Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of August 4-10, 2008. Summer Under the Stars continues on TCM, with seven more great stars in the spotlight. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

We're going to pick up where we left off last week, with Gregory Peck's day in Summer Under the Stars. Coming up at midnight tonight (that's the midnight between Sunday and Monday in the east; but 11:00 PM Sunday in Wisconsin) is the 1999 documentary A Conversation With Gregory Peck. This film combines an interview Peck did on a speaking tour, taking questions from an audience of fans, with a look at his relationship with his wife and daughter. It's an intimate, and enjoyable, look at his life and work.

Monday, August 4 on TCM is devoted to Marie Dressler. The first movie, at 6:00 AM Monday is one that I've been wanting to recommend for years (I believe it hasn't shown up since October 2004): The Hollywood Revue of 1929. This movie was made in 1929, the year when Hollywood made the transition from silent movies to sound. MGM made this movie mostly as a means of giving screen tests to all of their stars (except for Greta Garbo) to see how they would fare in the new medium of talking pictures. The title is descriptive: this is a revue of the talents of the various MGM stars, interspersed with vaudeville-style acts; there's no plot at all. The acts run the gamut from very good, to pretty bad, to "at least we have a cinematic record of this". Jack Benny serves as the master of ceremonies, and is good here, doing the same things that would make him popular on radio and later TV for the next 30 years. Joan Crawford dances (), Laurel and Hardy do a bit, John Gilbert does Shakespeare with Norma Shearer, and there are several musical numbers. The most important of these is the premiere of the song Singin' In the Rain, which appears during the middle of the movie, and as the finale, with the entire MGM stock appearing in two-strip Technicolor. If only for this finale, The Hollywood Revue is an extremely important cinematic document.

I could go on recommending Marie Dressler, so of course I will. Another of her early talkies is The Vagabond Lover, at 11:15 AM Monday on TCM. Marie Dressler isn't really the star of this movie, to be honest; that honor falls to Rudy Vallee in his first starring role. Vallee plays a young musician from a small town who's been taking mail-order music lessons and, having formed a band, wants to meet the man from whom he's been taking lessons. Unfortunately, the bandleader is on vacation, and due to a comedy of errors, the bandleader's neighbor for the summer (played by Dressler) believes that Vallee is the famous bandleader. Matters aren't helped when Vallee fall's in love with Dressler's daughter.... It's not the greatest movie, largely because everybody was still trying to figure out how to adjust to the new talking picture technology, but it's not bad. If you can hack 1920s singing styles, you even get to hear Vallee croon a few songs.

Marie Dressler's better known movies show up in prime time on Monday. I've mentioned Dinner at Eight a bunch of times; appropriately, TCM are showing it at 8:00 PM.
Dinner at Eight is followed at 10:00 PM by Dressler's Oscar-winning role in Min and Bill at 10:00 PM, about a woman (Dressler) who runs a boarding house for fisherman (including Wallace Beery, with whom she's romantically involved), and takes care of a girl who's not really her daughter.
Dressler was also nominated for an Oscar in Emma, which follows Min and Bill at 11:15 PM Monday, although I can't recall the last time TCM showed this one.

Tuesday's star is the always-wonderful Claude Rains. I've recommended a bunch of his movies before, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, airing on TCM at 11:30 AM Tuesday, in which Rains plays the senior senator ot James Stewart's junior senator. There's also The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I could always recommend; that airs at 2:45 AM Wednesday. ( Casablanca is not airing in honor of Rains, but when Ingrid Bergman gets her day on August 25.)

A Claude Rains movie I haven't recommended before is The Sea Hawk, at 1:45 PM Tuesday. The star is actually Errol Flynn, playing a privateer in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. One of the ships he boards is unfortunately carrying the Spanish ambassador (played by Rains), which gets Flynn in trouble. Of course, you'll recall that the Spanish sent the Armada against England, so eventually Elizabeth needs Flynn to fight the Spaniards again. One thing that's noticeable is that Flynn doesn't have Olivia de Havilland as his love interest this time. She wanted to do more challenging work, so even though the love interest part was written with her in mind, Warner Brothers had to make do with Brenda Marshall. Other than that, a lot of the great character actors at Warner's disposal show up, such as Alan Hale, Una O'Connor, and Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth. Our female readers will be thrilled ot see that Flynn spends several scenes shirtless, but they shoudl be warned that the Sea Hawk keeps his hair at AJ Hawk lengths.

Moving ahead to Wednesday, TCM's star for the day is Anne Bancroft. I've mentioned the nifty little Nightfall before; that shows up at 9:30 AM. Following Nightfall is The Girl in Black Stockings, at 11:00 AM Wednesday on TCM. A murder has been committed at a resort hotel in a small Utah town run by quadraplegic Ron Randell (aided by his sister, played by Marie Windsor). In walks former screen Tarzan Lex Barker, who's on vacation but willing to help solve the murder. Anne Bancroft, like everybody else at the hotel, is one of the suspects, along with the gorgeous Mamie Van Doren. The plot is a bit half-baked, although there's one particularly fun death scene.

