Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of May 26-June 1, 2008. As always, all times are in Eastern.

Monday is Memorial Day, and TCM is continuing with its salute to the man in uniform by showing more war movies. Monday starts off with one of the great movies about aerial combat: Wings, Monday at 6:00 AM on TCM. Two friends (Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers) go off to fight in World War I in the air corps. There's a silly little love story about how the two are in love with the same girl, but this is a movie to watch for the aerial scenes. Director William Wellman had fought in the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I and as a result had very personal experience with aerial combat. And in Wings, what you see is real -- it's certainly not CGI, and it's not even done on the ground. Everybody looks like they're up at 10,000 feet because they are (including Arlen and Rogers, who flew the planes themselves). Wings won the Best Picture Oscar at the first Academy Awards ceremony, the only silent film to do so, and is an amazing achievement. It's not readily available on DVD, so now is the time to watch it. Watch also for a young Gary Cooper in a small scene, as a more experienced airman at the flight training school who gets killed in an accident.

TCM are also showing the great The Best Years of Our Lives at 5:00 PM, and I could recommend that every time it shows up.

The Fox Movie Channel is also running a special tribute on Memorial Day, advertising it as being in honor of the USO. Of course, Fox don't have enough movies in their library to do an entire day of movies on the USO, so some of the standard Fox war movies, such as Twelve O'Clock High, show up (at noon Monday). One movie actually about the USO is Four Jills in a Jeep, Monday at 6:00 PM on FMC. This is a dramatization of the experiences of several famous women who went on USO tours during World War II, although since it was released in 1944, the four women are actually playing themselves. Martha Raye is the best known of the four; you might remember Wisconsin-born Carole Landis from the original version of One Million Years B.C.. Kay Francis was a bigger star in the '30s, while Mitzi Mayfair is the least-remembered of the four. Jimmy Dorsey has a small cameo, as do Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda.

Our next movie is also on the Fox Movie Channel, and is one I've never recommended before (and in fact, hadn't heard of until it showed up last month): Tales of Manhattan, Tuesday at 6:00 AM. This is a very interesting movie in that it's an anthology of several short stories, with the common theme of a formal tuxedo that's had a spell put on it making strange things happen to its owners. With the number of stories in this movie, there are a lot of famous folks appearing, although there's the drawback that nobody's on screen for too long: Charles Boyer and Rita Hayworth kick things off as two-thirds of a love triangle; Henry Fonda and Ginger Rogers fall in love in the next story; Charles Laughton writes a symphony and gets to conduct it; Edward G. Robinson goes to his 25th reunion; W.C. Fields plays a teetotaler who drinks spiked coconut milk; and Ethel Waters and Paul Robeson have the coat fall on them from the sky, filled with $40,000. My personal favorites are the Laughton storyline (watch the expressiveness of his face) and the Edward G. Robinson story; however, if you don't particulary care for any of the vignettes, wait 10 minutes and another one will happen. I can very strongly recommend this movie; it might be the highlight of the week.

Showing up on Tuedsay night on TCM is Voyage of the Damned, Tuesday at 8:00 PM. This is an all-star movie based on a true story, that of a ship full of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939, which is refused entry first in Cuba and then in the US. Faye Dunaway and Oskar Werner star as one couple; Lee Grant earned an Oscar nomination; Katharine Ross (from The Graduate and The Stepford Wives) shows up; and the ship's crew includes Max von Sydow and Malcolm McDowell. Watch also for Nehemiah Persoff and Maria Schell (Maximilian's sister) as Mr. and Mrs. Hauser.

Moving back to the Fox Movie Channel, we get a movie that wasn't made by Fox: Blood Money, Wednesday at 9:30 AM. The reason Fox isn't showing a movie made by Fox is because this is actually a movie from 20th Century Pictures, made before the merger with Fox Films in 1935. (20th Century, however, had the logo and the fanfare.) This is a really racy little pre-Code movie. George Bancroft plays a shady bail bondsman who has to get a shoplifter, played by Francis Dee, out of trouble. He falls for her, but she'd rather get involved in some S&M. (Well, they don't call it that, but it's fairly obviously implied.) Meanwhile, Bancroft's original girlfriend, played by Judith Anderson, is the sister of a gangster who is involved in getting Bancroft bankrupted by having all of his clients jump bail simultaneously. The plot isn't the greatest, but as one of the rare 20th Century Pictures, and especially for its raciness, it's worth seeing. A 21-year-old Lucille Ball is listed as having an uncredited role as an extra during a racetrack scene.

Fans of movies set in San Francisco may enjoy our next two movies. First, at 1:30 PM Wednesday on TCM is The Lineup. This movie is reminiscent of the later Wait Until Dark in that the subject material is people unwittingly bringing drugs into the country, and the criminals who fetch the drugs from them. The criminals are played by psychotic Eli Wallach, and a more sedate Robert Keith. Unfortunately, things go much worse for them than in Wait Until Dark, as they actually kill people and have to escape from the police. This is a pretty violent movie, but it's part of the late 1950s tradition of smaller movies that look as though they could have been extended TV episodes, with extensive location shooting and more realistic action and lighting than the shadowy noirs that had been the staple of the late 40s and early 50s.

