TiVoPlex
By John Seal
January 21, 2013
From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.
Tuesday 1/22/13
1:00 AM Turner Classic Movies
Some Kind of a Nut (1969 USA): Sometimes you feel like one, sometimes you don’t, but in general when you think of the word "nut" in the mental health sense you probably don’t conjure visions of Dick Van Dyke. Nonetheless, that’s what you get in this mildly amusing "hip" comedy directed by the decidedly unhip Garson Kanin. Van Dyke plays Fred Amidon, a Big Apple bank teller who grows a beard, causing widespread palpitations and pearl clutching in the executive wash room. Oh, he’s having an affair too...which makes no sense, as he’s married to a woman played by Angie Dickinson. Soon the men in white show up with a giant butterfly net. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the idea that a beard and an affair could qualify you for institutionalization is, I would suggest, a little far-fetched. Regardless, Dickinson and Rosemary Forsyth (playing the third corner of the triangle) are easy on the eyes, and there’s even a small role for the enchanting Zohra Lampert. This screening marks the film’s widescreen television debut.
6:45 AM Fox Movie Channel
Fathom (1967 GB): Raquel Welch in a bikini is pretty much all this film has to offer, which for many 1967 moviegoers was enough. Welch disrobes in the name of the Free World in this film, in which she portrays Fathom Harvill, a secret agent dispatched to the Mediterranean (fun! sun! bikinis!) to recover a lost atomic device. The complication: the device is in a building occupied by nefarious Red Chinese! Thankfully, the film doesn’t take itself much more seriously than the contemporaneous Matt Helm and Derek Flint series, and Welch seems to be having fun. Directed routinely by Leslie H. Martinson (who just celebrated his 98th birthday!), Fathom co-stars Anthony Franciosa and Clive Revill.
11:00 AM Cinemax
Back to the Future (1985 USA): Not much introduction necessary here, but I do enjoy it when premium channels air franchise features back to back to back (and in this case, Back), so we’ll give a brief mention to BTTF. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Robert Zemeckis...you know the routine. Back to the Future is followed at 12:55 PM by Back to the Future Part II (1989) and at 2:45 PM by Back to the Future Part III (1990). No idea if these will be airing in their original aspect ratios, but it would be a nice bonus if they were.
11:15 PM Turner Classic Movies
Cairo (1963 USA): if you can get past the fact that Cairo is an unnecessary and vastly inferior remake of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), you’ll probably enjoy it. Directed by Wolf Rilla (Village of the Damned), the film stars an in-his-cups George Sanders as The Major, a mysterious fellow scheming to snatch the riches of King Tut’s tomb from a Nile-side museum. As in all caper flicks, the plan seems to go off without a hitch...until that fatal moment when an alarm is accidentally triggered. Whoops! Richard Johnson, Eric Pohlmann, John Meillon and Wolf’s father Walter co-star as The Major’s co-conspirators, whilst the balance of the cast consists entirely of unknown (at least to westerners) Egyptian actors. It’s not a great flick, but the decent cast, nice location photography, and all-around obscurity render Cairo irresistible TiVoPlex bait.
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