TiVoPlex
By John Seal
October 19, 2004
From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.
Tuesday 10/19/04
1am Turner Classic Movies
Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972 USA): This long-forgotten MGM comedy stars Lynn Redgrave as a woman who kidnaps the son of gangster Victor Mature after his goons take over her dancing school and convert it into an illegal casino. Featuring an absurd plot only slightly more believable than that of 1971’s senior citizen motorcycle caper Bunny O’Hare, this is slight amusement at best, but in addition to Redgrave and Mature, you’ll spot boob-tube regulars like Pat Morita, Dom DeLuise, Severn Darden, John Astin, and Esther Rolle. Long unavailable on home video and unseen on television for years, this is a real rarity.
7:30am Sundance
Oporto of My Childhood (2001 POR): A double bill of unusual features from nonagenarian Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira are being aired on Sundance Channel this morning, kicking off with this love song to the filmmaker’s hometown. Named the European Capital of Culture in 2001, Oporto inspired de Oliveira - who directed his first feature film in 1931! - to revisit his childhood days in this docudrama, which blends fictional scenes with musical and cinematic fragments from the early 20th century. It’s followed at 8:30am by the director’s 2003 feature (yes, he’s still working at 96, with a new film currently in post-production), Un Filme Falado, a character study about squabbling tourists aboard a cruise ship captained by, of all people, John Malkovich. Both films air again 10/23 at 8am.
Wednesday 10/20/04
8pm Starz!
City of God (2002 BRA): The best film of 2002 - and 2003 as well, if you’re going by the guidelines established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - makes its American television debut this evening. The true story of youngsters growing up in the ghettos of Rio de Janeiro, City of God has the now-familiar roundabout narrative structure of a Tarantino film, but there the similarities to the works of Monsieur Ritalin end. Picking up where Hector Babenco’s gritty 1981 masterpiece Pixote left off, this Fernando Meirelles-helmed feature stars Alexandre Rodrigues as Buscape, a young, scrawny inhabitant of one of Rio’s ubiquitous shantytowns. The film’s major protagonists, however, are Buscape’s friends and neighbors, most of whom are deeply involved in the drug trade and all of whom are immersed in gang culture and life. City of God’s great strength is its ability to keep its subjects humanity in perspective, with even the worst of them revealing vulnerabilities or likable characteristics, and whilst the story may not be a new one - we already have learned many times over that poverty breeds crime, even if we choose not to learn the lesson - City of God miraculously manages to retell the tale in new and fresh ways. Extremely violent and frequently shocking, this dazzling film ends on a note of hope and grace that will appeal to even the most jaded film fan. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. Also airs at 11pm, 10/24 AT 10pm, and 10/25 at 1am.
Thursday 10/21/04
4:05am More Max
King Creole (1958 USA): Set in the picturesque French Quarter of old New Orleans, King Creole is one of Elvis Presley’s best films, benefiting from a screenplay by Michael V. Gazzo, whose brilliant drug-addiction drama Hatful of Rain had been released a year earlier. It also has some great music, featuring three Leiber-Stoller originals (including the rockin’ title track) and the wonderful and timeless Wise-Weisman composition, Crawfish. Shot on location in luminescent black-and-white, the film follows Elvis’ upwardly-mobile journey from dishwasher to nightclub performer under the tutelage of impresario Paul Stewart. As the King climbs to the top, he attracts the attention of local mobster Walter Matthau, who starts turning the screws when Presley refuses to appear at his nightclub. Directed by Michael Curtiz, and featuring Carolyn Jones, Dean Jagger, Vic Morrow, and Raymond Bailey, this is the Elvis film for folks who don’t like Elvis films.
Friday 10/22/04
3am Black Starz!
Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975 USA): I avoided this film for years because of its dreadful title, but it’s actually a very good drama unfairly lumped into the blaxploitation category. Berkeley native and former NBA star Keith Wilkes plays Cornbread, an aspiring high-school athlete gunned down by overzealous police. Lawyer Moses Gunn tries to separate fact from fiction when the fuzz attempt to exonerate themselves, and the cast also includes the always-excellent Rosalind Cash, Bernie Casey, TiVoPlex favorite Madge Sinclair, Thalmus Rasulala, Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas, and a very, very young Laurence Fishburne. Also airs at 8:40am.
11:45am Encore Westerns
The Big Gundown (1966 ITA-FRA): This Sergio Solima spaghetti western doesn't have the most original story - it’s the old one about a bounty hunter (Lee Van Cleef) on the tail of a desperado (Tomas Milian) - but it does have an absolutely stunning Ennio Morricone score that makes the whole thing worth watching. In a blatant case of false advertising, the film was promoted with the tagline ‘Mr. Ugly Comes to Town!’, when in fact star Van Cleef had played the ‘Bad’ in Sergio Leone’s 1966 epic, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Director Sergio Sollima remade this film in 1973 as Revolver, a contemporary crime thriller with Oliver Reed in the lead role. Also airs at 5pm.