On Wednesday night, Anne Bancroft pops up again in The Graduate, at 10:00 PM on TCM. The Graduate is Dustin Hoffman, who can't decide what to do with his future. At his graduation party, one of the women, Mrs. Robinson (that's Bancroft) asks him to take her home because she's had too much to drink, whereupon she seduces him. The two have a romantic relationship, but it hits a snag when he falls in love with her daughter. Too bad the Jerry Springer Show wasn't around in 1967 to sort out this mess.

If Anne Bancroft isn't your thing, you may want to switch over to the Fox Movie Channel, which is showing Ordeal at 3:30 PM Wednesday. If this movie looks familiar to you, it should: it's a remake of the 1953 movie Inferno, it's a story about a man (Arthur Hill, in this version; Robert Ryan in the original) who is stranded in the desert and left to die by his wife (Diana Muldaur, who would eventually play Dr. Pulaski on one season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and can't hold a candle to Inferno's Rhonda Fleming) because she wants to run off with another man. Of course, our hero stubbornly refuses to die....

Back to TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and Thursday, where we get 24 hours of Greta Garbo. There are two documentaries about her, Garbo at 6:30 PM, and The Divine Greta Garbo at 5:00 AM Friday. As for the movies, I've recommended Ninotchka (10:00 PM Thursday) and Grand Hotel (midnight Friday, or 11:00 PM Thursday for the Sconnies) before.

I don't think I've recommended Flesh and the Devil before; it airs at 8:00 AM Thursday. It's got one of the oldest Hollywood plots: Two Boys are friends. Two Boys meet Girl. Two Boys both fall in love with Girl, leading to disastrous consequences for their friendship. Garbo, of course, plays the Girl, a temptress who marries one of the Boys (Lars Hanson) but has a torrid (at least by 1926 standards) affair with the other (John Gilbert). Well, there's a bit more to the plot, in that Gilbert killed Garbo's first husband in a duel, and Garbo only marries Hanson because he saved Gilbert's life by getting Gilbert sent to five years' military service abroad instead of prison.

On Friday, TCM honors James Garner. One of the more bizarre movies he made is Mister Buddwing, Friday at 7:45 AM on TCM. Garner plays the title role, a man who wakes up on a park bench in Manhattan one Sunday morning and realizes that he has no idea who the hell he is. So, he goes around Manhattan trying to figure out who he is. Along the way, he meets several lovely women (Katharine Ross from The Graduate, Suzanne Pleshette, and Jean Simmons) who all remind him of some woman named "Grace". Remember, this was the 1960s, when filmmakers were trying to be experimental and shocking, so if the movie seems a bit tough to follow, that's why.

Saturday on TCM sees a day-long salute to Fred MacMurray. He is of course well-known from The Apartment, which is TCM's Essential for this week, airing at 8:00 PM Saturday. After starring in The Apartment and getting the role on "My Three Sons", MacMurray decided he'd stick to comedy instead, making movies like The Absent-Minded Professor (9:00 AM Saturday). However, he did make some light comedies before this, such as Callaway Went Thataway, Saturday at 3:30 PM. MacMurray stars as a marketing man who has the job of coming up with a successful TV show. The idea he gets is to bring back the popular silver screen cowboy "Smoky" Callaway (Howard Keel). Unfortunately for MacMurray, time has not been to kind to Callaway, who is now a raging drunk who can't do his stunts. So, MacMurray gets the brilliant idea of creating a "new" Callaway and having him star in the TV show. This works well until the original Callaway find out what's going on and wants a cut of the money. Watch for Natalie Schaefer in a small role.

Another, much older, MacMurray movie is Alice Adams, Sunday at midnight (that's 11:00 PM Saturday LFT). The star of the movie is Katharine Hepburn, who plays a social climber in the 1920s who's irritated that her father seems happy with his middle-class lot in life. She schemes to try to become the girlfriend of the wealthy MacMurray, and is constantly terrified that he'll find out the truth about her family. There's a secondary plot about her father and a business idea that might make a lot of money for the family, except that it might be a patent violation of the company he works for that is in many ways more interesting, largely because this leads to the final confrontation in which the father (Fred Stone) plays naturally, completely outacting the overwrought Hepburn. Watch for Hepburn's brother, played by Frank Albertson. He's probably better remembered as the businessman who gives Janet Leigh the $40,000 in cash in Psycho, but he also shows up this week in the previously-mentioned Nightfall.

Finally, on Sunday, we have Doris Day movies. Have fun watching James Stewart smack a hysterical Day in the 1950s version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, at 8:00 PM Sunday on TCM.