Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of March 14-20, 2016. Wisconsin is going to find out today where and when they play in the trademarked basketball tournament, so while waiting for that game you have two choices. Either watch Champions League football or the movies I've used my good taste to pick out. For most of you, the choice will be the movies, won't it? 
There's another night of Merle Oberon films as well as the movies condemned by the League of Decency, but I've selected a bunch of other stuff. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
I didn't mention it last week, but last Sunday night was the first of two Silent Sunday Nights installments of Hal Roach shorts. This week sees the second set, starting at 12:45 AM Monday. Note, however, that TCM's online schedule and the printable monthly schedule list the shorts in a different order, so it's best just to record the entire block of three shorts. They include an early Laurel and Hardy short, Putting Pants on Philip. Stan Laurel plays Philip, who is the Scottish nephew of American J. Pierpont Mumblethunder (Oliver Hardy). Philip comes to visit, andhe takes a liking to all the girls. But Philip also, being Scottish, wears a kilt, and that leads the Americans, who don't know any better, to think of Philip as some sort of freak. Our uncle isn't exactly excited by the prospect of this, so he tries to get a pair of pants for Philip, which proves to be more difficult than you'd think.
Comic-book films and their CGI may be all the rage these days, but Hollywood has been taking from the funny pages for decades. There were all those Blondie movies in the 1940s, and in the 1950s, there was Prince Valiant. You can catch it on FXM Retro at 9:30 AM Monday and 8:00 AM Tuesday. Robert Wagner, wearing a horrible wig, stars as Valiant, the sone of a Norse king whose kingdom has been usurped and who has fled to England. Valiant goes to see King Arthur (Brian Aherne) to become a knight, but gets waylaid by the Black Knight (James Mason) and meets Gawain (Sterling Hayden), who can help Valiant in his quest to become a knight. And then they meet Aleta (Janet Leigh) and her sister Ilene (Debra Paget), and romantic complications ensue. I haven't read the comic strip in decades so don't recall how true to the strip this movie is, but with the then-new Cinemascope process and some British establishing shots, this one is lovely to look at.
Monday night sees a return of the films about artists to TCM, with an airing of a movie that I think is a TCM premiere: El Greco, at 10:15 PM. The title means "the Greek man", and El Greco was indeed a Greek-born painter named Domenikos Theotokopoulos (played by Mel Ferrer) who spent the second half of his life (from about 1580 to 1614) in Toledo, Spain. ("Greco" is actually an Italian word, not Spanish; he spent time in Venice before moving to Spain.) There, he painted some of his greatest works at first hoping to get a commission from the King (Fernando Rey) but ultimately failing. El Greco fell in love with a noblewoman (Rossanna Schiaffino) who bore him a son, but they never married. In the movie, which focuses solely on the artist's time in Spain, he falls afoul of the Inquisition, which changes his artwork. This showed up on the old Fox Movie Channel ages ago, but at that time only in a panned-and-scanned print; this is a movie that really needs to be seen in its original aspect ratio.
Tuesday is the birth anniversary of George Brent, so unsurprisingly TCM is showing a bunch of his movies on Tuesday morning and afternoon. These include Wings of the Navy at 5:15 PM. The plot is relatively overworked, since there were a lot of similar movies. George plays Cass Harrington, the elder brother in a Navy flier who has become a good Navy pilot. Younger brother Jerry (John Payne) does the submarine thing but, wanting to prove himself to his brother, takes up flight training. Meanwhile, Cass has a girlfriend Irene (Olivia de Havilland) he is planning to marry. But Jerry falls for her, and then Cass gets injured in a flight accident, forcing him to quit flying to work in aircraft design while Jerry goes off to work on seaplanes. That is, until he gets a chance to show that Cass' new design can really work, despite it already having been in an accident that killed a previous test pilot. This one has some Navy-approved establishment shots of the naval bases at Pensacola and San Diego, and some vintage airplane shots that may be of interest to plane buffs.
Jerry Lewis is turning 90 this week, and TCM is celebrating with two nights of his movies. On Tuesday night we get some of the films he made with his comedy partner Dean Martin, and then on Wednesday we get films he made after this. One of those later films is The King of Comedy, at 9:30 PM Wednesday. The star of the movie is actually Robert De Niro, who plays Rupert Pupkin. Rupert is a man who has no life apart from what he sees on TV, and he's become one of the biggest fans of late-night talk show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). One of Rupert's biggest dreams is to be able to perform his own stand-up routine on Jerry's show, although Rupert has never actually performed as a comedian. One night, however, while waiting outside Jerry's studio, Rupert saves Jerry from another fan Masha (Sandra Bernhard), and Rupert thinks this is his in to Jerry. It isn't, so he and Masha team up to kidnap Jerry with the "ransom" being Rupert getting to perform on Jerry's show.
