Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of July 28-August 3, 2008. August is a special month, in that TCM airs its annual "Summer Under the Stars" festival. Each of the 31 days of August is dedicated to a different star, with 24 hours of that star's movies. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.

We'll start off with this week's TCM "Silent Sunday Night" feature, a movie selected especially for Blair Kiel. It's Wings, Monday at midnight (That's Sunday at 11:00 PM LFT!). William Wellman directed this epic about two pilots in World War I, and the girl they both love. The love story is cheesy, but the reason to watch this is for the aerial stunts, which are all real. Wings was made back in 1927, and there were no computers to speak of, let alone CGI. Also, stop-motion photography would have been murder on the pilots. In addition to the aerial stuntwork, watch for a brief appearance by Gary Cooper, in the movie that made him a star.

For another movie about the aftermath of World War I, switch to HBO Signature. At 6:20 AM Thursday, they're showing the 1946 version of The Razor's Edge. Tyrone Power plays a man who comes back from the war and decides he needs to "find himself". So, he breaks off his engagement from Gene Tierney (stupid idea) and spends 10 years seeing the world, during which time Tierney understandably gets married. Power returns to find Tierney married and her friend, played by Anne Baxter suffering from the death of her husband and baby in a car accident, and dealing with the pain by becoming a drug addict. Power naturally feels for Baxter, but Tierney decides she wants Power back! Baxter won an Oscar for her role, and watch the rest of the supporting cast. Herbert Marshall plays Somerset Maugham, who wrote the book on which the movie was taken; Clifton Webb shows up as Uncle Elliott.

Monday nights in July on TCM have featured film critic Elvis Mitchell's interviews of Hollywood 's big names asking them about their movie influences. This week's interviewee is Quentin Tarantino; the interview airs at 8:00 PM with a repeat at 10:30. Apparently, one of Tarantino's influences was the dreadful musical Meet Me in St. Louis, which airs at 11:00 PM after the encore presentation of the interview. Apparently he too found Judy Garland's singing of "The Trolley Song" frightening. That, and Margaret O'Brien.

I've recommended the screwball comedy My Man Godfrey before, but it hasn't aired in a while. It shows up this week, at 6:20 AM Tuesday on Cinemax. William Powell plays a "forgotten man" who's found by wealthy socialite Carole Lombard in a charity scavenger hunt. She takes him home and installs him as the family's butler, but he's got other ideas. Lombard's sister, played by Gail Patrick, suspects that something isn't quite right with Powell, and tries to frame Powell to get him fired. It's great comedy, although there's a social message woven into the movie as well. Veteran character actor Eugene Pallette (Friar Tuck in the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood) plays the patriarch of the family, while Mischa Auer was nominated for an Oscar for playing a singer who is the protégé of the matriarch (Alice Brady).

Tuesday nights on TCM in July have been devoted to the Star of the Month, Rosalind Russell.. I'm pretty certain I mentioned Auntie Mame the last time it aired; it shows up this week at 8:00 PM on Tuesday.
Later in the evening, there's a double feature of Russell as a nun: The Trouble With Angels at 1:00 AM Wednesday, in which Russell plays the mother superior at a Catholic girls' school, teaching Hayley Mills lessons about life. For those of you who are Catholic and have daughters, this is actually a delightful little movie.
The Trouble With Angels was so successful that a sequel was made, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, which airs at 3:00 AM Wednesday. Unfortunately, they couldn't get star Hayley Mills, or director Ida Lupino, from the original, and the result is an absolute mess about Russell and the rest of the nuns taking their charges on a cross-country trip to a post-Vatican II style youth religious festival.

In between all these is a movie I haven't recommended before, Gypsy, airing Tuesday at 10:30 PM on TCM. This is a musical biopic about the life of burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. Russell doesn't get the title role; she's too old for that. The title role is played by Natalie Wood, with Russell playing her driven stage mother.

There are a number of movies airing Wednesday morning on TCM that I've recommended the last time they showed up, but are worth mentioning again:
Bird of Paradise at 6:45 AM, in which Joel McCrea falls for Polynesian princess Dolores del Rio; both of them get very undressed in several swimming scenes;
The Most Dangerous Game at 8:15 AM, in which Joel McCrea and Fay Wray are the human prey of an insane big game hunter; and
Alfred Hitchcock's Number Seventeen at 9:30 AM, an early British Hitchcock film about jewel thieves in an abandoned house.

