Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 15-21, 2013. It's been hot in a large part of America these past few weeks, so why not keep cool by staying inside and watching some good movies? We've got five more Carson interviewees and a great campy horror movie in addition to Star of the Month Paul Henried and director FranÇois Truffaut, so there's something for everybody. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off this week with something on the Fox Movie Channel: These Thousand Hills, at 9:30 AM Monday. Don Murray stars as a cowboy working in Montana who really has a dream of having his own ranch; the only thing is, he doesn't have the money for it and can't get a loan from the bank. His lady friend, dance hall girl Lee Remick, however, has saved up some money, which she lends him. Murray gets his ranch and makes a success of it, but in wanting to be a respectable member of society, he dumps Remick for banker's niece Patricia Owens. Remick, for her part, winds up with Richard Egan, who is a brute of a man who treats her terribly. This, combined with the lynching of Murray's best friend (Stuart Whitman), causes Murray to wonder just what the important things in life really are.
Carson on TCM returns on Monday night at 8:00 PM with five more interviewees, which are, in order: Shelley Winters from 1975; Ronald Reagan, also from 1975; Robin Williams from 1981; Jonathan Winters from 1988; and Michael Caine from 1983.
Director Bryan Forbes died back in May, so even though the first of the movies after Carson on TCM, The Wrong Box at 9:00 PM, stars final interviewee Michael Caine, the night is given over to Forbes' work, he having directed The Wrong Box. I've already recommended that one once before, so this week I'd like to mention Seance on a Wet Afternoon at 11:00 PM, instead. Kim Stanley stars as the psychic Myra, which is of course a job for scam artists. Still, she's not successful as a psychic, so she comes up with a "brilliant" idea: have her weak-willed husband (Richard Attenborough) kidnap the child of a well-to-do couple. Myra will then use her bogus powers to "find" kid, making her the hero and boosting her business at the same time! Of course it's a cockamamie scheme, as the police begin to suspect Myra fairly quickly, but worse is that there's more to Myra than meets the eyes.
A couple of weeks back, I mentioned Errol Flynn playing a Canadian fighting Nazis in Northern Pursuit. This week, you can see him as... a Norwegian fighting Nazis in Edge of Darkness, at 11:00 AM Tuesday. Flynn plays a fisherman in a small coastal town that's been under Nazi occupation since the invasion a few years earlier. But the story is not only about him; it's about the town doctor (Walter Huston) and his family, especially daughter Ann Sheridan, all of whom have seen terrible predations on their lives by the Nazis, who are led here by Helmut Dantine. It's enough to drive them all to a revolt. Well, not Dantine, but the Norewgians. There are of course exceptions, such as the cannery owner who collaborates with the Nazis, and Sheridan's own brother, who is an informant, with tragic consequences.
Tuesday night is the third night of movies featuring Star of the Month Paul Henried. The night kicks off with a film in which Henried doesn't star, but is only billed sixth: Never So Few. This late 1950s movie is set in World War II in Burma, where a group of OSS agents led by Frank Sinatra are working with British Captain Richard Johnson to train the native Kachin people to engage in guerrilla actions against the Japanese occupation. Sinatra discovers his jeep driver (Steve McQueen) is a good manipulator, so he gets recruited into the undercover work. Meanwhile, the Chinese are training bandits who raid the Americans, which causes problems. As for Henried, he's basically trying to profiteer off of the war, and he's got a relationship with Gina Lollobrigida, who is clearly only in this movie because she's eye candy (not that there's anything wrong with that0, but the film bogs down a whole lot when Sinatra tries to get involved with her.
Wednesday night on TCM is a night of Tony Randall movies. Randall was always adept at comedy, as he shows in Our Man in Marrakesh, airing at 10:00 PM. Randall plays American tourist Andrew Jessel, on a holiday in Marrakesh, Morocco. Unfortunately, he gets more than he bargained for: in the closet of his hotel room, he finds a dead body! Obviously, there's been a murder! One of the people he met on the bus from the airport, Kyra (played by Senta Berger) helps him, as the story becomes one of international spying intrigue. Apparently, there's a local crime boss (Herbert Lom) who's expecting to get some documents from somebody who was on the same flight as Jessel in exchange for $2 million, and there's something to do with United Nations politics too. The plot is a bit of a mess, but you're supposed to sit back and enjoy the laughs, which are also provided by Terry-Thomas and veteran British character actor Wilfrid Hyde-White.
