Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 10-16, 2008. This is my 120th consecutive edition, and with Brett Favre retired, I'm now only 134 weeks away from passing his streak, which should happen on October 3, 2010. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

We start off this week with TCM's "Silent Sunday Nights" feature, which returns after a five-week hiatus for "31 Days of Oscar". This week's selection is The Kid, airing Monday at midnight (that's 11:00 PM tonight Lambeau Time!). Charlie Chaplin stars as The Tramp, in this case a down on his luck man. One day, an orphan falls into his life, and Chaplin is determined to raise the boy. Unfortunately, since Chaplin can't hold down a steady job, the State wants to take the boy away (Jackie Coogan) from him, and The Tramp will stop at nothing to keep the boy. There's a lot of visual humor, but the movie is also quite poignant.

Moving ahead to Monday night on TCM, we have a night of movie versions of Shakespeare plays; specifically, Shakespeare tragedies. The night starts off with Orson Welles playing Macbeth, at 8:00 PM.
Next, we have Laurence Olivier's epic, Oscar-winning version of Hamlet, at 10:00 PM.
At 1:00 AM, TCM is showing Franco Zefferelli's 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet.
Finally, at 3:30 AM, we have Paul Scofield (remember him from A Man for All Seasons?) as King Lear.

A very odd movie is showing up on TCM on Tuesday morning: The Ice Follies of 1939, at 7:45 AM. MGM looked at the success Fox were having with Sonja Henie (eg. Sun Valley Serenade, airing this Friday at 6:00 AM), and decided that if they made an ice-skating picture of their own, they might make a bundle of money, especially if they used their stable of stars in the cast. So whom did they put on ice? Joan Crawford. Stop laughing, though, because that's not all they put on ice. The male lead is none other than James Stewart. The highly original plot for Ice Follies of 1939 is that Crawford and Stewart play a happily married pair of skaters in the Ice Follies, until a new man joins the follies, played by Lew Ayers, whom you'll probably best recall as the doctor in Johnny Belinda. Perhaps MGM should have saved a bundle by just putting Johhny Belinda herself on skates.

We get more Joan Crawford coming up on Tuesday and Wednesday on TCM. First up is a later Crawford movie, airing as part of TCM's look at psychiatry in the movies: The Caretakers, Wednesday at 2:30 AM. The basic story is that Robert Stack plays the chief psychiatrist at a mental institution, and he's a fervent believer in reform, wanting to do away with the harsh treatments you might seen in movies such as The Snake Pit. Crawford, however, who plays the chief nurse, strongly disagrees, as she the chaos this is causing her nursing staff. Unfortunately, the movie delves into clichés, although the cast is well worth watching: in addition to Stack and Crawford, there's Herbert Marshall as one of the doctors, and Polly Bergen as a woman who suffers a rather hilarious nervous breakdown at the beginning of the movie. It's just too bad nervous breakdowns aren't supposed to be funny.

Wednesday morning sees three very early Crawford movies, from the end of the silent era and the beginning of the sound era when she hoofed it on screen:
Our Dancing Daughters at 6:00 AM;
Our Modern Maidens at 7:30 AM; and
Our Blushing Brides at 9:00 AM. Watch for Robert Montgomery in this one.

If such early movies aren't your thing, you might want to switch to IFC instead. At 8:00 AM on Wednesday, they're showing My Left Foot. Daniel Day-Lewis won the first of his two Best Actor Oscars for his portrayal of Christy Brown, an Irishman with cerebral palsy who went on to become an acclaimed writer and artist using his only functioning limb, his left foot.

We switch from a biography to a nifty little suspense movie: Union Station, Wednesday at 12:30 PM on TCM. Nancy Olson (from Sunset Blvd.) stars as a young woman taking a train back to the big city. On the train, she meets two men she thought she saw with her boss's blind daughter, and when she gets to the city, she gets more reason to believe that something bad has happened to her blind friend. The only problem is trying to convince the authorities to do something about it. William Holden plays the head of security for the train station, and Barry Fitzgerald plays a police detective, and together with a lot of prodding (and some help) from Olson, crack the case. Watch for a very interesting death scene, at least for an urban crime drama.

