Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 7-13, 2008. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise specified. This having been a holiday week, some of the descriptions might be a bit shorter, as I was spending more time doing other things instead of working on these stellar threads.

We start off with the movie Oscar selected as the Best Picture of 1942, Mrs. Miniver, airing at 4:15 AM Monday on TCM. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon star as a British couple at the start of World War II, and how the war affects them. The movie does this without actually showing much combat (well, with the exception of air-raids). This being a Hollywood production, it gets England wrong, especially the accents -- England didn't really look and sound the way it does in Hollywood movies. But the movie makes up for it with its cast. In addition to the two leads, there's Best Supporting Actress winner Teresa Wright as a young woman and Dame May Whitty as her grandmother; and character actors such as Henry Travers and Reginald Owen.

TCM have a special series of interviews this month by film critic Elvis Mitchell called "Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence", airing at 8:00 PM on Monday nights, with a repeat at 10:30 PM. This week sees Mitchell interviewing director Sydney Pollack in what was Pollack's last in-depth interview before his death. The first airing of the interview will be followed at 8:30 PM by a showing of Pollack's movie Tootsie.

Moving ahead to Tuesday, we have the second night of TCM's salute to Star of the Month Rosalind Russell. The movie kicking off this week's set of Russell movies is Craig's Wife, at 8:00 PM. If the title sounds familiar, it's not because I've recommended the movie before -- it's because I've recommended the remake, Harriet Craig, before. Craig's Wife is a 1936 version of the later Harriet Craig; in this older version, Rosalind Russell plays the wife of a businessman on the way up who is extremely possessive -- to the point that she'll even screw up her own marriage. Watch for some of the supporting women; you'll see Billie Burke (the mother in Dinner at Eight and Glinda, the good witch in The Wizard of Oz) and Jane Darwell (who won an Oscar as the matriarch in The Grapes of Wrath).

On Wednesday, we'll move away from TCM, since there are interesting movies on some of the other channels. First, at 12:30 PM on Cinemax is The Fury. I think I've recommended this movie before; it stars Kirk Douglas as a government agent whose son is kidnapped because he's got psychic powers. So, Douglas goes and kidnaps a girl the same age as her son, and tries to use her to get his son back. It's a pretty cheesy movie, not helped by some of the 1978-era decor. But there are some funny (not that this is what the film was going for) special effects, and a really gory climactic scene which does, in an unintentionally humorous way, redeem the rest of the movie. In that respect, it's got the same cult movie vibe that something like The Omen does, even though both were trying to be serious movies.

A much better movie shows up on Wednedsay on Encore Mysteries: The Killing, at 3:10 PM. This is a movie that is very reminiscent of The Asphalt Jungle, and not just because Sterling Hayden is the star of both movies. In The Killing, an ensemble cast plan the robbery of the day's takings of a race track, what is actually a quite substantial sum. The plot seems to go fairly well, albeit with some minor unexpected glitches. Of course, those glitches will eventually be the downfall of the robbers, along with their combined greed. (I told you it sounded like The Asphalt Jungle.) Stanley Kubrick directed it, one of his earliest movies; the rest of the ensemble cast includes meek Elisha Cook; Marie Windsor (of The Narrow Margin) as Cook's wife; and Vince Edwards, better known as TV's Ben Casey in the 1960s, but who played a string of seedy masculine characters in the 1950s. This is an excellent movie, and would probably be my #1 pick this week if it weren't for an extremely rare cult classic coming up on TCM Underground....

Moving ahead to Thursday, we get a string of 1960s movies. First up is Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, at 1:00 PM on TCM. James Coburn stars in this crime caper, in which a band of criminals try to rob the bank at LAX (the airport, not the city in Wisconsin); in this case, the cover for the crime is that security is going to be too busy with the arival of a high-level Soviet delegation to notice what's going on elsewhere in the airport. Unfortunately, this movie doesn't reach the level of Topkapi, let alone a classic of the genre like the original Ocean's Eleven. There's a lot of nice 60s style, if you enjoy paying attention to those details, although even here, we've got another movie coming up with better 60s style. If you just want a simple movie that doesn't require much thinking, this is a good one for you.

The next movie doesn't require much thinking either: the original version of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, Thursday at 4:45 PM on TCM. Well, actually, it doesn't have anything to do with the horror writer, which may not be such a bad thing. It's a "generation gap" movie, in which an older star (in this case Anthony Quinn) gets stuck with some bright young things in an attempt to make a movie that will appeal to the hipsters. Specifically, Quinn plays a retired mobster who gets kidnapped by the younguns (including a young Faye Dunaway), only to find his old pals don't care about him any more. At least there's a peppy theme song by the Supremes.

