You may remember actor Bill Paxton from such movies as Apollo 13 or even Titanic, if you were whipped by your woman into watching that one. Well, Paxton is this month's TCM Guest Programmer, having sat down with TCM host Robert Osborne to present four of his favorite movies. Paxton has a rather eclectic selecion of four movies, as follows:
The Italian movie Juliet of the Spirits at 8:00 PM, about a housewife who finds her husband is cheating on her;
The Spanish-langauge fantasy Spirit of the Beehive at 10:30 PM, about two young girls trying to find Frankenstein's monster;
Robert Altman's California Split at 12:30 AM Tuesday; and
The Last Detail at 2:30 AM, about two MPs who, having pity on a sailor about to go to prison, decide to show him a "good time" before he has to go to prison.
Elvis Presley would be turning 78 on Tuesday if he hadn't been kidnapped and buried under the old Meadowlands Stadium. (Or am I mixing Elvis up with somebody else?
) TCM is celebrating the day with a bunch of his movies. I don't think I've mentioned Kissin' Cousins, which is airing at 8:00 AM Tuesday, before. That's probably because it's not one of his best, and even has Elvis wearing a blond wig! 
The reason for the wig is that Elvis plays two characters here. One is an army man sent to Tennessee to try to convince the locals that their neck of the woods wouldn't be such a bad place for a missile base. But when that Elvis gets there, he finds that he's got a backwoods cousin who looks just like him, well except for that hideous blond wig. (That's because the cousin was also played by Elvis.) 1930s star Glenda Farrell, whom I've been mentioning in the Torchy movies running at noon on Saturdays, plays the civilian cousin's mother.One of TCM's themes in January is heist movies, which are running on Tuesday nights in January. One airing this week that I don't think I've mentioned before is Bob le Flambeur at 12:15 AM Wednesday. "Bob" is a man who spent 20 years in a French prison for a bank robbery, and now that he's gotten out, he's too old for robbery. So instead, he leads a meager existence by gambling in the penny-ante Parisian places, these being the days before professional poker became popular. Eventually, Bob loses enough money that he needs to make some by some method other than gambling, and the only way he knows how is robbery, so he has to get in on a plan to rob a casino.... Bob le Flambeur was made five years before Ocean's Eleven, and although it predates the French New Wave, it has a look significantly different from what Hollywood or the British cinema were doing at this time.
Loretta Young returns as TCM's Star of the Month on Wednesday night with another night of her movies. This Wednesday kicks off at 8:00 PM with Employees' Entrance. Warren William plays the head of a department store who will do almost anything to keep his store going during the Depression. That includes seducing and bedding his female employees. Loretta Young, who was all of 20 when she made this, is the female employee, but what William doesn't know is that she's married to Wallace Ford, whom William has been grooming for Big Things. When the relationship becomes public, Ford kills himself. And watch what William does with another of his lady employees, Alice White. After all this, the bankers and the rest of the board come after William to take control of the store, which he's determined not to see happen....
If you want another pre-code about women using their sex appeal to advance in the business world, you can watch the last of this week's Loretta Young movies: She Had to Say Yes, which is airing at 7:00 AM Thursday on TCM. Young plays a secretary at a business that's not doing so well. In order to improve business, the boss (Regis Toomey) comes up with the wonderful idea that perhaps the lady employees ought to "entertain" prospective buyers, with the hope that they'll respond by directing business Toomey's way. "Entertaining", of course, means something rather loose and immoral, and winds up with poor Loretta being sexually assaulted by Lyle Talbot! The interesting thing about this one is that it was directed by Busby Berkeley, who is best known for choreographing the filming of many of the great musical numbers in Warner Bros. 1930s musicals.
After the Loretta Young movies, TCM will be celebrating Sal Mineo, who would be turning 74 on Thursday if he hadn't been murdered. Mineo's films include The Young Don't Cry, which comes on at 2:45 PM. Mineo stars as a teenaged boy at an orphanage in Georgia. As you can imagine, it's a stereotypical tough life, although Mineo tries to do what he can to help the younger orphans. The orphange is next to where a prison work-gang is working, and one day, one of the prisoners (James Whitmore) saves Mineo from being bitten by a snake. A fast friendship develops, although it's going to be tested when Whitmore tries to escape and asks Mineo for help. Complicating matters is the fact that there's another role model for the orphans in the form of a former one of their own, so to speak: a kid from the orphange who grew up to become a millionaire and shows that yes, you can make it from the orphanage without having to rebel against everybody.
If you like pre-codes, and I know you all do, another nifty little one is airing in the early hours of Friday morning: Love Is a Racket, at 4:00 AM Friday on TCM. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. plays a columnist covering Broadway who likes actress Frances Dee. However, she's only using men as stepping stones to make it on Broadway. In fact, she's in trouble because she's been writing checks that have gotten her deeply overdrawn, and the only person who can cover the checks is racketeer Lyle Talbot. That's bad enough, but eventually, the racketeer ends up murdered, and Dee's debt to him is bound to become public... unless Fairbanks can do something about it while covering up the story! You have to love the way obstruction of justice and evidence tampering are treated so casually in these 1930s movies. Rounding out the cast are Ann Dvorak as a lady reporter and fast-talking Lee Tracy as Fairbanks' reporter sidekick.
I don't recommend the TCM Underground selections all that often, but one of this week's movies is interesting: The Psychopath, airing at 2:00 AM Saturday on TCM. In 1960s England, a German widow and her son have emigrated trying to clear her industrialist husband's name. It seems that after World War II, the denazification commissions investigated, and concluded that he had employed slave labor at his factory during the War. However, one by one the Britons who had been on the commission investigating Nazi war crimes are winding up dead! Well, not just dead, but spectacularly murdered, with little doll likenesses of them being placed next to their dead bodies! Who's doing it? The mystery part isn't too much of a mystery, but it's also got horror elements.
I've mentioned Michael Shayne a couple of times in the past. As I know you'll recall, Shayne isn't an actor, but a character, a detective played in a series of seven films in the early 1940s by Lloyd Nolan. What's left of the Fox Movie Channel has shown three of those movies over the past year or so, and now they've added a fourth Shayne filmi: Sleepers West, which will be on FMC at 6:00 AM Sunday. I have to admit that this is a film I haven't seen before, so I can't comment much about it. The plot, however, sounds somewhat like that of The Narrow Margin in that our hero is on board a train transporting a witness to a trial, while he has to figure out which of the other people on the train are trying to stop him from doing it. Bald character actor Edward Brophy shows up, and the witness is played by Fox contract player Lynn Bari.
Finally, after all of the football games on Sunday, when the Packers are beginning to prepare for the NFC Championship Game, you can watch the first movie version of Magnificent Obsession, which TCM is showing at 10:15 PM Sunday. Robert Taylor stars as a playboy who lives his life idle and fast, eventually nearly dying when he crashes his speedboat. He's resuscitated with a new-fangled heart machine, but unfortunately there's only one of the machines, and a prominent doctor also needed it at the same time -- so the doctor dies! Everybody hates Taylor, especially the doctor's widow (Irene Dunne). Taylor tries to atone, but his first attempt winds up in Dunne getting run over by a car and blinded! The only way for Taylor to atone is to become a doctor, and perform the necessary surgery on Dunne himself! (I guess he really is obsessed.) This melodrama was remade in the 1950s by famed melodrama director Douglas Sirk, with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in the lead roles.