Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 3-9, 2008. TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" salute is over, which means that we get to go back to some less well-known movies on TCM. As always, the times listed are Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned. Please note that Daylight Savings Time begins overnight between Saturday and Sunday (unless you're one of those weirdos in Arizona).

First, we'll take a look at the Fox Movie Channel, since their giving us a double feature of the always fun to watch Carmen Miranda. She, of course, was the Portuguese-born Brazilian best known for doing musical numbers in oversized hats. Seen as exotic, she was cast in a series of musicals with piffling plots mostly involving rich Americans is exotic locales in some sort of concocted love story, complete with a nightclub where Miranda could perform her Busby Berkeley inspired routines. The two movies FMC is showing in this double feature are That Night in Rio, Monday at 6:00 AM, in which Don Ameche romances Alice Faye, followed by Weekend in Havana at 8:00 AM, in which Faye returns, this time paired with John Payne. Sorry, but this is Fox; they didn't have the musical department that the Warners did in the 30s or MGM had with the Freed Unit in the 40s, so we don't get the best starpower here.

TCM on Monday is giving us a triple feature of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Of course, I'm a big fan of Hitchcock, so I've recommended all of these before, but they're well worth mentioning again:
Tippi Hedren plays a kleptomanic with a sexual problem with whom Sean Connery falls in love, in Marnie; Monday at 1:45 PM;
Maureen O'Hara suspects Charles Laughton is up to nothing good in early 1800s England in Jamaica Inn, at 4:00 PM; and
The Trouble With Harry, Monday at 6:00 PM. In this black comedy, several residents of a Vermont town chance upon a dead body out in the woods. Edmund Gwenn thinks he shot the body while hunting, and doesn't want to be responsible for the man's death. Meanwhile, the young son (Jerry Mathers, not as "the Beaver") of one of the women (Shirley MacLaine, in her screen debut) tells his mom about the body, and she realizes it's her ex-husband. (Why the boy doesn't recognize it as his father is beyond me.) The various townsfolk, each thinking he or she is responsible for the man's death, get together and bury the body so nobody will find it. Except that they figure this won't work, so they end up exhuming and reburying the body several times over. Eventually, these lovable loonies fall in love: MacLaine with artist John Forsythe, and Gwenn with dotty old Mildred Natwick.

Monday in prime time sees a series of pre-Code movies on TCM. The first, which I haven't recommended in a long time, is The Divorcee, Monday at 8:00 PM. Norma Shearer stars as a "modern" woman married to Chester Morris. He plays fast and loose with other women, and the standard of the day dictataes that the woman is supposed to take it lying down. But not Shearer: she decides that she's going to respond by becoming romantically involved with other men! (It would have been more shocking had she become romantically involved with other women, but Hollywood couldn't put that in a movie back in 1930.) Of course, while it's okay for the husband to be unfaithful, it's not okay for a wife to do the same thing, and Shearer finds that being unfaithful isn't all it's cracked up to be. Shearer won the Best Actress Oscar for this early talkie.

Shearer was also nominated the very next year for her role in A Free Soul, Tuesday at 3:45 AM. Here, she plays the daughter of a prominent lawyer (Lionel Barrymore), who also happens to be a raging alcoholic. He's defending a gangster (Clark Gable, in the role that made him a star), and she falls in love with him, despite the fact that she's engaged to Leslie Howard. (Is it really much of a choice? ) Father and daughter make a deal: he'll give up drinking if she gives up Clark Gable and goes back to Leslie Howard. Of course, father reneges on his end of the bargain, and when Shearer goes back to Gable, Howard responds by shooting Gable. Barrymore then has to defend Howard while struggling against the bottle, and wins the Best Actor Oscar for his courtroom speech. (Thankfully, Shearer didn't win; otherwise, the actual winner, Marie Dressler's Min and Bill, would be forgotten.)

Clark Gable makes another appearance on Monday night, alongside Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse at 10:45 PM. I've mentioned this movie more recently; Stanyck plays a nurse to two trust-fund kids whom she suspects are being starved to death so that the adults can get at the trust fund.

For Quiet One, we have an interesting short as part of TCM's "Festival of Shorts" program at 5:30 AM Tuesday: Kings of the Turf. This 1941 Technicolor looks at the breeding and raising of harness racing horses. At a run-time of only about 11 minutes, it can't go into that much detail, but there are some nice slow-motion shots looking at the different gaits in harness racing.

