A fine night of underscreened repeats

This week's TCM Essential, at 8:00 PM tonight, is Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. This one doesn't show up often enough, probably because Hitchcock did it at Fox. It's been years since they put it on FMC, and TCM was only able to get the rights to it last year. I do wonder, however, if they had any difficulty with the fact that it wasn't going to show up until September. All of the Essentials pieces are taped long before the series premiere in March, and I wonder what TCM would have done had something fallen through with getting the rights to Lifeboat.

At any rate, Lifeboat is being used as part of a night of Tallulah Bankhead movies. Faithless, at 10:00 PM, is a pre-Code about the Depression that sounds awfully familiar, but it might be one of those where I've seen a similar movie and not this one. And then there's Die! Die! My Darling! at 11:30 PM. TCM ran the trailer for this one recently, which doesn't make the movie look anywhere near as fun as it really is. It's not the world's greatest movie by any stretch of the imagination, but one of those movies that's just so damn fun and entertaining that you don't really care if it's not all that good.

TCM Underground generally begins at 2:00 AM or later, so to fill the time after Die! Die! My Darling! we get another airing of Lionpower from MGM just after 1:30 AM. As for TCM Underground, it brings the first airing in a good five years of Skidoo, another movie that shows up much too rarely.