TCM is offering some serious fare for crime and suspense enthusiasts this week.

Monday: Joan Crawford gets fitted for a strait jacket *before* she goes berserk — most curious.

Tuesday: Three gritty Depression-era films by William Wellman are followed by several Hitchcocks, which in turn are flanked by a couple of thrillers done to perfection by Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang.

Wednesday: David Lean directs a crime drama, unusual for him.

Thursday: We have three juvenile delinquent exploitation films.

Friday: Michael Caine and George Peppard are in the spy game.

Saturday: William Castle hokes it up, Frank Sinatra plays hide-and-seek with a human robot, and Jack the Ripper scares the bejabbers out of boarding house lodgers — twice.

Sunday: Enjoy the musicals and romantic comedies.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Note: All dates and times are Eastern Standard, USA.
Further note: There may be SPOILERS at the other end of some of the links.

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Monday—March 23rd

4:30 PM—Strait Jacket (1964)
Murder follows an axe murderer home when she’s released from a mental hospital.
Cast: Joan Crawford, Diane Baker, Leif Erickson, Howard St. John
Dir: William Castle
BW-93 mins, TV-14

"Strait Jacket continues to grow in popularity among Crawford’s more camp-oriented fans, who delight in the sight of Crawford done up in full ’40s drag, looking like Mildred Pierce having a night on the town."
[Source: Frank Miller on TCM Movie Database]

6:15 PM—Berserk (1967)
A lady ringmaster milks the publicity from a string of murders.
Cast: Joan Crawford, Ty Hardin, Diana Dors, Michael Gough
Dir: Jim O’Connolly
C-96 mins, TV-PG

"In the Hardin-Crawford relationship, it is Hardin (playing highwire artiste Frank Hawkins) who is searching for true love, while Crawford (as circus owner Monica Rivers) bluntly rejects anything romantic. Think of it—a film where the man is the emotionally needy one, the woman the player! And she’s more than twice his age!"
[Source: David Kalat on TCM Movie Database]

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Tuesday—March 24th

12:45 AM—Frisco Jenny (1932)
A district attorney prosecutes his own mother for murder.
Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Louis Calhern, Helen Jerome Eddy, Donald Cook
Dir: William A. Wellman
BW-71 mins, TV-PG

"Cellars of Chinatown. Yeah, I was there. So was he. It was there I gave him life. He gives me death."
———-
"Business was very gratifying this month."
"Conventions always help."

"In recent years, Frisco Jenny has been among the pre-Code films rediscovered and re-evaluated thanks to theatrical revivals and cable television screenings. New fans have been impressed by [Ruth] Chatterton’s depiction of a tough woman who takes charge of her own destiny long before women’s liberation and Wellman’s energetic direction and creative camera placement."
[Source: Frank Miller on TCM Movie Database]

2:00 AM—Heroes for Sale (1933)
A veteran fights drug addiction to make his way in the business world.
Cast: Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, Loretta Young, Gordon Westcott
Dir: William A. Wellman
BW-72 mins, TV-G

"In American pop culture, eruptions of social unrest, so inexplicably AWOL today, sizzled off movie screens in the 1930s. Heroes for Sale (1933), filmed with raw, gritty immediacy by the no-nonsense William Wellman, covers all the Depression-era bases. Perhaps even a few too many. It’s crammed with plot, and the joinery lurches from casual to non-existent. But while it’s ungainly, it’s also unfailingly urgent and never boring, even when the characters stop talking in anything resembling human speech and start sounding like placards proclaiming a tacked-on message—specifically, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address punch line, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Actually, the characters have plenty to fear."
[Source: Jay Carr on TCM Movie Database]

3:15 AM—Midnight Mary (1933)
An abused orphan sinks into a life of crime.
Cast: Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone, Andy Devine
Dir: William Wellman
BW-74 mins, TV-PG

"When surveying the impressive resume of the prolific, pugnacious Hollywood director William A. Wellman, the pre-code potboiler Midnight Mary (1933) won’t likely be amongst the most recognizable entries. It is, however, well worth rediscovery, as a crisply told tale of Depression-era desperation showcasing Loretta Young at the height of her beauty, with plenty of Wellman’s signature motifs and touches in play."
[Source: Jay S. Steinberg on TCM Movie Database]

6:00 AM—Blackmail (1929)
A shopkeeper’s daughter fights off blackmail after she kills a young artist who had tried to rape her.
Cast: Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, Charles Paton, Donald Calthrop
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
BW-82 mins, TV-PG

"Many of the first sound films were hybrids; Blackmail, which was initially planned as a silent, is no exception. The opening prologue and other portions of the film are silent with music and sound effects added. In certain portions of the film, dialogue was apparently added to shots that were originally filmed silent. In addition, the voice of the lead actress Anny Ondra was dubbed."
[Source: James Steffen on TCM Movie Database]

