Welcome to Fedya's “Movies to Tivo” thread, for the week of September 7-13, 2020. We're finally getting to football this week, but before the Packers play, there's still several days. So why not use that time to watch some more interesting movies. There are going to be more concert movies all day Monday on TCM; movies directed by women on Tuesday night; the return of TCM Underground with Plan 9 from Outer Space and Reefer Madness overnight between Friday and Saturday, and more. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
After the concert movies finish up at the end of Labor Day, we get something completely different, in the form of one of the Dogville shorts, this one being The Big Dog House at about 5:35 AM Tuesday on TCM. The Dogville shorts spoofed popular MGM movies and genres from around 1930, with this one being a takeoff on the movie The Big House. The difference, of course, is that the human actors were replaced with dogs dressed up like humans. In this short, Trixie is a shop girl at a department store who is in love with Fido in accounting. However, Trixie's boss also loves her, so to get Fido out of the way, he gets Fido framed for murder! Fido gets sent to prison and faces the electric chair, with Trixie trying to get the exculpatory evidence to save him at the last moment, which would become a standard trope in prison movies. You're either going to be horrified at what these dogs are made to do, or think it's the funniest thing you've seen in a long time.
Showing up on FXM this week is the undemanding movie Everything Happens at Night, at 7:20 AM Tuesday. Two rival reporters, American Geoffrey Thompson (Ray Milland) and Brit Ken Morgan (Bob Cummings) are looking for Nobel laureate Dr. Norden, who is officially dead in an attempt to escape a Nazi concentration camp but believed to have escaped and living in hiding somewhere in Switzerland. They find Dr. Norden (Maurice Moscovitch) in a small Swiss village, where she has a daughter Louise (Sonja Henie). This being a Sonja Henie movie, you can probably guess what happens the rest of the way. Both of the reporters fall in love with Louise, and she gets to do a big ice skating number along the way. However, the presence of the reporters also tips off the Gestapo, who for fairly obvious reasons want Dr. Norden dead. The reporters become part of the story, trying to smuggle the doctor and Louise to safety, first to France (the movie went into production in mid-1939 before the Nazis invaded Poland), and then to either England or the US, depending on who gets Louise in the last reel.
Tuesday morning and afternoon on TCM bring a bunch of heist movies. A lighter one that I haven't recommended in a while is Jack of Diamonds, at 6:00 PM Tuesday. The Ace of Diamonds (Joseph Cotten) is a code name for a famous criminal who robbed ladies of their valuable diamonds in true cat-burglar fashion. Police in Germany are puzzled when more burglaries with that method start tking place again after a gap of several years, since Ace is presumed to have aged out of cat burglary and retired. It turns out that there's a young man, learning from Ace, taking the nickname Jack of Diamonds (George Hamilton). Jack, Ace, and the rest of the gang decide to do a more complicated job, but better policing along with infighting among the members of the merry band of criminals threatens to derail the job. There are stylish mid-1960s sets, along with cameo appearances from several actresses who are victims of the cat burglars. Fun, even if it's not up to the gritty standards of the earlier heist films.
A heist movie of sorts is Sneakers, which will be on Thriller Max at 1:20 AM Wednesday. Robert Redford plays Martin Bishop, a 1960s radical hacker who had to change his identity and settle down as a computer security analyst after one of his jobs ended up in a man getting murdered. Two decades have passed and a pair of NSA agents approach him with an offer he can't refuse: recover a cryptography device from Janek, a brilliant scientist who has started working for the Russians. Do it and we'll clear your name; don't and will reveal your identity. So Bishop assembles his associates: Mother (Dan Aykroyd), who believes in conspiracies; brilliant young man Carl (River Phoenix); blind expert in sound Whistler (David Strathairn); and ex-CIA man Crease (Sidney Poitier). They are able to get that crypto device, but after delivering it to the NSA they realize that the NSA are a bunch of shits who lied to them about Janek and why they really wanted the device. They've also framed Bishop for another crime, so to extricate himself he's going to have to get that device again.
The 911 emergency number was first used in 1968. Before that, there was no standard number in the US. Thus you could get a title like Dial 1119, airing at 5:00 PM Wednesday on TCM. Marshall Thompson plays Gunther Wyckoff, who has just escaped from a mental institution. He takes a bus to Terminal City, looking for Dr. Faron (Sam Leven), the doctor who got him declared mentally incompetent and put away in that institution. He can't find Faron, but sees that there's a bar next door to Faron's apartment building. So Gunther goes in that bar, tended by Chuckles (William Conrad) and having a small number of patrons, and draws a gun on them, holding them all hostage. Amazingly for 1950, the bar already has a TV set, and Chuckles, seeing the report, realizes who's holding them hostage and tries to get help. This does eventually result in the police surrounding the place and a standoff occurs as Gunther holds everybody hostage while the story is being reported on TV.
