Welcome to a post-Brett Favre edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo", for the week of August 11-17, 2008. Once again, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned. Summer Under the Stars continues on TCM, but on the other channels we've got a François Truffaut movie; a game show host in one of his acting roles, and Kenny Rogers not knowing when to fold them.

We'll start off with TCM's "Summer Under the Stars", however, since Monday sees 24 hours of movies starring the recently deceased Richard Widmark. He was under contract ot Fox for the first several years of his career, so his early films rarely show up on TCM. However, they have gotten one from Fox: Pickup on South Street, Monday at 8:00 PM. Widmark stars as a petty pickpocket in New York city, swiping the purses of unsuspecting women like Jean Peters. Unfortunately for both of them, what they don't know can hurt them: her pocketbook was holding a microfilm that contains important secrets wanted by the Communists! Needless to say, the Commies, wicked bastards that they are, aren't about to let that microfilm disappear without trying to get it back, and stopping at no lengths to get it back. So, we've got poor Widmark being chased by both the police and the communists. It's a wonderful thriller. Watch also for the great Thelma Ritter in one of her finest roles, playing a stool pigeon.

Moving ahead to Tuesday, TCM's star for the day is Kim Novak. Her best known movie is probably Vertigo, which TCM is showing at 11:15 PM ET Tuesday. If you're a fan of Hitchcock like I am, you proabably know the story. James Stewart plays a San Francisco cop who's got a bad case of vertigo and is on disability because he saw his partner on the beat fall off a building to his death. One day, he's asked to watch a rich man's blonde wife (that's Novak), who seems to be crazy. He follows her around and eventually develops a bit of a relationship with this mysterious woman, until she throws herself off a belltower. Not long after, he meets another woman who looks mysteriously like the first one.... Many of the scenes in Vertigo were filmed on location in and around San Francisco. The misson where Novak dies actually exists in San Juan Batista -- but the bell tower was edited in for the movie, and doesn't exist in real life!

I've recommended the Bette Davis movie Of Human Bondage before. It was remade in 1964, with Novak taking the Bette Davis role, that of a flirtatious waitress who has an affair with a crippled medical student (Laurence Harvey), even though she doesn't really love him. Having been made in the mid-1960s, the filmmakers didn't have to worry about the Production Code the way RKO did back in 1934, so we actually get to hear the characters talk about syphilis.

If Kim Novak isn't your thing, you might want to switch over to the Independent Film Channel. At 9:30 PM Tuesday, with a repeat at 3:30 AM Wednesday, is the François Truffaut movie The Last Metro. Set in occupied Paris during World War II, it stars Catherine Deneuve as a popular theater actress who's married to a Jew. The Nazis believe that her husband fled to South America, but in fact, he's been hiding in the basement of the theater that he owned. She's starring in a new play there with Gérard Depardieu, and is doing everything she can to try to keep the theater going -- after all, if she can't keep control of it and keep the play running, she'll lose the hiding place for her husband. Meanwhile, Deneuve finds herself falling for Depardieu, despite the fact that she's already married....

Going back to TCM, we've got a new star for Wednesday, Peter Lorre. Last week I mentioned the 1950s version of The Man Who Knew Too Much which aired on the 10th as part of Doris Day day; the original 1934 version starred Peter Lorre and airs at 6:30 PM Wednesday.

Lorre could do comedy, too; a comedy of his that I haven't recommended in a long time is the hilarious Arsenic and Old Lace, airing at noon Wednesday on TCM. Lorre isn't the real star; that honor goes to Cary Grant, a writer about to get married on Halloween to Priscilla Lane. He goes to tell his two elderly aunts about it, and discovers that they have a secret: they've been killing lonely old men who have nobody left in their lives by serving the men poisoned elderberry wine, and then burying the bodies in the basement! Peter Lorre steps into all this mess later, but only serves to make things worse. It turns out that he's a black-market plastic surgeon, and has done some surgery on Grant's brother (played by Raymond Massey), who is a fugitive on the run, is looking for a place to stay -- and has picked their aunts' house! Frankly, it's amazing that this all made it past the censors enforcing the Production Code.

Lorre also starred in the 1935 horror classic Mad Love, which kicks off TCM's prime time schedule at 8:00 PM Wednesday. Colin Clive (from the Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein) plays a concert pianist who loses the use of his hands in a train accident. His fiancée, a theatre actress played by Frances Drake, goes to controversial surgeon Lorre to see if he can help her fiancé. What she doesn't know is that he's obsessed with her, and "helps" by amputating the hands of a notorious knife-throwing murderer who's just been executed. Naturally, Colin Clive's new hands have a life of their own, and instead of becoming a master pianist again, Clive finds he's got a masterful ability to throw knives!