The second, House on Telegraph Hill, airs on the Fox Movie Channel on Thursday at 9:00 AM. Valentina Cortese, who was brought to the States by Fox to be one of the new European faces after World War II, stars as Viktoria Kowełska, a Polish woman who gets caught up in World War II when the Nazis kill her husband, destroy her house, and imprison her in a concentration camp. There, conditions are lousy (although in this movie, the depiction doesn't feel as bad as what Fox gave us in Three Came Home, airing on Fox on Monday at 4:00 PM), but she makes a friend: Karin Demakova. Demakova has a son who made it to America, where he's living with his aunt in San Francisco. However, Demakova dies before the camp is liberated by the Allies, and Kowełska decides to assume Domakova's identity, seeing as it's the only way she can get to America. Once in America, Kowełska meets Alan Spender played by Fox contract player Richard Basehart, who is the guardian of the little boy. He marries her, although Kowełska comes to believe he's got bad intentions. Sadly, though, it's here that the movie begins to fall a bit flat. He does have bad intentions, trying to get the boy's trust-fund money. There's also a bit of a love triangle in that William Lundigan, who played the major who got Cortese sent to the States, returns and happens to be one of Basehart's acquaintances in San Francisco.

In the meantime, we get the last night of TCM's Star of the Month for May, Frank Sinatra. This final night of the salute sees a number of Sinatra's more dramatic roles. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with The Man With the Golden Arm, in which Sinatra plays a heroin addict who has to try to kick the habit. It's followed at 10:15 PM by the oft-recommended The Manchurian Candidate.

The most interesting of the movies that night, however, may by Suddenly, airing Thursday at 3:00 AM. In this movie, Sinatra plays a hired assassin whose job it is to kill the President when the President's train stops in the sleepy town of Suddenly, California, on the President's way to a fishing trip. Charged with protecting the President is the town's sheriff, played by Sterling Hayden. Unbeknownst to him, Sinatra and his goons have taken over the best house in town -- the one with a great vantage point if a sniper wants to shoot at the train station. It's owned by former Secret Service agent James Gleason, whose daughter-in-law is a pacifist widow in love with Hayden. Anyhow, Hayden walks into the house to see his love -- and promptly gets taken hostage by Sinatra and Co. You have to presume that the assassination attempt is going to fail, but I won't give away how it fails. Suddenly fell into oblivion after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was not seen for many years.

Later on Thursday, and back on the Fox Movie Channel, is Down to the Sea in Ships, Thursday at 11:00 AM. Lionel Barrymore stars as an aging whaler who wants to take his grandson (Dean Stockwell) out to sea for one more voyage. Unfortunately, the kid is sorely in need of an education. That education gets provided by Richard Widmark, the ship's first mate who has gone to college and made a more scientific study of whales. This leads to natural conflict between Widmark and Barrymore not only over how to raise the kid, but also over how to be a whaler. These silly conflicts aside, you still have a fine adventure movie with good performances from the main actors, and nice sailing footage too.

This week's TCM Essential is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, airing at 8:00 PM Saturday. You all know the story, but the movie is always worth watching, so it's worthy of a mention.

On Sunday, TCM is airing some love stories I've previously recommended, including the screwball comedy Love Crazy, in which William Powell feigns insanity to keep Myrna Loy from divorcing him, at 6:00 AM.
Next up is The Marrying Kind, at 8:00 AM. Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray are on the verge of divorce, when the divorce court judge gets them to look back on their marriage to see what went wrong.
And there's The Clock, at 12:15 PM. Judy Garland is a salesgirl who meets GI on leave Robert Walker; they have a brief romance in New York during his two-day leave. James Gleason appears again, as a milkman who offers the lovebirds a lift (and is in my opinion the highlight of the movie). I mentioned Gleason before in Suddenly; he also shows up in Tales of Manhattan in the Edward G. Robinson story.

Finally, we have a new feature on TCM, "The Essentials, Jr." If you recall, last summer TCM aired "Funday Night at the Movies", a series of classic movies that were good for the whole family. They're running the same idea this year, albeit under a new title. The first movie up this summer is National Velvet, Sunday at 8:00 PM. A young Elizabeth Taylor stars in this movie about a girl and her horse; she wants to train it to run in the Grand National. Only, she needs a jockey, so she gets the short Mickey Rooney to do that. Angela Lansbury plays one of Taylor's sisters; Anne Revere won an Oscar for playing Taylor's mother. Donald Crisp plays the father.

Dammit! Been waiting for Wings and missed it. My daughter is trying to watch all the "Best Films" in order and as you mentioned, it's tough to find.