This week TCM’s films feature
* Robert Mitchum being tough all day (see Tuesday);
* Stewart Granger being devious for two days (Tuesday and Wednesday);
* the Saint being suave in seven films (Wednesday);
* and a few rarely-viewed thrillers interspersed throughout the week’s schedule (Roadblock, Mystery in Swing, A Night to Remember, The Unholy Three, Pier 5, Havana, and Personal Affair).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Monday—July 20th
Sci-fi films from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M. the next morning.
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Tuesday—July 21st
11:00 AM—His Kind of Woman (1951)
A deported gangster causes problems for guests at a Mexican resort.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price. Dir: John Farrow.
BW-120 mins, TV-PG, CC
1:15 PM—My Forbidden Past (1951)
A beauty with a skeleton in her closet seeks revenge on the suitor who jilted her.
Cast: Ava Gardner, Melvyn Douglas, Robert Mitchum. Dir: Robert Stevenson.
BW-70 mins, TV-PG, CC
2:30 PM—The Racket (1951)
A tough cop has to fight his superiors in order to battle the mob.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scott, Robert Ryan. Dir: John Cromwell.
BW-89 mins, TV-PG, CC
4:15 PM—The Night of the Hunter (1955)
A bogus preacher marries an outlaw’s widow in search of the man’s hidden loot.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish. Dir: Charles Laughton.
BW-93 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format
6:00 PM—Thunder Road (1958)
A fast-driving moonshiner locks horns with a Chicago gangster.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Gene Barry, Keely Smith. Dir: Arthur Ripley.
BW-93 mins, TV-PG, CC
8:00 PM—Footsteps in the Fog (1955)
An ambitious housemaid learns her employer murdered his wife.
Cast: Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Bill Travers. Dir: Arthur Lubin.
C-90 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format
9:45 PM—The Secret Partner (1961)
A shipping tycoon with a record becomes a suspect when money goes missing from the company vault.
Cast: Stewart Granger, Bernard Lee, Haya Harareet. Dir: Basil Dearden.
BW-91 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format
11:30 PM—The Light Touch (1952)
An art thief tries to double cross his gangster boss.
Cast: Stewart Granger, George Sanders, Pier Angeli. Dir: Richard Brooks.
BW-93 mins, TV-G, CC
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Wednesday—July 22nd
1:15 AM—The Whole Truth (1958)
A woman tries to prove her cheating husband didn’t murder his mistress.
Cast: Stewart Granger, Donna Reed, George Sanders. Dir: Dan Cohen, John Guillerman.
BW-84 mins, TV-PG
4:30 AM—Roadblock (1951)
An insurance agent’s greedy wife leads him to a life of crime.
Cast: Charles McGraw, Joan Dixon, Milburn Stone. Dir: Harold Daniels.
BW-73 mins, TV-G, CC
"What makes you the way you are?"
"What makes anybody the way they are?"
"You tell me."
"Where they got started maybe. I had a lot of jobs — modeling, clerking, secretarial work. I tried hard but it was no go."
"Does that make a chiseler out of you? Must have been something else."
"Whenever I got a job there was always a man who wasn’t interested in my working ability."
"I understand that."
"Really? Coming from you that’s a compliment."
11:15 AM—The Saint in New York (1938)
The Saint goes undercover to get the goods on New York’s mob kingpins.
Cast: Louis Hayward, Kay Sutton, Jonathan Hale. Dir: Ben Holmes.
BW-72 mins, TV-G, CC
12:30 PM—The Saint Strikes Back (1939)
The Saint helps a young beauty take vengeance on the mobsters who ruined her father.
Cast: George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, Barry Fitzgerald. Dir: John Farrow.
BW-64 mins, TV-G, CC
1:45 PM—The Saint in London (1939)
The Saint’s investigation of a counterfeiting ring uncovers a nest of spies.
Cast: George Sanders, David Burns, Sally Gray. Dir: John Paddy Carstairs.
BW-72 mins, TV-G, CC
3:00 PM—The Saint’s Double Trouble (1940)
Reformed jewel thief Simon Templer lands in hot water when a look-alike smuggles stolen goods out of Egypt.
Cast: George Sanders, Jonathan Hale, Bela Lugosi. Dir: Jack Hively.
BW-67 mins, TV-G, CC
4:15 PM—The Saint Takes Over (1940)
Reformed jewel thief Simon Templar tries to help a police inspector who’s been framed on bribery charges.
Cast: George Sanders, Jonathan Hale, Wendy Barrie. Dir: Jack Hively.
BW-70 mins, TV-G, CC
5:30 PM—The Saint in Palm Springs (1941)
Reformed jewel thief Simon Templar’s efforts to deliver a fortune in rare stamps are complicated by murder.
Cast: George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, Jonathan Hale. Dir: Jack Hively.
BW-66 mins, TV-G, CC
6:45 PM—The Saint Meets The Tiger (1943)
The Saint infiltrates a small English village run by smugglers.
Cast: Hugh Sinclair, Jean Gillie, Clifford Evans. Dir: Paul L. Stein.
