Tonight on Turner Classic Movies: two excellent movies with the word Blonde in their titles: at 8 p.m. EDT, Raoul Walsh’s delightful 1941 comedy The Strawberry Blonde stars Rita Hayworth as the alluring title character in Gay ’90s New York City, and features excellent performances by Jimmy Cagney and Olivia DeHavilland; and at 10 p.m EDT, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks’s delightfully cynical film of Anita Loos’s delightfully cynical novel. The Strawberry Blonde is a charming, heartfelt comedy from the superb action director Walsh. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell star as two golddiggers on the make in Paris, and the film includes some excellent scenes of Hawks’s characteristic farcical comedy. It also has a great performance by Charles Coburn as wealthy marital target "Piggy."

Both of these are must-sees for any serious film enthusiast.

These two films are followed at midnight EDT by Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble (1944), one of the later and less-effective entries in the highly appealing "Andy Hardy" series of films MGM produced largely in the late 1930s and early ’40s. I’d recommend that those who have yet to see an Andy Hardy film skip this one and wait for TCM to show an earlier film in the series, as the channel does quite regularly.