engineering feat is entirely far-fetched, and exceedingly difficult considering getting all the workers that far under sea level, so there’s a lot of opposition to the project. This especially once the technical difficulties come. Madge Evans plays Mrs. McAllan, who supports her husband at first before beginning to get estranged by his constant absence. Leslie Banks plays Robbins, a fellow engineer and McAllan’s best friend. Walter Huston and George Arliss have cameos as the US President and British Prime Minister respectively. This was based on a German novel from 1913, which posited that transatlantic planes would make the tunnel obsolete before it was finished.
The Saturday matinee block has returned to TCM with August being over, so this week I’ll mention one of the movies, Central Park, at about 8:27 AM Saturday. Joan Blondell plays Dot, a woman loitering more or less in Central Park because there’s a Depression on and she’s out of work. On a park bench she meets Rick (Wallace Ford) and the two fall for each other, not that there’s much they can do to help each other though. Dot is approached by Nick Samo (Harold Huber), claiming to be a policeman and asking her to do an undercover job. She doesn’t realize that they’re actually gangsters looking to rob the Central Park Casino. Also in the park is police officer Charlie Cabot (Guy Kibbee), who is nearing retirement but also going blind and trying to hide that long enough to reach retirement. Rick helps Charlie which nets him a make-work job, one which will help when it comes time to foil the casino robbers. There’s also the Central Park zoo which comes into the plot when one of the lions escapes…. Warner Bros packed a lot of fun into a one-hour movie.
Noir Alleyhas also come back to TCM, with this week’s selection being Drive a Crooked Road, at 10:00 AM Sunday. Mickey Rooney plays Eddie Shannon, a mechanic at a garage who would really rather be racing the sports cars rather than servicing them. But for that he needs money he doesn’t have. Then he meets Barbara (Dianne Foster), who’s a lovely femme fatale so naturally Eddies falls in love with her. Of course, she’s already got a boyfriend in Steve (Kevin McCarthy), and Steve and his friend Harold (Jack Kelly) are bank robbers who want to use Eddie to drive the getaway car because his racing ability can get them down some difficult roads. Eddie eventually gives in and agrees if only because there’s so much money in it for him. But he also doesn’t realize that Barbara has been double-crossing him the whole time and Steve and Harold don’t intend for Eddie to wind up with any money. Mickey Rooney was actually a capable actor when given a good role, so much more than Andy Hardy.