We get another night of doctor movies on Thursday on TCM, with this week's theme being devoted to doctors in war. I don't think I've mentioned The Story of Dr. Wassell before, so I'll point out that you can see it at 12:30 AM Friday. This one is based on the true story of Croydon Wassell (Gary Cooper), who spent a couple of decades as a medical missionary in China before becoming a navy doctor in the mid 1930s. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor also coincided with an offensive in southeast Asia that would lead to their capturing Dutch Indonesia, where Wassell was stationed at the time of the events in the movie. The Japanese attacked the Allied fleet in the area, leading to a lot of injuries and a mad dash to evacuate as many people as possible before the Japanese conquering the region. Unfortunately, the injured had to be tended to medically before they could be evacuated, so Wassell stayed behind with them during the first wave of evacuations while the Japanese were advancing. Of course, since the movie is told in flashback, we know he gets the injured sailors out at the end. Laraine Day plays Wassell's love interest, while a wide array of second-tier stars play the injured sailors and their love interests.
I could swear the x4 search engine is buggy, since it doesn't bring up any hits for the movie Blown Away. It's going to be on StarzEncore Classics this week, at 3:26 AM Friday. Jeff Bridges plays Jimmy Dove, an expert with the Boston police department's bomb squad, who's looking to retire from active duty and go into teaching new bomb squad members. But Dove has a secret, which is that Dove isn't his real identity, but McGivney, an Irish republican who committed bombings in Northern Ireland and spent time in a terrorist cell with Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones) before the two had a falling out. Gaerity wound up getting caught and imprisoned, leading him to want to take revenge on his old friend. Gaerity escapes from a prison in Northern Ireland, and learning about Dove from a TV news report, makes his way to Boston to get that revenge, setting up bombs designed to kill the members of the bomb squad as opposed to regular people. Dove has to go back into active duty when he realizes his wife and daughter are in danger.
For a light comedy this week, I'll mention Merton of the Movies, which is airing on TCM at 10:00 AM Friday. Red Skelton plays Merton Gill a theater usher in a small plains state town in the silent era. He dreams of being an actor, and when he is able to stop a robbery at the theater, he credits to silent star Laurence Rupert (Leon Ames), whose style Merton has been imitating. Rupert's handlers invite Merton to Hollywood as a publicity stunt, but Merton thinks this is his big break into movies. In fact, all Merton can do is screw things up in a slapstick way. When Rupert gets too drunk to complete the latest costume drama he's working on, the suits decide that they can take the footage they have and mix it with Merton's slapstick to complete the film and turn it into a comedy. Rupert is naturally pissed. Along the way, Merton meets a stunt double (Virginia O'Brien) for a star (Gloria Grahame) and falls in love with the double, who's trying to get her own big break. If you like the comedy stylings of Red Skelton, you'll definitely like this one.
Over on StarzEncore Westerns, a movie I don't think I've mentioned before is The Broken Star, which will be on at 11:24 PM Saturday. Howard Duff plays Frank Smeed, the deputy marshal of a western town circa 1900. He kills a rancher and steals the guy's $8,000 in gold, claiming he shot the guy in self defense. He doesn't realize, though, that there's a witness to the crime. Meanwhile, of of Smeed's colleagues, deputy Bill Gentry (Bill Williams) is called in to investigate the case, using primitive forensic science to try to figure out whether Smeed really was acting in self-defense. At the same time, there are guys who knew the murder victim and want revenge (and probably that gold as well), so they're trying to kill Smeed before Gentry can figure out the case and bring Gentry to trial. Interesting in that this sort of police procedural wasn't normally combined with a western.
We didn't have a Star of the Month on TCM last week because of the Labor Day movies and because TCM selected a Star of the Month who didn't have very many movies to choose from: Dorothy Dandridge. For the next three Sundays in prime time, before Silent Sunday Nights, TCM will be running a total of eight Dandridge movies. This first Sunday sees probably Dandridge's most famous movie and the one that earned her an Oscar nomination, Carmen Jones, at 8:00 PM. That will be followed at 10:00 PM by Bright Road, where she plays a schoolteacher helping a troubled kid. Finally, at 11:30 PM, there's Sun Valley Serenade, a Sonja Henie movie where Dandridge only shows up in a dance number for the Oscar-nominated song Chattanooga Choo-Choo, a scene with fairly obvious cut points where exhibitors in the south could excise that scene so segregated white audiences wouldn't have to have their eyes sullied by a musical number with black people.