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From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.

Tuesday 9/14/10

10:05 AM Showtime Extreme
The Long Duel (1967 GB): Showtime Extreme really seems to be in the mood for late ‘60s epics at the moment. Here’s another one that, sadly, probably won’t be getting a widescreen airing, but will be worth a look anyway for star spotters and admirers of sweeping vistas. Directed by Ken Annakin, The Long Duel stars a beturbaned Yul Brynner as Sultan, an unambitiously named tribal leader getting up to all sorts of trouble on the North West Frontier. The rebellious Sultan liberates some of his brethren from prison, which gets the attention of Stafford (Harry Andrews), a district superintendent determined to keep the brown man down. He assigns officer Freddy Young (Trevor Howard) the task of bringing Sultan to heel, but Young comes down with a case of White Man’s Guilt Syndrome and decides Sultan actually has a pretty good point about perfidious Albion. Co-starring Andrew Keir, Charlotte Rampling, Laurance Naismith, and Edward Fox, The Long Duel is a typically bloated and not terribly imaginative period piece, but Howard and Andrews are always fun to watch.

5:15 PM Showtime Extreme
Severance (2006 GB): Office Space meets Deliverance with dashes of Saw and Shaun of the Dead in this amusing British horror comedy written and directed by Christopher Smith. Set somewhere in Eastern Europe, the film stars Tim McInnerny as Richard, sales team manager at Palisade, an arms company developing a (supposedly) non-lethal land mine. Richard takes his team on retreat to points east of Transylvania, but the locals are none too happy to see them and soon the blood and guts are flowing. Amongst the stock characters on the trip are obseqious bootlicker Harris (Toby Stephens), sexy workaholic Maggie (Laura Harris), and hopeless pothead Steve (Danny Dyer), but you’re not tuning in for character development - you’re tuning in for viscera and gutbusting laughter. Severance delivers both.

Wednesday 9/15/10

5:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
Al Capone (1959 USA): An evening of gangster biopics kicks of with this widescreen salute to the king of the Chicago underworld. Rod Steiger is perfectly cast as the high-living Capone, who moved to the Windy City in 1923 for a job guarding bootlegger Johnny Torrio (Nehemiah Persoff) but eventually worked his way to the top of the syndicate before taxes and venereal disease undid him. Renowned for its historical accuracy - a rarity when it comes to these things - Al Capone co-stars Martin Balsam as a crusading reporter, Fay Spain as the great man’s moll, and James Gregory as a copper hot on Capone’s trail. It’s followed at 7:00 PM by 1960’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, featuring Ray Danton as the titular New York hood; at 9:00 PM by 1961’s King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein, starring David Janssen as You-Know-Who (no, silly, not Voldemort); and at 11:00 PM by 1975’s Lepke, making its widescreen television debut and headlined by Tony Curtis and Anjanette Comer.

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