BW-69 mins, TV-G, CC
———-
Thursday—July 23rd
3:00 AM—Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)
Sherlock Holme
s fights to keep a new bombsite design from the Nazis.
Cast: Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Lionel Atwill. Dir: Roy William Neill.
BW-68 mins, TV-G
4:15 AM—Sherlock Holmes in Terror by Night (1946)
Sherlock Holmes signs on to protect a priceless diamond from jewel thieves.
Cast: Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Alan Mowbray. Dir: Roy William Neill.
BW-63 mins, TV-G
6:00 AM—Mystery in Swing (1940)
A newspaper reporter tries to solve a jazz musician’s murder.
Cast: Monte Hawley, Marguerite Whitten, Tommie Moore. Dir: Arthur Dreifuss.
BW-67 mins, TV-PG
7:15 AM—My Favorite Brunette (1947)
A baby photographer mistaken for a private eye ends up framed for murder.
Cast: Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Peter Lorre. Dir: Elliott Nugent.
BW-86 mins, TV-G, CC
8:45 AM—Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
A young girl fears her favorite uncle may be a killer.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Macdonald Carey. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock.
BW-108 mins, TV-PG, CC
10:45 AM—In a Lonely Place (1950)
An aspiring actress begins to suspect that her temperamental boyfriend is a murderer.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. Dir: Nicholas Ray.
BW-93 mins, TV-PG, CC
12:30 PM—Double Indemnity (1944)
An insurance salesman gets seduced into plotting a client’s death.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson. Dir: Billy Wilder.
BW-108 mins, TV-PG, CC
2:30 PM—A Kiss Before Dying (1956)
A college student tries to get rich quick by wooing two wealthy sisters.
Cast: Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Joanne Woodward. Dir: Gerd Oswald.
C-95 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format
6:00 PM—Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
A distraught mother searches for her seemingly non-existent daughter, bringing her sanity into question.
Cast: Carol Lynley, Keir Dullea, Laurence Olivier. Dir: Otto Preminger.
BW-107 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format
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Friday—July 24th
6:00 AM—They Made Me a Criminal (1939)
A young boxer flees to farming country when he thinks he’s killed an opponent in the ring.
Cast: John Garfield, Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson. Dir: Busby Berkeley.
BW-92 mins, TV-PG, CC
4:30 PM—A Night to Remember (1942)
A mystery writer and his wife stumble on a murder in their new apartment.
Cast: Loretta Young, Brian Aherne, Jeff Donnell. Dir: Richard Wallace.
BW-92 mins, TV-G, CC
"Loretta Young and Brian Aherne discover that life in New York City can be an adventure in A Night to Remember. Aherne stars as Jeff Troy, a hardworking writer of murder mysteries. His wife Nancy (Young), however, wants him to devote his time to completing a romance novel he has been trying to pen-and gets them both a quaint basement apartment in Greenwich Village with just the right ‘literary’ ambiance. Nancy’s intentions fall flat when the new address proves to be anything but romantic and the worst place imaginable for a writer trying to keep his mind off murder-especially when a very dead body turns up in their new backyard. After the police can’t come up with a clue about the case, Jeff eagerly sets out to solve the crime and gets his first opportunity to put his years of research into practice." — From Amazon.com
6:15 PM—Remember the Night (1940)
An assistant D.A. takes a shoplifter home with him for Christmas.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi. Dir: Mitchell Leisen.
BW-94 mins, TV-G
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Saturday—July 25th
3:15 AM—The Unholy Three (1930)
A ventriloquist, a strong man and a midget form a criminal alliance.
Cast: Lon Chaney, Lila Lee, Harry Earles. Dir: Jack Conway.
BW-72 mins, TV-G, CC
11:30 AM—Beat the Devil (1954)
A group of con artists stake their claim on a bogus uranium mine.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones. Dir: John Huston.
BW-89 mins, TV-PG
6:00 PM—Soylent Green (1973)
A future cop uncovers the deadly secret behind a mysterious synthetic food.
Cast: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young. Dir: Richard Fleischer.
C-97 mins, TV-MA, CC, Letterbox Format
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Sunday—July 26th
6:15 AM—Pier 5, Havana (1959)
An American in Cuba tries to thwart a bombing plot aimed at Castro.
Cast: Cameron Mitchell, Allison Hayes, Eduardo Noriega. Dir: Edward L. Cahn.
BW-68 mins, TV-PG
7:30 AM—Personal Affair (1953)
When a teenaged student disappears, her teacher is suspected of killing her.
Cast: Gene Tierney, Leo Genn, Glynis Johns. Dir: Anthony Pelissier.
BW-83 mins.
9:30 PM—The Set-Up (1949)
An aging boxer defies the gangsters who’ve ordered him to throw his last fight.
Cast: Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias. Dir: Robert Wise.
BW-
73 mins, TV-PG, CC
10:45 PM—Rope (1948)
Two wealthy young men try to commit the perfect crime by murdering a friend.
Cast: James Stewart, Farley Granger, John Dall. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock.
C-81 mins, TV-14, CC
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—Mike Gray