Among the movies airing this week on Encore Westerns, one that I think I've never mentioned before is Drango, which you can catch at 12:25 PM Wednesday at 1:10 AM Thursday. The title refers to the character played by Jeff Chandler, who stars as US Army Major Clint Drango. He marched through Georgia with General Sherman in 1864, and now that the war is over, he has been sent back to Georgia to lead the military occupation of one of the towns that just a year earlier he helped lay waste to. He tries to be honorable and magnanimous, but of course that's not easy when you've got an entire town that's still bitter over having lost the war and been destroyed. It won't help when they find out the Major's part in that. But there are more pressing matters to attend to, such as those southerners who would still like to fight the war, to the point that they lynch a man who although a southerner, disapproved of the Confederacy. That man's daughter (Joanne Dru) blames the major, in part, until she learns how he's trying to help the town and there's nowhere else for her to turn.
I know how much you all love those 1930s B movies, so this week I'm going to mention one that I don't think I've recommended before: That Man's Here Again, airing at 1:45 PM Wednesday on TCM. Hugh Herbert plays That Man, wealthy drunkard Thomas Jesse, although the real stars of the movie are the two younger characters. Tom Brown plays Jimmy, the overnight elevator operator in Jesse's ritzy apartment building, who helps the rich guy get back to his apartment safely since he comes home late every night. One night, not only Jesse comes in, but a young woman Nancy (Mary Maguire) who's clearly been in the rain too long. It turns out she's been living on the streets and since Jimmy falls in love with her, he gets her a job as a maid. Unfortunately, she's also got a baby who is a ward of the state, and that causes problems. It's up to Mr. Jesse to bring Jimmy and Nancy back together again and realize they should stay together.
For you philistines who only like more recent movies, I'll mention one from the 1980s this week: Starman, which is on Encore at 10:00 PM Thursday if you've got the east coast feed, or three hours later if you've got the west coast feed. Karen Allen plays Jenny, a woman who was recently widowed and is trying to overcome her grief by shutting herself away at her cabin in the woods. Meanwhile, in outer space, aliens have come across the Voyager probes, and send one of their own to meet us Earthlings. Of course, we stupid Earthlings view the alien ship as a threat and try to shoot it down, forcing the alien to crash land, which is where he meets Jenny. When he finds that Jenny's husband died, he uses some of the husband's DNA to remake himself in the spitting image of her husband, at which point the Starman is played by Jeff Bridges. Starman needs to get from the cabin in Wisconsin to Arizona where his kind are going to pick him up in a couple of days, and Jenny is the only one who can get him there, since the military wants him for their own purposes. Along the way, she falls in love with him.
Since you all read these threads religiously, you'll recognize character actor Edward Everett Horton. Horton got the chance to play a leading role -- no, two leading roles -- in Lonely Wives, which you can see on TCM at 8:45 AM Friday. Horton plays lawyer Richard Smith, happily married to Madeline (Esther Ralston) by day, and romancing other women by night. The other character is vaudeville impersonator Felix. Felix would like to impersonate Smith in his act but would also like to get permission, so Smith agrees if Felix can fool Smith's mother-in-law who is staying with him while Smith's wife is away on vacation. Meanwhile, Smith's secretary is setting him up with her friend Diane (Laura La Plante) to try to help Diane win a divorce from her husband. What Smith doesn't know is that Diane's husband is... Felix. Then, making matters even more complicated, Madeline returns home early from her vacation to find her husband, except that it's really Felix, and not her husband. Things get very complicated.
If you like monster movies, you'll be happy to see that TCM is running The Giant Behemoth at 6:15 AM Saturday. This one starts off with reports of people dying in Cornwall, on the southwest English coast. Well, they're not just dying; they're dying of radiation burns. And it's not just people; dead fish are washing ashore! The first thought is that the radioactive waste being dumped in the ocean is leaking and somehow washing ashore or otherwise affecting people, but the scientists who investigate (Gene Evans the American and Andre Morrell the Brit) are stunned to find that the radioactive waste has awakened a dinosaur-like creature. That creature can fire radioactivity, which is what's causing the burns. And worse, the creature is heading for London! They could destroy the creature, but there's a problem. If they kill it while it's in someplace like London, it's going to release all its radioactivity, contaminating London which would be a disaster.