Saturday 10/23/04
5am Turner Classic Movies
Cause for Alarm! (1951 USA): This entertaining, if far-fetched, pseudo-noir stars Loretta Young as a housewife endangered by her shell-shocked husband (Barry Sullivan) who thinks she’s knocking boots with the doctor who’s been paying him house calls. The absurd storyline (written by Loretta’s husband at the time, producer Tom Lewis) involves a missive written by Sullivan to his lawyer detailing his wife’s imagined peccadilloes, and the efforts Ms. Young must make to recover the letter before it gets delivered. Local postman Irving Bacon stands in her way, claiming - quite rightly - that once the letter hit the mailbox, it’s US government property. Shot on a slim budget in two weeks, Cause for Alarm! is a thoroughly unbelievable and thoroughly enjoyable MGM quickie.
9:30pm Turner Classic Movies
The Great Train Robbery (1979 GB): That cinematic rarity, a little-seen Michael Crichton film, The Great Train Robbery deserves a much wider audience than the one it found on its initial release. If you enjoy caper films, you won't want to miss this set-in-Victorian England caper flick featuring Sean Connery as a master criminal out to, well, rob a train. It’s reasonably suspenseful, flawlessly shot by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, features a good supporting cast, including Donald Sutherland, Michael Elphick, and Andre Morell, and is being aired wide-screen by TCM.
Sunday 10/24/04
3am The Movie Channel
The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001 GER-GB-ITA): This week’s speculative pick may be a real stinker for all I know, but I simply can’t resist any film that casts Ian Holm as The Little Corporal. Yes, during the same period he was portraying Bilbo Baggins, the diminutive Holm played an even shorter chap with real-life pretensions of greatness, Napoleon Bonaparte. Directed by Alan Taylor, recently employed on the entertaining TV series Keen Eddie, The Emperor’s New Clothes also features Iben Hjelje (John Cusack’s love interest in High Fidelity) in a romantic suspense tale involving Napoleon’s (fictional) escape from exile on St. Helena. Someone slip the little fella some arsenic before he can get back to Paris. Also airs at 6am, 1:10pm, and 4:10pm.
Monday 10/25/04
12:45am Showtime 2
1984 (1984 GB): Three cheers for Showtime, who are airing more and more films in their correct aspect ratios. Here’s the latest to get the letterboxed treatment, the definitive film version of George Orwell’s dystopian classic. Director Michael Radford's version is as grey and bleak as one would hope and imagine and is one of the all-time best screen adaptations of any novel, featuring the brilliantly restrained John Hurt as Winston Smith, the workaday drone who makes the mistake of falling in love with co-worker Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) when love is against the law. 1984 was also Richard Burton's last film, and it's nice to see him ending his career on a high note after spending much of the previous decade in mediocre big-budget bloaters and Eurojunk. When this film came out, the future it posited still seemed somewhat fantastic; in 2004, we truly do live in a corporate state and wage perpetual war against ever-shifting enemies. This frighteningly prescient film also features the most clinical (and unsexy) sex scene this side of Jude Law’s sleeping-bag shagfest in 2001’s Enemy at the Gates.
7am Turner Classic Movies
The Shiralee (1957 GB):Peter Finch is terrific as a traveling swagman, traversing the Australian outback in search of work and shelter. Finding his Sydney-based wife shacked up with another man, he takes his daughter (Dana Wilson) and resumes his wandering ways. The film does a good job of keeping a lid on sentiment and features outstanding cinematography by Paul Beeson, who usually worked on less-inspired fare like Tarzan Goes to India, Die Monster Die!, and Starcrash. One of the last efforts of Ealing Studios, and a good one, though certainly not on a par with their Alec Guinness comedies.
Noon Trio
Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971 USA): Dusty and Sweets McGee is a plotless, episodic look at the days and nights of Los Angeles junkies circa 1971. This mournful, elegiac film is a truly unique entry in its genre, its cast of real-life hopheads lending it a bittersweet tinge offset by a marvelous soundtrack of jaunty oldies. Blue Moon, Duke of Earl, The Loco-Motion...these were the songs these young people grew up listening to in happier, simpler times, and now they're the soundtrack of their rapidly-disintegrating lives. There's even a perfectly-selected Van Morrison tune, Into the Mystic, and a magnificent composition by the unfairly-neglected Jake Holmes. The first and best film of director Floyd Mutrux's on-again/off-again Hollywood career, Dusty and Sweets McGee is an amazing time capsule that all serious film fans should try to see.
12:45pm Turner Classic Movies
The House of the Seven Hawks (1959 GB): This long-unseen, shot-in-Britain mystery stars aging matinee idol Robert Taylor as an itinerant seaman searching for Nazi gold. Based on a novel by occasional Hitchcock collaborateur Victor Canning and directed by Richard Thorpe (Jailhouse Rock), this is an unexceptional, though well-made, murder mystery that hasn’t been on TV in many years.
6pm Sundance
Ford Transit (2002 ISR-PAL): Yes, it’s an Israeli-Palestinian co-production, and if those two nations can make a film together, perhaps Mid-East peace is possible after all. Detailing the onerous commute of West Bank Palestinians trying to get to work in Israel, the film’s subjects include a lawyer, a bereft mother whose son died in a suicide bombing, and others trying to live life under extremely difficult conditions. Ford Transit, which made its American debut at this year’s Portland International Film Festival, would make a perfect double-bill partner with the previously seen-on-Sundance documentary Detained, another story of occupation life on the West Bank.
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