7:30 AM—The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
A British family gets mixed up with spies and an assassination plot while vacationing in Switzerland.
Cast: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Nova Pilbeam, Peter Lorre
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
BW-75 mins, TV-PG

"The Man Who Knew Too Much is actually the first of two films based on the same material that Alfred Hitchcock directed. Perhaps the better known of the two, at least in the United States, is the 1956 version … starring James Stewart and Doris Day … While it may not have the remake’s bigger budget and exotic Moroccan locales caught on Technicolor VistaVision,
the 1934 version is lean, fast-paced and radically different in tone and narrative structure."
[Source: Scott McGee on TCM Movie Database]

9:00 AM—Double Indemnity (1944)
An insurance salesman gets seduced into plotting a client’s death.
Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall
Dir: Billy Wilder
BW-108 mins, TV-PG

"They’ve committed a murder and it’s not like taking a trolley ride together where they can get off at different stops. They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery."

"Cold-blooded, brutal, highly stylized, and informed with a black sense of humor, Double Indemnity is one of the high points of 1940s filmmaking and a prime example of a genre and style that remains highly influential in its look, attitude and storyline."
[Source: Rob Nixon on TCM Movie Database]

11:00 AM—Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
A young girl fears her favorite uncle may be a killer.
Cast: Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, MacDonald Carey, Henry Travers
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
BW-108 mins, TV-PG

"Resulting from all these writers’ hands was a remarkably subversive movie, something of a flip side to Our Town. The town in the film is sunny and pleasant on the surface, but underneath runs a river of uncertainty and anxiety. Considering it was made in the middle of World War II, to find such a dark and disturbing portrait of smalltown America in a major studio production was quite amazing."
[Source: Jeremy Arnold on TCM Movie Database]

1:00 PM—The Blue Gardenia (1953)
A telephone operator kills in self-defense but can’t remember the details of the encounter.
Cast: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr
Dir: Fritz Lang
BW-88 mins, TV-PG

"From the vortex that envelopes [the central character] Norah at the point of her collapse to the rain-streaked window looking in at the peak of her vulnerability, The Blue Gardenia creates a sustained sensation of impending doom and offers much of what lent [Fritz] Lang his enduring distinction in the field … The Blue Gardenia also benefits from the game efforts of its players. Baxter hits the right notes as the conscience-plagued heroine; Burr is wonderfully smarmy as her would-be seducer; and Sothern engagingly delivers in a familiar assignment as the wisecracking confidante."
[Source: Jay Steinberg on TCM Movie Database]

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Wednesday—March 25th

4:00 PM—Madeleine (1950)
A beautiful young woman stands trial for poisoning her lover.
Cast: Ann Todd, Norman Woland, Ivan Desny, Leslie Banks
Dir: David Lean
BW-115 mins, TV-PG

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Thursday—March 26th

7:15 AM—Delinquent Daughters (1944)
Two teenage girls find trouble when they fall in with the wrong crowd.
Cast: June Carlson, Fifi D’Orsay, Teala Loring, Mary Bovard
Dir: Albert Herman
BW-70 mins, TV-PG

8:30 AM—Teen-Age Crime Wave (1955)
Juvenile delinquents pull a young innocent into their crime spree.
Cast: Tommy Cook, Mollie McCart, Sue England, Frank Griffin
Dir: Fred F. Sears
BW-76 mins, TV-PG

"Teen-Age Crime Wave makes a pretty good case for juvenile delinquency. The homes of the adult characters, the seedbeds of dissatisfaction and postwar alienation, are depicted as shadowy and joyless, the only source of light (apart from the occasional 40 watt wall sconce) coming from the glow of the omnipresent television. While the script isn’t so glib as to pin the whole of the blame on bad parenting, one agent of law enforcement actually admits ‘I think we lock up the wrong people,’ before Mike puts a bullet in his belly."
[Source: Richard Harland Smith on TCM Movie Database]

10:00 AM—No Greater Glory (1934)
A frail boy fights to win acceptance from the leader of a street gang.
Cast: George Breakston, Frankie Darro, Jackie Searl, Jimmie Butler
Dir: Frank Borzage
BW-74 mins, TV-G

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Friday—March 27th

3:30 PM—Billion Dollar Brain (1967)
A retired spy gets mixed up with plans to overthrow Communism using a new supercomputer.
Cast: Michael Caine, Karl Malden, Ed Begley, Oscar Homolka
Dir: Ken Russell
C-108 mins, TV-PG

"They think the Latvians on the verge of overthrowing their tyrannical overlords. Heh heh. They think that people walking in the street out there are dreaming of the moment when they can become capitalist serfs again. They think we all lie awake dreaming of going to America. They think they can distribute pamphlets and gold, and a vast monarchist army will materialize overnight."

