Tonight's lineup, however....

I mentioned yesterday that there are actually times on TCM where I haven't seen a bunch of the movies that they're showing. Tonight, on the other hand, is the opposite story. The night is kicking off at 8:00 PM with A Foreign Affair, an OK Billy Wilder comedy set in Berlin just after the end of World War II, with a US Representative (Jean Arthur) getting involved in with a US serviceman (John Lund) who is supposed to be investigating the troops' relationships with the locals, specifically Marlene Dietrich. I was thinking that this would be a good movie to blog about if I hadn't done so already, but sure enough, I had done a full-length post on the movie back in October 2010.

Even earlier are the posts I did on the night's next two movies. Following A Foreign Affair, at 10:00 PM, is The More the Merrier, a Jean Arthur movie I much prefer to A Foreign Affair. This one has Jean Arthur working in Washington DC during World War II, a time when there was a severe housing shortage in the city. She lets out half her apartment as part of the war effort, only for a man, aging businessman Charles Coburn, to rent the place. And then he sublets half of his half to a US soldier (Joel McCrea) in town on some secret business, and starts playing matchmaker between the two. Never mind the fact that Jean Arthur's character is already engaged. I really like both this movie and its remake, Walk, Don't Run.

Then, at midnight, you can catch Joel McCrea again in Foreign Correspondent. This is a really underrated Alfred Hitchcock movie, released the same year as his Oscar-winning Rebecca. It's a fun thriller about a journalist (McCrea) who goes over to Europe just before the outbreak of World War II to report on what's really going on over there, only to get involved in the kidnapping and faked murder of a prominent Dutch politician. Why this one doesn't get the attention of some of Hitchcock's later movies, I don't know, but the movie deserves to be more prominent, I think.