Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of June 9-15, 2008. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

A few weeks back, I mentioned The Lineup, a fun little late-50s crime drama from the period just after noirs were winding down. Our first selection is in a similar vein: Man in the Vault, Monday at 6:00 AM on TCM. William Campbell, looking like Tony Curtis on a bad hair day, plays a locksmith who is given an offer he can't refuse by a mobster: make a key for another mobster's safe deposit box. Naturally, our hero tries to refuse, but eventually goes along after the usual threats to his girlfriend. However, our mobster has a lovelier woman -- Anita Ekberg. She's two-timing him, and, wanting to get out of a bad situtation, offers to give the young locksmith the information on where the safe deposit box is, if only he'll split the loot with her and allow her to make a getaway. He agrees, but of course, things don't go as planned, leading to the climax, a scene in a darkened bowling alley where the mobster's thugs try to kill our hero not only by shooting him, but by mowing him down with bowling balls thrown down the lanes. It's a low-budget B movie, but like a lot of the B crime dramas released in the middle and late 1950s, it's a lot of fun.

June 10 marks the birthday of Judy Garland, and TCM is celebrating the day with an entire morning and afternoon of her movies. Perhaps the most fun of the movies TCM is showing is Girl Crazy, airing at 1:15 PM Tuesday. The plot is nothing new: short boy meets girl; short boy falls in love with girl; girl doesn't love short boy at first; but short boy and girl get together by the end in time for the wild musical numbers. Girl Crazy is another of the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies, this time set to the music of George Gershwin. Set at a college this time, it also stars Guy Kibbee as the dean of the college; June Allyson doing a small musical number, and Nancy Walker (older readers may remember her from the TV show Rhoda or from commercials for Bounty) singing a song along with Judy and Mickey.

If Judy Garland isn't your thing, you might want to watch something more recent instead, such as Fletch, Tuesday at 6:40 AM on MoMax. Chevy Chase stars as journalist Irwin Fletcher, nicknamed Fletch, who goes undercover to get his stories. While working on a story about drug smuggling, he meets a rich man who wants Fletch to help kill him so that his wife can get the insurance money. Of course, there's more than meets the eye to this. Fletch is just as much a comedy as it is a mystery, allowing Chase to deliver his trademark one-liners. It spawned a sequel a few years later; supposedly, a new Fletch movie is in the works for 2009. (Watch for a smaller role from George Wendt, whom you'll recall as Norm Peterson on Cheers.)

On Tuesday night, TCM's look at Asian images in film continues. This Tuesday, we get a bunch of detective movies, with Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and the like appearing.

We switch over to the Fox Movie Channel for our first Wednesday selection: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Wednesday at 1:30 PM. Walter Pidgeon stars as an admiral testing a new submarine when, all of a sudden, it's faced with the end of the world: apparently the Van Allen belts have caught fire, and it's caused the world to heat up. Nelson has an idea that they can put out the fire, while the suits at the UN think it will burn itself out. So, the good admiral sets out to shoot it down, with the US Navy in hot pursuit for his violating orders. Since they're underwater, they've also got to face the problems of undersea life, such as giant squid, in one memorable scene. The cast also includes Joan Fontaine as a scientist; a morbidly obese Peter Lorre as one of the ship's officers; a pretty young Barbara Eden as another lieutenant, and teen idol Frankie Avalon.

Movie buffs may prefer the program Billy Wilder Speaks, on TCM on Wednesdy at 6:45 PM. Put together from a bunch of interviews Wilder did in the mid 1980s, it's an interesting look at the life and work of one of Hollywood's great directors.

TCM's Star of the Month for June is Sophia Loren, and her movies are airing every Wednesday in prime time. This week, you can see her Oscar-winning performance in Two Women, which airs at midnight Thursday (that's 11:00 PM Wednesday for those of you partying on the Love Boat with the Minnesota Vikings.)

