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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 6/5/12

3:00 AM Fox Movie Channel
The Eyes of Annie Jones (1964 GB): No, this isn’t a prequel to Faye Dunaway’s Eyes of Laura Mars, but a super obscure thriller about a teenage girl with extrasensory perception. Annie Jones (British television regular Francesca Annis) also walks and talks in her sleep...and eventually stumbles across a murder case whilst on the narcoleptic prowl one night! Shot in Britain by Bowery Boys director Reginald le Borg, the film co-stars Yank Richard Conte as the man young Annie falls in love with - as well as Joyce Carey as her dear old Aunt Helen - and makes its widescreen American television debut this morning.

Wednesday 6/6/12

4:45 AM Fox Movie Channel
The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder (1974 USA): Timothy Bottoms (looking like a hirsute draft-dodging George W. Bush) stars as the title character in this mildly amusing Arthur Hiller-helmed comedy. Bottoms plays a Vietnam vet suffering from "psychiatric impairment" who falls for a nurse (Barbara Hershey, then billed as "Barbara Seagull") and attempts to move to Canada and live off the land with his new lady. Better than living under a highway overpass, I guess. The film also features an engaging cameo by octogenarian director George Marshall, but whether or not you enjoy it will probably depend on how lightly (or how seriously) you take the topic of mental illness.

11:45 AM Encore Dramatic Stories
A Time for Drunken Horses (2000 IRA): Oh, Iran. How I loved your cinema back in the day. Now with conservative clerics cementing their hold on power and imprisoning directors like Jafar Panahi, it’s getting harder and harder to make films in the Islamic Republic. Consider Time for Drunken Horses director Bahman Ghobadi, who hasn’t made a film in his homeland since 2009 and now prefers working overseas. It’s a startling and disturbing change since the 1990s, when Iranian cinema was at its height and films like this one - about a wintry, race-against-time passage through the mountains of Kurdistan - were the rule and not the exception. A Time for Drunken Horses cleaned up on the festival circuit (including winning two prizes at Cannes) and is a beautiful, contemplative, and deeply intelligent piece of work. Check it out - and hope that Iranian censorship rules start to loosen up again soon.

8:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
An American Romance (1944 USA): Featuring one of the most anodyne, bland titles imaginable, An American Romance is neither a Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald musical nor a tragic Hollywood weepie. It’s actually a paean to the Horatio Alger mythos starring Brian Donlevy as Stefan Dangos, a Czech immigrant who comes to America with next to nothing and pulls himself up by the bootstraps to become a leading industrialist. It’s a pretty bizarre feature - for starters, Donlevy is sorely miscast - but was directed by the great King Vidor, who tells the tale on an epic scale. It’s no forgotten classic, but any Vidor film has its moments, and An American Romance is no exception - especially if you’re keen on assembly line sequences.

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