Tuesday marks the birth anniversary of John Garfield, which TCM is honoring with a slew of his movies (although unfortunately not The Postman Always Rings Twice ). Among the better ones are:
Garfield's last movie, He Ran All the Way at 5:00 PM in which Garfield, running from the law, holds Shelley Winters and her family hostage, falling in love with her along the way; followed by
Force of Evil at 6:30 PM, in which Garfield and his brother are involved with the seedier side of the numbers racket; ie. the force that backs it up.

If John Garfield isn't your thing, you may want to try something more recent, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tuesday at 7:40 AM on MoMax. This early-80s look at the vapid lives of teenagers stars a bunch of folks still recognizable today: Sean Penn, Jannifer Jason Leigh, Nicholas Cage, Anthony Edwards, Forrest Whittaker, and Judge Reinhold; Ray Walston is among the teachers.

On Tuesday nights in March, TCM is taking a look at the subject of psychiatry in the movies. The first movies up is one of the first to look in depth at the topic: Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, Tuesday at 8:00 PM. Ingrid Bergman, of all people, plays the psychiatrist at a Vermont sanatorium who falls in love with the new boss, Gregory Peck, only to find out that Peck is actually an amnesiac running from the law. This movie is full of nutty Freudian imagery (watch the scene of a series of doors opening when Bergman and Peck first kiss ), notably an entire dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali. Hitchcock does the best he can with the topic of Freudian psycoanalysis, which is quite good, but 60 years on, the premise and execution will leave you laughing in some inappropriate places. Watch for the nymphomaniac patient early on; that's sexy Rhonda Fleming in one of her first roles. (Interestingly, she's said that when she was offered the part, she didn't know what a nymphomaniac was, so she and her devoutly Mormon mother looked it up in the dictionary, much to her mother's shock!)

Also as part of this week's head-shrinker lineup is Claude Rains analysing old maid Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, Tuesday at 1:45 AM.

Wednesday night sees TCM looking at Rex Harrison; his best known movie, My Fair Lady, shows up at 10:00 PM.

On Thursday morning and afternoon, TCM gives us a birthday tribute to Warner's favorite dirty old man, Guy Kibbee. (Not that Kibbee himself was a dirty old man; it's that he played a lot of such characters, notably in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.) However, TCM aren't showing the well-known Kibbee movies, but instead a bunch of B movies running about 70 minutes apiece.

If you want something more prestigious on Thursday, this means you'll have to watch HBO Signature: they're showing The Razor's Edge, Thursday at 8:00 AM. Based on the novel by Somerset Maugham, it tells the story of a man (Tyrone Power) who sets out to "find himself" after World War I. He loses his fiancée (Anne Baxter) to another man, but when he returns, he wants her back! The all-star cast includes Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and as Maugham himself, Herbert Marshall.

Moving ahead to Saturday morning, we get the interesting mystery Nightfall, Saturday at 8:30 AM on TCM. Aldo Ray stars as a man who's being chased after by some thugs. It turns out that they're bank robbers who robbed $350,000, and they had to drop the money while fleeing. Ray knows where it is, and they want to find out! Of course, the $350,000 is buried

under the "big W". Er, no, not that "big W"; it's in Wyoming, where it's currently winter, and the money is in a snowed-in part of the mountains. Ray (and the criminals) are waiting for the snow to melt so that he can get back to Wyoming and pick up the money. Meanwhile, Ray's got a detective hot on his trail, and when he flees the thugs, meets a model (Ann Bancroft) who also gets caught up in the mayhem. This is quite a fun little low-budget mystery. Watch also for Marlon Brando's sister Jocelyn as a woman whom the bank robbers use to lure Ray at the beginning of the movie.

Finally, back on the Fox Movie Channel, we have a Marilyn Monroe film that hasn't shown up in quite some time: Monkey Business, Sunday at 1:30 PM. Monroe isn't actually the star; she plays a supporting role as a ditzy secretary in a pharmaceutical company. The star is Cary Grant, who's working on a youth pill which works all too well: the monkeys he administers it to start acting like youth run wild. Worse, Grant and his wife (Ginger Rogers) also take the potion, and predictably start acting like the teens (or, about as wild as teens of the early 1950s got). Veteran character actor Charles Coburn plays Grant's boss.