Thursday on TCM brings us 24 hours of Greer Garson movies. Her Oscar-winning performance as Mrs. Miniver airs at 11:30 AM, while she shows up in one of the most dreadful chick flicks of all time, Random Harvest, at 10:00 PM. In Random Harvest, Garson plays (eventually) the wife of a man (Ronald Colman) who developed amnesia in World War I. He escapes from the asylum, meets Garson, marries her, and the two live happily in a small cottage while he tries to become a writer. Unfortunately, one day while in the big city to negotiate a writing contract, he falls, hits his head, and develops a second case of amnesia, forgetting everything that happened after his first case, but suddenly remembering everything that happened before his first case. Garson, meanwhile, starts out on a decades-long search for her man....

A Garson movie I don't think I've recommended before is Blossoms in the Dust, Friday at 4:15 AM. Garson plays Edna Gladney, a social worker in Texas at the beginning of the 20th century. There was a real-life Edna Gladney, who founded a famous children's home in Texas, but this movie is MGM's dramatized version of the story, including people who never existed in real life. (The real Gladney never had children, unlike in the movie). Having worked with abandoned babies and orphans, Gladney spends much of her life trying to correct wrongs such as having the word "illegitimate" stricken from these children's birth certificates. Walter Pidgeon plays her husband, as in Mrs. Miniver. Blossoms in the Dust is also in glorious Technicolor.

If you don't particularly care for Greer Garson, you can watch Kenny Rogers, before all the plastic surgery, over on the Fox Movie Channel, in Six Pack, Thursday at 9:00 PM. Rogers plays a race car driver who's down on his luck, to the point of having his hot rod stolen. He finds out that the people responsible for stealing his car are actually six orphan siblings. He can't turn them over to the sheriff, because he's corrupt and threatening to put the kids in an orphanage unless they steel and give him a cut of their takings. So, Rogers comes up with a different solution: taking the kids with him and turning them into his pit crew! Don't you love these crusty old man meets heartwarming waif stories?

Our next movie is also on the Fox Movie Channel, at 10:30 AM Friday: The Rookie. This movie stars Peter Marshall (yes, the later Master of the Hollywood Squares) as a popular radio host at the end of World War II who's about to get engaged. However, he's in the Army and when Tommy Noonan tries to get enlisted, in spite of the fact that soldiers are being demobilized left and right, the Army finds the solution of putting Noonan in a one-man platoon under the command of Marshall. It's pretty dire stuff, made worse by the fact that, due to a comedy of errors, the two, along with Marshall's fiancée (played by Julie Newmar) end up stranded on an island in the Pacific with two Japanese soldiers who don't know that the war is over (Marshall and Noonan, doing spectacularly offensive double roles as the Japanese soldiers).

If Julie Newmar is hot, Rita Hayworth is even hotter -- and she's TCM's star for Friday. She's close to her hottest in Gilda, alongside Glenn Ford; this airs at 9:45 PM Friday.

Saturday's featured star is decidedly less hot than Rita Hayworth: Fred Astaire. I'd recommend more of his movies, but the plots are so similar that it's easy to get them mixed up. It doesn't matter whether you watch Swing Time at 8:00 PM, Top Hat at 10:00 PM, or The Gay Divorcee at 4:00 AM Sunday; they're all good. A movie which is somewhat different, though -- if only because Astaire is in a supporting role -- is Flying Down to Rio, at 6:00 AM Saturday on TCM. The putative star here is Gene Raymond, playing a bandleader who loves the ladies and ends up in Rio de Janeiro, competing with the obscure Raul Roulien for the heart of Dolores Del Rio. One of the highlights is the final musical number, which involves a gaggle of showgirls dancing on the wings of airplanes; the other is the first screen pairing of Astaire with Ginger Rogers. The lit up the screen in one scene dancing that famous new Brazilian dance of the day -- no, not the lambada; the carioca.

This coming weekend gives viewers the chance to answer the question of who's the better dancer: Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Having watched a day of Astaire movies, you can then watch Gene Kelly all day on Sunday. One of his finest movies is the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1951, An American in Paris, airing at 6:00 PM Sunday. Kelly plays the title character, an ex-GI who really wants to paint, and so stays in Paris after the war in order to paint. He's romanced by Nina Foch, who is in love with him and would like him to be her protégé, but Kelly is really in love with Leslie Caron. Unfortunately, Caron's situation is such that she can't marry him.... It's a thin story, and one we've seen a dozen times before, but the reasons to watch An American in Paris are for the lovely George Gershwin music, and for the incredible dancing, especially the final sequence, which MGM declared the best they had ever produced when they released That's Entertainment! in 1974.

An American in Paris is followed at 8:00 PM by On the Town, about three sailors on a one-day leave in New York City who meet three lovely women and spend the day seeing New York with them. Finally, following On the Town, at 9:45 PM we have Gene Kelly in his other masterpiece, Singin' In the Rain.

Thanks, Fedya! Lots of good stuff this week.

I do love musicals! An American in Paris, On the Town and Singin' In the Rain all in a row! Woo Hoo!