24 hours after Union Station is a comedy that will probably appeal more to the lowbrow sentiment that seems common on x4: The Naked Gun, Thursday at 12:25 PM on MoMax. Leslie Nielsen stars as Los Angeles police detective Frank Drebin, who, together with his murderous partner O.J. Simpson, solves some of the more convoluted crime schemes to hit LA. In this first installment of the series, our heroes have to stop an evil businessman (played by Ricardo Montalban) from assassinating Queen Elizabeth II at Dodger Stadium. Watch for a whole host of sports figures appearing as themselves, along with Weird Al Yankovic.

Instead of a normal "Star of the Month", TCM is spending March looking at acting families. This Thursday night sees a look at the Redgrave family. Patriarch Michael Redgrave gets the first movie, in The Lady Vanishes, Thursday at 8:00 PM. In this lovely Alfred Hitchcock thriller, Margaret Lockwood stars as a young woman who meets a governess (Dame May Whitty) on a train in a Central European country, only to find when she wakes up after a nap that the governess has disappeared. Worse, nobody on the train believes her when she says that this governess was even on the train. Well, nobody except for Michael Redgrave. He helps Lockwood find the agent, who it turns out is a British agent with an important secret, who has to get out of the country and back to Britain. But the agents are on to her, and will do anything to stop her from taking her secret back to Britain. Hitchcock fills this movie with twists and turns, and a bunch of interesting little back stories from the various passengers on the train, making this one of his most fun movies from his British era.

Next up is Sabrina, Friday at 8:00 AM on HBO Signature. William Holden stars as the playboy son of a wealthy Long Island family, who falls in love with the chauffeur's daughter (played by Audrey Hepburn) Sabrina, despite the fact that he's supposed to marry somebody else. So, it's up to the more sensible son, played by Humphrey Bogart, to intervene and stop the relationship. The only problem is that when he does, he too falls in love with Sabrina. What's a girl to do? Director Billy Wilder handles the proceedings deftly, equally mixing comedy and drama, as he leaves us in suspense as to which, if either, brother Sabrina will end up with. (Wilder himself has said the script was being rewritten during shooting, and when they couldn't come up with the right idea, he would instruct Hepburn to flub her lines on purpose so that they couldn't get through too many scenes and give Wilder more time to come up with a better way to resolve the story.)

TCM has a new season of "The Essentials", movies they think are essential for a well-informed movie buff to have seen, on Saturday nights. This year, Robert Osborne's co-host is the lovely Rose McGowan, whom you may remember from the TV series "Charmed". This week's essential is The Music Box, Saturday at 8:00 PM. Laurel and Hardy star in this half-hour short as two men trying to deliver a piano. The only thing is, the house they're delivering it to is at the top of a giant flight of stairs, which inevitably leads to all sorts of comedic problems for them. The Music Box is paired as an Essential with their feature film Sons of the Desert, immediately following The Music Box.

The rest of Saturday night sees some of the screen's most famous comics, although perhaps the most interesting of the choices is the movie which brought them back to prominence: The Golden Age of Comedy, Sunday at 2:45 AM on TCM. It's little more than a clip movie, but back in 1957 when the movie was released, the great silent comedians couldn't be seen the way they can now, since they didn't have DVDs and cable channels playing classic movies.

Some of the great classics are showing up on Sunday morning on TCM; MsPacman will enjoy Cary Grant in the often-recommended His Girl Friday at noon, which is followed by Audrey Hepburn taking a Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck at 2:00 PM.

A less well-known, but equally deserving movie shows up on Sunday evening on TCM: The Blue Gardenia, Sunday at 10:30 PM. Anne Baxter plays a telephone operator who's grieving the fact that her boyfriend serving in Korea has just dumped her, so she goes out with a man who is looking for her roommate. She gets unbelievably drunk and ends up at his place, and when she eventually comes to she finds that he's dead, and all the clues lead to her having done it -- but she can't remember a thing!