I already mentioned one more recent movie; now is the time for another. If you're not a big fan of Sophia Loren, you can switch over to Encore in the overnight hours: at 5:05 AM Thursday, they're showing Ghost Dad. Not to be confused with Brak and Space Ghost, this movie stars Bill Cosby as a widower trying to take care of his three children when he's killed in a taxicab accident. As the title implies, he returns to this world as a ghost, trying to help out his children. The movie was panned by critics when it was released, and could be seen as a terrible waste of talent. In addition to the usually lovable family man Cosby, Ghost Dad was directed by the estimable Sidney Poitier. However, I'm recommending it simply to show that all those B movies from the 1930s and 1940s I recommend are much better than you might think.

For a better movie from around the same time as Ghost Dad, you'll have to switch over to Cinemax on Thursday: at 3:30 PM, they're showing the original Weekend at Bernie's. Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman star as two bored workers in a large New York corporation who discover that there's an embezzlement scheme in their business. They report it to their boss, Bernie, who congratulates them by giving them a weekend trip to his vacation home in the Islands. Of course, Bernie is the one doing the embezzling, and his plan is to have them killed down there. Unbeknownst to him, the mob is unhappy with his unsubtlety in embezzlement, so they kill him first, before our two heroes make it to the Islands. So, they arrive to find their boss dead, and decide to pretend that he's alive so that they can have their weekend. Naturally, they have no idea that danger is lurking. Does it sound dumb? Well, it's better than Ghost Dad!

Just to show you, however, that these "comedies of lies" are nothing new, and were just as funny -- or unfunny -- sixty years ago, you can switch back to TCM later on Thursday afternoon, and watch My Favorite Brunette, Thursday at 5:45 PM. Bob Hope stars as a photographer who has his studio across the hall from a private eye. Hope has fantasies in the Sam Spade vein, and sits in the detective's office when he's not around. One night, Dorothy Lamour walks into the office, and mistakes Hope for the detective, leading Hope to get caught up in a murder frame-up involving all the usual clichés that you would expect from movies like The Maltese Falcon. Watching Hope try to lie his way out of the situations he's gotten himself into is no better or worse than watching something like Weekend at Bernie's. If you like Hope's humor, you'll really like the movie; if you don't, you'll find it a tough slog. The one thing going for My Favorite Brunette, however, is that it's got a better supporting cast: Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney. There's also a brief cameo from Hope's longtime movie partner, Bing Crosby.

Thursday nights are the second night of the week for TCM's look at Asian images in film. This Thursday sees more "yellowface", with white Hollywood stars donning makeup to look Asian in "prestige" movies. The first is The Good Earth, at 8:00 PM Thursday. Paul Muni, and Austrian born Luise Rainer (still alive at 98) star as Chinese peasants in this movie based on the novel by Pearl Buck, the daughter of American missionaries to China. Last's week's highlighted star, Anna May Wong, desperately wanted the part that ultimately went to Rainer (who won an Oscar for it), but the Production Code rules at the time wouldn't allow for a white and an Asian character to end up together at the end of the movie.

The Good Earth will be followed by some even more interesting casting, in Dragon Seed, at 10:30 PM. The story is again about a Chinese village, this time occupied by the Japanese during its invasion of China that eventually led up to the Pacific theater of World War II. Here, the Asians are played by: Katharine Hepburn, who ultimately leads the resistance movement; Walter Huston as her father in law; Aline MacMahon as Huston's wife; Agnes Moorehead in a smaller role; and, perhaps the worst-cast of them all, Henry Travers.

This week's TCM Essential is A Face in the Crowd, airing Saturday at 8:00 PM. It kicks off a night of movies with Walter Matthau. One I haven't recommended yet is The Fortune Cookie, Saturday at 10:15 PM. Not only is it a wonderful Billy Wilder comedy, it's also a football movie. Jack Lemmon nominally stars, as a TV cameraman working the Cleveland Browns game. On one of the plays, star running back Ron Rich plows into him on the sidelines, knocking him out and forcing him to be taken to the hospital. It's not a serious injury -- until his brother-in-law shows up. That brother-in-law is ambulance-chasing lawyer Matthau, who convinces Lemmon to feign a serious injury in order to be able to sue anybody and everybody for big bucks. Lemmon isn't exactly thrilled with the idea at first, but eventually goes along. It's Billy Wilder's typical biting indictment of, well, everything, and is as funny as you'd expect from a Billy Wilder movie.

The Fortune Cookie is highly reccommended!