Wednesday evenings on TCM in July have seen a festival of big bands on the silver screen, and this final Wednesday in July starts with a series of biopics:
The Glenn Miller Story at 8:00 PM Wednesday, starring James Stewart at Miller and June Allyson as his wife;
The Benny Goodman Story at 10:00 PM, with a wooden Steve Allen as Goodman; and
The Gene Krupa Story, about the jazz drummer, at midnight Thursday (that's 11:00 PM Wednesday for those of you shucking corn in Iowa), with Sal Mineo playing Krupa.

There are a lot of phony animals on TCM on Thursday, not all of which were animated by Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion photography. With that in mind, I'll recommend Son of Godzilla, airing at 2:15 PM Thursday on TCM. Yes, it's everybody's favorite Japanese monster, this time playing surrogate dad. Sure, it's not very good, but like a lot of the bad American sci-fi movies from the 1950s and early 1960s, it's the sort of movie to just sit back with a bowl of popcorn and not take too seriously.

We can get more serious with "Summer Under the Stars", which begins on Friday. The star for August 1 is Michael Caine. Our first Caine selection will be The Eagle Has Landed, Friday at 12:30 PM. An all-star cast play Nazis in this 1970s movie about a plot to kidnap British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Sure, the plot is far-fetched, but it's got a lot of star power: In addition to Caine, Robert Duvall plays a Nazi colonel; Donald Pleasance plays Heinrich Himmler; Donald Sutherland plays an Irish Nazi sympathizer; Anthony Quayle plays the German admiral Canaris; and in smaller roles you can find Larry Hagman and Treat Williams. It's not as good as The Dirty Dozen or The Great Escape, but it beats any chick flick.

Later on Friday might be Michael Caine's most famous role, as Alfie, Friday at 10:30 PM. Alfie is a lovable cad who seduces every woman he meets, only to find out that when you're this selfish, looking at women only as a tool to give you sexual pleasure, the end result is going to be that you end up alone. Watch this version, not the Jude Law remake.

Saturday's star is Charlie Chaplin; TCM presents 24 hours of his movies in chronological order from 1914's The Knockout at 6:00 AM, to 1957's A King in New York at 4:15 AM Saturday. In between all this, at 1:45 PM Saturday, is the classic The Gold Rush. Chaplin's "Little Tramp" learns of the Klondike gold rush, and decides that he wants in on the action. The Gold Rush has the famous sequences of Chaplin doing a "dance" number with potatoes on his plate; the Little Tramp eating his boot; and his shack on a cliff, with high winds blowing everything back and forth. It might be Chaplin's best work, and thankfully doesn't have the political overtones some of his later movies do.

One such later movie is Modern Times, Saturday at 8:00 PM. In this mostly silent movie, Chaplin's Tramp is a man who tries to adjust to a more industrialized world, getting hired and fired from a series of jobs as a result, and as often happened to the Tramp, getting into trouble through no fault of his own. Chaplin starts off this movie as a factory worker, and there are some funny scenes about automation, presaging those 1950s fantasies about devices that would do things for us automatically, or some of the devices on The Jetsons. Perhaps the best scene, however, is one in which Chaplin roller skates on the unfinished second floor of a department store.

Sunday, August 3 will see 24 hours of movies starring Gregory Peck. Unfortunately, To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't show up this time; you'll have to be contented with something like Roman Holiday at 8:00 PM Sunday instead.

If Gregory Peck isn't your thing, you might want to tune into the Fox Movie Channel. At noon on Sunday, they're showing Move Over, Darling. This movie is a remake of the Irene Dunne/Cary Grant classic My Favorite Wife, starring Doris Day as the woman who returns to her husband (played by James Garner) after being missing for five years. It's not quite as good as the original -- who could be as good as Cary Grant and Irene Dunne? -- but Day and Garner are both good at what they do, and it's a pleasant enough movie. Polly Bergen (from Cape Fear) plays the other woman, Don Knotts has a bit part as a shoe salesman, and the always-wonderful Thelma Ritter plays Garner's mother.