TCM Week: Jan. 23-29

TCM Week spotlights a highly subjective selection of the week’s essential or undiscovered films on the Turner Classic Movies channel to help plan movie viewing, DVR scheduling or TCM Party attendance. All times are EST. 

Monday, January 23
Tonight beginning at 8 p.m., TCM presents six films directed by Max Ophüls in Hollywood. Born in Germany in 1902, Ophüls was a director, creative director and producer in theater, then in films. He fled from the Nazis to France in 1933, and landed in Hollywood via Switzerland and Italy by 1941. He didn’t make a film in the US until five years later, when Robert Siodmak helped him land The Exile (1:00 a.m. Tues.). To me, Ophüls is synonymous with love and destiny, luxurious productions, and the brilliant, saturated color of the tragic Lola Montes. Other films in the block include:
8:00 p.m. The Reckless Moment
9:30 p.m. Caught
11:15 p.m. Letter from an Unknown Woman
1:00 a.m. The Exile
2:45 a.m. La Ronde
4:30 a.m. The Earrings of Madame de…

Tuesday, January 24
11:30 a.m. The Catered Affair (1956)
I’ve always heard, the wedding is for the family and the honeymoon is for the couple, and so it is when a daughter (Debbie Reynolds) gets engaged and her mother (Bette Davis) makes every effort to give the girl a wedding like the mother always wanted.

4:30 p.m. The Dirty Dozen (1967)
If you haven’t yet seen this classic about Aldo Raines Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) and 12 convicts (Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, and George Kennedy, among others) on an impossible mission to blow up a movie theater chateau containing a whole mess of Nazis, set your DVR now. If you don’t have a DVR, call in sick. At least put it in your Netflix queue. I’m serious.

Wednesday, January 25
8:00 p.m. Private Screenings: Angela Lansbury

9:00 p.m. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1982)
***TCM Party***
A barber (George Hearn) begins a murderous partnership with the baker downstairs (Angela Lansbury). Find us on Twitter with #TCMParty…watch and tweet along!

Thursday, January 26
Jack Cardiff is best-known as a cinematographer but he was also an Oscar-nominated director (for 1960’s Sons and Lovers). Tonight TCM is showing another five of the 13 films Cardiff directed:
8:00 p.m. Intent to Kill (1958)
9:45 p.m. The Lion (1962)
11:30 p.m. Young Cassidy (1965)
1:30 a.m. The Liquidator (1966)
3:30 a.m. Dark of the Sun (1968)

Friday, January 27
TCM has a block of films directed by James Whale beginning at 8:00 p.m. tonight. I can recommend The Invisible Man and Frankenstein, but I also highly recommend Gods and Monsters, an imagining of the end of Whale’s life. It’s superbly acted by Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser, and it’s nowhere near as depressing as it sounds.
8:00 p.m. The Great Garrick (1937)
9:45 p.m. One More River (1934)
11:15 p.m. The Invisible Man (1933)
12:30 a.m. (Sat.) Frankenstein (1931)

Saturday, January 28
There’s a lot of famous movies scheduled today…Rocky, King Solomon’s Mines, The Misfits, Soylent Green, Rebel Without A Cause, and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner…but I’m going to try to catch Zsa Zsa Gabor as one of the all-female inhabitants of Venus in a movie that promises to give new meaning to the term “campy,” Queen of Outer Space (7:30 a.m.); and Saratoga (10:15 p.m.), which pairs Clark Gable with Jean Harlow in her last film.

Sunday, January 29
6:00 a.m. The Hard Way (1942)
Yep, it’s early in the morning, but who am I to refuse an Ida Lupino movie?

2:00 a.m. (Mon.) The Vanishing (1988)
“A young man is obsessed with finding the girlfriend who vanished at a rest stop.”