Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 21-27, 2008. This being the summer season, there are a lot of reruns, although a lot of that has to do with the fact that I've recommended hundreds, if not over a thousand, movies already. There's a movie I last recommended in the spring of 2007, and one I recommended back in the summer of 2006, but not since. Once again, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

We're going to start off with this week's Silent Sunday Nights on TCM. Every week, overnight between Sunday and Monday, TCM airs a silent movie, or a series of silent shorts, starting around midnight (that's 11:00 PM Sunday out in Lambeauland). This week sees several movies starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who was quite popular in comedies in the teens and early twenties until he was arrested on a rape charge. (He was eventually found not guilty, but it still ruined his career, just like Mark Chmura.)

Silent Sunday Nights is followed at 2:00 AM ET Monday by TCM Imports, TCM's weekly foreign film spotlight. This week, TCM airs the 1957 Soviet movie The Cranes Are Flying. I recommended this movie back in May 2007 when it first showed up on TCM, but it's always worth watching again. It tells the story of a young woman on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, who's about to get engaged to her boyfriend. However, with the war, he goes off to fight the Nazis, and when he goes missing in action, she ends up marrying her boyfriend's cousin, who's gotten an exemption from fighting, which would have been very controversial in the USSR. The film has stunning cinematography; watch especially for a soldier's death scene that involves "what might have been".

I've mentioned each of the past two weeks that TCM is airing a series of interviews by film critic Elvis Mitchell with various movie personalities asking about what influenced them. This week's interviewee is Laurence Fishburne; his interview shows up Monday at 8:00 PM with a repeat at 10:30 PM. In between, TCM are showing A Patch of Blue, at 8:30 PM. Elizabeth Hartmann stars as a blind girl who, thanks in no small part to the meanness of her mother (Shelley Winters, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar) spends her days stringing beads to make a few dollars. Some days her father takes her to the park and leaves her there to string her beads under a tree, and on one such day, Sidney Poitier comes along and notices her. She immediately develops a crush on him, and he realizes there's something wrong with her situation, and tries to help her. Unfortunately, she, being blind, has no idea that Poitier is black, and that this might be a problem -- but hre mother is a vicious racist. It's a sweet movie, albeit one that's also quite poignant. Watch for Hartmann's boss, who brings her new beads to string. That's veteran character actor John Qualen.

Tuesday nights in July on TCM are given over to the Star of the Month, Rosalind Russell. This Tuesday's first movie is the 1937 suspense movie Night Must Fall. Russell plays the niece of an elderly woman (Dame May Whitty) who's wheelchair-bound and needs some help around the house, but is still quite feisty. One day, into their lives walks Robert Montgomery, carrying a hatbox and a dark past. There's been a murder recently, and Russell begins to suspect that perhaps Montgomery had something to do with it. She's right of course, but will she figure this out before Montgomery gets a chance to murder Whitty? Well, you're just going to have to watch to find out. Montgomery received an Oscar nomination for his role, which is quite a change from the romantic comedies he normally did.

Back in 1944, director Otto Preminger teamed up with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney to make Laura, one of the great movie mysteries of the 1940s. Six years later, the three got back together to make our next movie, Where the Sidewalk Ends, airing on Wednesday at 12:30 PM on the Fox Movie Channel. Dana Andrews is the star, as a cop with a violent temper who is about to be sent back to walking a beat if he can't control his temper. One night, while investigating the murder of a man at an illegal floating craps game, a possible suspect comes at Andrews. Andrews responds in self-defense by hitting the guy -- unfortunately for him, hard enough to make the guy fall on his head and kill himself in the fall. Andrews realizes nobody will believe him, so he tries to frame the guy running the craps game, and dispose of the body himself. Where Tierney comes into all of this is that she was at the craps game, and when Andrews comes to meet her, he falls in love with her. Unfortunately, she was the ex-wife of the guy Andrews killed, who was abusive to her. Her father knew this, and because he was a taxi driver who was spotted in the area at the same time Andrews killed the guy, he naturally becomes a suspect. Poor Dana Andrews. Of course, this movie was made at a time when the Production Code was still going strong, so you know right will win out, but part of the fun of watching a movie like this is seeing exactly how it works out. Watch for Gary Merrill as the crime boss running the craps game, and a younger Karl Malden as one of Andrews' bosses.

Back on TCM, Wednesday nights see a salute to the big-band era. At 11:15 PM Wednesday, TCM are showing one of the more star-studded movies from that era: Hollywood Canteen. Set at the Hollywood Canteen, a place that servicemen on leave in the Los Angeles area could attend for recreation and entertainment, the nominal story is of a soldier who meets Joan Leslie, falls in love with her, and then wins a prize as the Canteen's one millionth guest -- getting to go out on a date with Joan Leslie! What this movie is really about is what Hollywood stars were doing for the war effort. Hollywood Canteen is packed with almost all of Warner Brothers' stars who were in Hollywood at the time: Bette Davis, John Garfield (who is responsible for starting the Hollywood Canteen), Jack Benny, Joan Crawford, Roy Rogers, Dennis Morgan, the Andrews Sisters, and on and on.