Another movie that mixes crime and comedy is The Lady and the Mob, which comes on at 7:30 AM Thursday on TCM. Fay Bainter stars as a woman whose son (Lee Bowman) is engaged to Ida Lupino, which is a problem because Bainter has a way of screwing up her son's engagements. She goes to the dry cleaners one day, and finds out that the prices have been raised, because somebody is running a protection racket. What's a little old lady to do? Well, since she's got money herself from owning the local bank, she calls New York and hires a bunch of gangsters from New York to help her form a new gang and destroy the current one, all for good of course! Along the way, Bainter learns that the corruption extends to very high places, but also learns to respect Lupino, since she's helping deal wiht the racketeers.
This Thursday night brings July's Guest Programmer to TCM: New York Times columnist Frank Rich. As with all Guest Programmers, he's presenting four of his favorite movies. I've recommended The Palm Beach Story (at 8:00 PM) quite a few times. That's followed at 9:45 PM by The Manchurian Candidate, which I've also posted about; this is, of course, the original version from 1962 and not the dreadful remake of a decade or so ago. Then at midnight Friday (or 11:00 PM Thursday LFT) is Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game.
The last of Rich's selections, at 2:00 AM Friday, is Petulia. Julie Christie plays Petulia, a woman in San Francisco married to wealthy Richard Chamberlain. However, as we eventually find out, the marriage isn't a particularly happy one for her, and when she sees doctor George C. Scott, she falls for him and tries to strike up a relationship with him. He has recently been divorced, and although he's seeing another woman, he also starts seeing Petulia. That's the basic gist of the story, but unfortunately, it can be a bit tough to follow at times because it's told in a story that involves a lot of flashbacks and edits. On the plus side, Petulia is also a lovely to look at time capsule of San Francisco as it was back in 1968, with a lot of location series, and performances from Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead.
We have a third night of FranÇois Truffaut movies on Friday night. I'm not a fan of Jules et Jim (10:00 PM), so instead I'll mention The Man Who Loved Women, at 4:30 AM Saturday. This movie starts off at a funeral, for engineer Bertrand (Charles Denner). But the odd thing is, there are only women at his funeral; no men. Why? Well, GenviÈve, who was Bertrand's last girlfriend, is going to tell us why. Or, she's going to let Bertrand more or less in his own tell us why. Bertrand had written a book about his experiences with women, and after the funeral, the movie becomes a flashback, of Bertrand narrating from his own book, about his experiences with women, why he had so many, falling into infatuation almost at the drop of a hat and the great lengths he goes to to seduce them even though he was supposed to be busy seducing somebody else.
At the beginning of this week's thread, I mentioned there would be a campy horror movie. That film is The Brain That Wouldn't Die, airing at 3:15 AM Sunday on TCM. Herb Evers plays Dr. Bill, who is working in transplantation techniques. He's got a girlfriend in the form of Jan (Virginia Leith), and you know the two interests are going to come together. That happens when the two of them get involved in a car accident that unfotunately decapitates Jan! Bill keeps her alive in his secret laboratory by keeping her severed head in a pan! Jan, unsurprisingly, is pissed about the arrangement and utterly snarky about it (her vocal cords are still intact); meanwhile, she (and we) are trying to figure out what's going on in the locked door opposite Jan-in-the-Pan. Bill, meanwhile, is trying to find a new body for Jan, and is a total perv about it! He visits strip clubs and artists' models among other things. This is a movie that's terrible, but it's in the so awful it's a riot category. Oh -- we do get to find out at the end what's behind that locked door, which is also a highlight.
Last but not least, we have Mrs. Soffel, at 5:45 PM Sunday on TCM. Diane Keaton plays the titular Mrs. Soffel, a woman in circa-1900 Pittsburgh who is married to the warden of a prison (played by Edward Herrmann) in Pittsburgh. In order to make her life more meaningful, she goes into the prison to read the Bible to prisoners. This is where she meets convicted killers Ed Biddle (Mel Gibson) and his brother Jack (Matthew Modine). Ed, being a condemned man, doesn't believe any of the stuff in the Bible about God's love and forgiveness, but does seem to have a liking for Mrs. Soffel. In fact, he's charismatic enough that he can convince Mrs. Soffel to smuggle in a saw under all those pantaloons and help him and his brother escape! Things get quite a bit more complicated when, during the escape, the Biddles stop at Mrs. Soffel's house and Ed asks her to come to come along with them.
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