Immedieatly following The Happening[b], at 6:30 PM Thursday on TCM, is [b]Homicidal. A woman walks into a hotel, offering a bellhop a substantial money to be the groom in a quickie marriage of convenience. He accepts, and at the wedding, she kills the justice of the peace performing the ceremony! Eventually, our woman ends up nursing a wealthy old mute, and we begin to suspect that there's going to be some sort of trouble surrounding the old lady's inheritance. The movie was directed by famed gimmick director William Castle, who had previously given us stuff like The Tingler, with seats wired for electric shocks. The gimmick in Homicidal is that just before the last reel, Castle offers anybody too week to see the "shocking" ending the chance to leave the theater, complete with a clock counting down. Homicidal isn't a very good movie, but it's become a cult classic over the past decades, and is a hoot.

Sally Field is TCM's guest programmer for July, and her movies show up in prime time on Thursday. The best of her selections is All About Eve, at 11:45 PM Thursday. An allegory for the Green Bay Packers, All About Eve stars Bette Davis in the Brett Favre role, as aging veteran Margo Channing. The scheming Aaron Rodgers understudy, here named Eve Harrington, is played by Anne Baxter. Mike McCarthy shows up as playwright Lloyd Richards, played by Hugh Marlowe. And behind the scenes, of course, we've got Ted Thompson, who uses a lot of words to say nothing, or whatever he wants them to mean; the Thompson equivalent here is snakelike theater critic Addison DeWitt, played by George Sanders in one of his best roles.

The next movie is even more of a cult classic than Homicidal, although it's also exceedingly rare: Skidoo, Saturday at 2:00 AM on TCM. The plot doesn't sound bad: a retired gangster (Jackie Gleason) is brought out of retirement by his old boss (Groucho Marx, in his last movie) to try to rub out a rival mobster who's about to turn state's evidence (Mickey Rooney). Unfortunately, director Otto Preminger wsa trying to make a movie that the hipsters would enjoy, so he had Marx persuade Gleason by having Gleason's teenage daughter, who likes to cavort with hippies, kidnapped. That's where the trouble begins, and the movie quickly descends into territory so unbelievably bad, you wonder what the hell everybody was thinking:
Carol Channing, playing Jackie Gleason's wife, does a striptease that has her ending up in yellow tights and a translucent bra.
She's doing that striptease for Frankie Avalon (they still thought the young folks considered him cool?), who, along with his father (Cesar Romero), wears matching pumpkin-themed outfits.
She also gets to sing the big musical number at the end of the movie, dressed up as Napoleon.
Speaking of singing, Harry Nilsson sings the closing credits.
Copious quanities of LSD. Jackie Gleason gets the first acid trip, followed by almost everybody else, in a prison break scene facilitated by having the prison's food laced with acid. Watch for naked Green Bay Packers here.
Groucho Marx's character is named "God", and lives on a boat just outside US territorial waters; the boat is captained by an elderly George Raft. In the final musical number, aboard the boat, watch for God's mistress, played by an actress named "Luna"; she wears an outfit that's so backless that you can see her butt crack!
The movie is so bad that Preminger's widow and the rest of his family wanted it destroyed after he died, but fortunately, that hasn't happened. It's one of those movies that's so bad it's funny, and is probably even better than, say, Valley of the Dolls in that regard.

TCM's "Essential" movie this week, at 8:00 PM Saturday, is The Postman Always Rings Twice. John Garfield stars as an itinerant worker who walks right into a murder plot being committed by the gorgeous Lana Turner, who's trapped in a loveless marriage and wants to knock off her husband (Cecil Kellaway). It's one of the great noirs of the 1940s.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is the excuse for TCM to show a night of movies with co-star Hume Cronyn. Second up is Brute Force, at 10:00 PM Saturday. Cronyn plays the brutal chief guard at a state penitentiary; the star of the movie is Burt Lancaster, who vows to lead a prison break. It's another excellent movie.

Our last choice is something much more upbeat than Brute Force: The Young Girls of Rochefort, Sunday at 9:45 AM on IFC. This 1967 French movie is about a bunch of impossibly thin, impossibly good-looking young people in the French seaside town of Rochefort who are looking for love, only to find that it's been right under their noses all along. Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac play twin sisters who end up with a blond sailor/painter and pianist Gene Kelly, respectively. Their mother jilted a music store owner years ago, only to find eventually that he, too, is still in town. The characters sing and dance their way through this stuff, and are unbelievably good at it (and I'm not normally that big a fan of musicals). The cast also includes George Chakiris, who won an Oscar several years earlier in West Side Story. The sets are gorgeous, although to be honest, when I was in France briefly in the summer of 1989 I recall French towns looking rather dingier than this. The colors are also vibrant and contribute the the feeling of everything being impossibly good looking.

Ah, crap!

4:15 AM on Monday.

quote:

Originally posted by MsPacman:
Ah, crap!

4:15 AM on Monday.

I went to tape it when it was on on a Saturday morning back in October (I think). The only problem is that I left the satellite box on ESPN2 since I had been watching a college football game, and ended up with two hours of hunting and fishing shows!

Don't forget the Skidoo is on overnight tonight. You won't want to miss this howler.