Turner Classic Movies, Best Movies, Goldie Hawn, Political Thrillers, Screwball Comedies, Cult gems October 7 to 9 Review

Tonight on cable channel TCM  4 Goldie Hawn movies, including the won she won a supporting actress Oscar for... 1969's Cactus Flower ( 9 p.m.) in which she made a indelible impression surround by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and Jack Weston...Tomorrow october 8th  it's a theme night called Life during the Depression featuring classics like Sullivan's Travels (5 p.m.), My Man Godfrey  8:15 p.m. and milestone's like Hallelujan I'm a Bum at 6:45 p.m. 

Friday night October 9th's focus is on Political Thrillers with two great ones and a real turkey.  The cult films included  Sam Raimi's best:  Evil Dead 2 at 11:15 a.m.  and the almost baaaad enough to recommend Horror House with Frankie Avalon from 1969.

Tonight.  Goldie Hawn.   It starts at 5 p.m. on the West Coast with 1978's Foul Play, written by Harold and Maudes Collin Higgins and directed by James M. Arnett  it was an excellent vehicle to showcase rising star Chevy Chase in a comic suspense thriller.  It's got a preposterous plot that finds Goldie innocently stumbling upon a plot to murder the pope which involves the stumbling accident prone private eye Chevy Chase and features Burgess Meredith.  It's pretty funny.  

1972's Butterflies are Free is a  romantic comedy drama that's a bit too much maudlin drama than comedy but is still entertaining.  This is the one where Edward Albert is a blind man who falls for aspiring actress Goldie even though his over-protective mom objects to the relationship.  Based on a play.  It airs at 7 p.m. PST.   

 1969's Cactus Flower is a 1969 romantic comedy that has dentist Walter Matthau asking his shy and very reserved assistant Ingrid Bergman, to help him dump his latest too young girlfriend, Goldie Hawn.  Bergman is secretly in love with Walter and like a "Cactus Flower'  blossoms in her new assignment with help from Goldie!   It's mostly an old fashioned romantic comedy, based on a popular play that allowed Ingrid Bergman to do a rare comic role.  Lauren Bacall played the role on Broadway and expected to be in the movie, but the director  wanted to go with a younger woman (the character was written to be in her 30s) but Bergman (who was 54 at the time) got the part and Bacall was very angry about it.  She got over it when she won a Tony Award for her next Broadway triumph, the musical Applause.  Bergman and Bacall made up and wound up being good friends.  It airs at 9 p.m.

1970's There's a Girl in My Soup airing at 10 p.m. is NOT a great movie, but it's every bit as enjoyable and entertaining as Cactus Flower and Goldie Hawn holds her own with a very funny Peter Sellers who plays a debonair, womanizing, self centered host of a popular television cooking show who meets a very down to earth hippie girl whose much smarter than she appears.   It's sexy and funny and very much a 1970 movie.   Enjoy the silliness.

 Thursday's prime time spotlight begins at 5:00 p.m.  PST with of Preston Sturgess finest comic masterpieces; 1941's Sullivan's Travels from 1941; a sharp satire in which a successful filmmaker decides he needs to get in touch with the little people and so he pretends he's a hobo and hits the road for an adventure.  He gets more than he bargained for.  It stars Joel McCrea with Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick and William Demarest.  

One of the movies Sullivan references is the 1933 musical  Hallulah I'm a Bum  directed by Lewis Milestone and it stars the amazing Al Jolson with Madge Evans, Frank Morgan and Harry Langdon.  It's dated, and corny but give it a chance you'll be entertained by the story of a homeless man who stops the mayor's girlfriend from committing suicide.   It airs at 6:45 p.m. on the West Coast. 

 It is followed by one of the funniest screwball comedies of the 1930s, My Man Godfrey (1936) in which the beautiful but ditzy heiress (Carole Lombard) decides to help a homeless man  William Powell) and make a statement by turning him into the family butler.   

Three more 1930's movies follow  Wild Boys of the Road  airs at 10 p.m.  a homeless girl pretends she's a boy to be part of a group of young hobos.  1940's  Girls on the Road is about a Governor's daughter who protests the treatment of female vagrants by joining homeless women who live on the road.  This is followed by a rarely seen horror film from 1934 about a woman who returns to her island birthplace and becomes involved in a voodoo cult.  It stars King Kong's Fay Wray, Jack Holt and others. Black Moon airs at 12:30 A.M.

Friday  October 9th  Three political thrillers are the prime time focus.  At 5 p.m.  it's the 1962 masterpiece of paranoid conspiracy thrillers The Manchurian Candidate with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh and Angela Landsbury .  It remains a powerful effective film not to be missed.   This is followed by another wonderful paranoid conspiracy thriller from 1974 in which a reporter Warren Beatty uncovers a conspiracy behind a political assassination.  It stars Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels, Paula Prentiss and other recognizable folks in the cast.  It begins with a very memorable scene at Seattle's Space Needle. The Parrallex View  airs at 7 :15 p..m.   Then at 9 p.m. it's time to clear the room.  A real turkey of a movie that is an embarrassment to Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier and James Mason called Boys from Brazil is being shown.  It's about a Nazi hunter who's after a mad scientist in South America who is trying to bring Hitler back.   It's awful  and yet the actors are too good to have fun laughing at.  Oh but there's some real awful dialogue in this one.   

The good news is that if you want to see a wonderful comedy-horror film that delivers lots of bloody gore between the laughs, then don't miss Sam Raimi's cult classic  Evil Dead 2:  Dead by Dawn.  It was unleashed in 1987 and is almost a re-make of the very low budget Evil Dead.   Bruce Campbell is very very funny even covered in blood and puss....   Those with strong stomachs will have a great time.  It begins at 11:15 p.m.

This is followed by the utterly mediocre 1969 Horror House in which a teenage party turns out to be a real bummer when someone starts killing off the guests.  It stars Frankie Avalon of the Beach Party movies and an always fun to watch Dennis Price.  Not very good, not baaaad enough to have a great time with either.. but if you can't sleep...... it's on at 12:45 am.