"[Producer Harry] Saltzman, who co-produced the James Bond film series with Albert R. Broccoli, wanted the Harry Palmer movies to serve as a more realistic and serious take on the spy genre with Palmer relying on his intelligence more often than weapons or his fists. The emphasis was on the often complex twists and turns of the plot and not the high-tech gadgetry, sexy female heroines or tongue-in-cheek one-liners that distinguished the Bond films."
[Source: Jeff Stafford on TCM Movie Database]

5:30 PM—The Executioner (1970)
A British spy tracks down a beautiful double agent.
Cast: George Peppard, Joan Collins, Judy Geeson, Oscar Homolka
Dir: Sam Wanamaker
C-111 mins

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Saturday—March 28th

3:45 AM—13 Ghosts (1960)
A family inherits a house haunted by 13 ghosts and a living killer.
Cast: Charles Herbert, Jo Morrow, Martin Milner, Rosemary DeCamp
Dir: William Castle
BW-82 mins, TV-PG

"As a follow-up, [director] Castle decided to forgo the blatantly adult situations and unpleasant characters on display in The Tingler and produce a film for juvenile audiences with an All-American family at its center. Depending on your age when you first see it, 13 Ghosts (1960) works as either spooky fun (like a potentially dangerous ride in a low-rent carnival Spook House) or an exercise in campy nostalgia."
[Source: John M. Miller on TCM Movie Database]

6:00 AM—Man in the Attic (1953)
A landlady suspects her mysterious new tenant is Jack the Ripper.
Cast: Jack Palance, Constance Smith, Byron Palmer, Frances Bavier
Dir: Hugo Fregonese
BW-82 mins, TV-PG

"Sometimes I walk close by the river. The river is like liquid night flowing peacefully out to infinity."

"Unlike its immediate predecessor [from 1944—see below] which was an ‘A’ picture directed by John Brahm with a first rate cast including George Sanders, Merle Oberon, and Cedric Hardwicke, Man in the Attic was clearly a B-movie with Palance as the only high profile name in the cast. Still, the film is atmospheric, faithful to [Mary Belloc] Lowndes’s storyline, and an entertaining diversion for Palance fans who enjoy his particular brand of moody self-absorption and intensity."
[Source: Jeff Stafford on TCM Movie Database]

7:30 AM—The Lodger (1944)
The inhabitants of a boarding house fear the new lodger is Jack the Ripper.
Cast: Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Laird Cregar, Sir Cedric Hardwicke
Dir: John Brahm
BW-84 mins

"The essential trick of The Lodger (1944) is its masterful inversion of the traditional mystery story. Instead of following a detective hero on a journey of ratiocination to determine whodunnit, we are exiled frustratingly to the sidelines—just like in real life. We are bystanders, waiting helplessly outside the action in a limbo where fear swirls without context, like children frightened by shadows and sounds in the night. Each new murder enhances the paranoia without bringing us any closer to understanding, because we are not collecting any valid evidence, only circumstantial clues that may or may not mean anything. In all likelihood, the city is full of such ‘lodgers,’ targets of suspicion for the people around them but genuinely innocent."
[Source: David Kalat on TCM Movie Database]

2:00 PM—The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
A Korean War hero doesn’t realize he’s been programmed to kill by the enemy.
Cast: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
Dir: John Frankenheimer
BW-127 mins, TV-PG

"Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it! Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it."

"The Manchurian Candidate’s impact on all those who saw it in 1962 was undeniable. Although Richard Condon’s novel had been available to the public since 1959, the story did not have the same dramatic effect on readers it would have on moviegoers when they saw it brought to life by some of Hollywood’s most talented actors. The nation’s shameful anti-Communist era was essentially over, but its effects lingered, and the idea of presenting a McCarthy-type movement as a sinister Communist plot was outrageous. The topsy-turvy premise offered great opportunities for twisting and turning the audience’s attention and expectations, shifting between black humor and queasy violence to make for an emotional thrill ride."
[Source: Rob Nixon on TCM Movie Database]

4:15 PM—Still of the Night (1982)
A psychiatrist falls for the chief suspect in a patient’s murder.
Cast: Meryl Streep, Jessica Tandy, Joe Grifasi, Sara Botsford
Dir: Robert Benton
C-91 mins, TV-14

"Writer-director Robert Benton went for a Hitchcock feel in Still of the Night (1982), a psychological thriller about a shrink (Roy Scheider) who falls for a possible psychopathic killer (Meryl Streep) after one of his clients is murdered. The plot of Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) immediately comes to mind, but there are many other echoes from the suspense master’s work, especially Streep’s icy, inscrutable blonde."
[Source: Rob Nixon on TCM Movie Database]

—Mike Gray