On Thursday morning, TCM is showing a morning's worth of those schlocky sci-fi movies from the 1950s. I'm pretty certain I've recommended Edgar G. Ulmer's The Man From Planet X before; that kicks off the morning at 6:00 AM. I've definitely recommended Plan 9 From Outer Space, which airs at 9:00 AM. However, I don't think I've mentioned It Came From Beneath the Sea before now. It airs on Thursday at 10:30 AM on TCM. Kenneth Tobey stars as a submarine captain whose ship gets caught underwater by something, although he doesn't quite know what. There are other reports of missing boats, and so the scientists are called in, especially love-interest/scientist Faith Domergue. She determines the problem is an octopus that was hit by fallout from atomic bomb testing, with the result that it's grown to giant proportions! This giant octopus eventually attacks beautiful San Francisco. The great Ray Harryhausen is responsible for the special effects, which are the only reason to watch a movie like this. But look carefully. The movie was done on such a low budget that Harryhausen had to cut costs by giving his octopus only six arms!

On Thursday night, TCM is saluting the FBI on its 100th anniversary. Naturally, this means movies about FBI agents. The first one, at 8:00 PM, is G-Men. James Cagney stars in this movie, originally released in 1935, as a lawyer who starts out working for the mob. He'd like to go straight, but business isn't going so well for him. All this changes when a good friend of his gets killed, leading him to decide to become an FBI agent. G-Men is the sort of movie that Warner Brothers were so good at making in the 1930s, and Cagney is as good as ever. Movie buffs will notice, however, that the movie was re-released. (At least, the last time TCM aired it, it was the re-release print.) There's a silly framing story about new recruits watching a training film, and more obscurely, the opening Warner's fanfare isn't what the studio was using in 1935. (It's frightening what a geek I'm becoming, but this was the very first thing I noticed about the movie.)

G-Men will be followed at 9:30 PM by the 1939 movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy, one of the first anti-Nazi movies put out by Hollywood. The story is about an FBI agent (played by Edward G. Robinson) who infiltrates a star-studded ring of Nazi sympathizers in America (including Oscar winners Paul Lukas and George Sanders). What's more interesting is that this film helped lead to a Congressional investigation of Hollywood for putting out propaganda. (The investigation went nowhere because the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor intervened.)

If FBI movies aren't your thing, perhaps you might enjoy a boxing movie like Raging Bull; it's airing on IFC at 9:00 PM Thursday, and is repeated overnight at 3:00 AM Friday and again Friday morning at 11:35 AM. Robert de Niro stars as Jake La Motta in this biopic of a boxer who has, shall we say, issues. He's violent and paranoid, thinking that his wife (Cathy Moriarty) is cheating on him -- with his brother (Joe Pesci)! La Motta eventually goes from a world boxing champion to a drunk, overweight, middle-aged man, a transition that helped De Niro win an Oscar.

If you want something more fun than Raging Bull, tune into the Fox Movie Channel on Friday morning for a movie that hasn't shown up in about two years: The Magnificent Dope, Friday at 10:00 AM. Don Ameche stars as a man running a Dale Carnegie-like school of success. The only thing is, it isn't going very well, so he gets an idea: run a contest to have somebody who's not much of a success take the course for free; when the course "works", it will drive more business to the school. Unfortunately for Ameche, he picks somebody who doesn't really want to be a success, a man from a small New England town who only wants the prize money so he can help his town buy a new fire truck. The contest winner is played by Henry Fonda, who does an excellent job in this light comedy, and teaches everybody in the big city a few things about life along the way.

On Saturday afternoon at 4:00 PM, TCM is showing one of the classic later westerns, Ride the High Country. An aging Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were pulled out of semi-retirement to make this movie, about a man (McCrea) whose job it is to protect a shipment of gold and bring it from the mining town in the mountains down to the valley. McCrea brings along an old colleague (Scott) as an assistant, since this is a job for more than one man. What McCrea doesn't know is that Scott is actually plotting against him.... Along the way, the two reminisce about how the West is passing them by, while watching life happen for the young people: there's an extended subplot regarding Scott's young partner (Ron Starr), the daughter of a strict farmer (a young Mariette Hartley), and the miner she wants to run away to marry.

This week's TCM Essential, Saturday night at 8:00 PM, is the previously-recommended The Bad and the Beautiful, in which Kirk Douglas plays a movie producer trying to convince his former collaborators ot work with him again on a new movie.

One final note for Blair Kiel: next week's Silent Sunday Nights feature, airing overnight between the 27th and 28th, is Wings. I know you've been wanting to see this one, so I'm giving you a full week's notice. If you miss it, don't come running to me on the 28th.