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9:00 AM Turner Classic Movies
The Collector (1965 GB-USA): William Wyler's creepy tale of quiet madness returns to the small screen this morning after a lengthy absence. Terence Stamp stars as Freddie Clegg, a sensitive and obsessive young Englishman with a low-paying position in a high street bank. When Freddie wins the football pools, he chucks in his job and invests his money in a country estate, which serves as a repository for his extensive butterfly collection. But poor Freddie has fallen for beautiful art student Miranda (Samantha Eggar), and the socially inept fellow doesn't know that women and insects must be treated differently. Based on a novel by John Fowles, The Collector is a tense, ahead of its time psychological chiller, and an unlikely Oscar contender that earned Academy Award nominations for Wyler, Eggar, and screenwriters John Kohn and Stanley Mann.

3:15 PM Turner Classic Movies
The Walking Stick (1970 GB): It's TiVoPlex Movie of the Week time! This unheralded British feature has aired in the past on TCM UK, but only in pan and scan. Now finally getting the widescreen broadcast it deserves, The Walking Stick features broody, moody David Hemmings as Leigh, an artist living the bohemian lifestyle in London's (then un-redeveloped) Docklands. He makes friends with crippled sweet young thing Deborah (Samantha Eggar, who apparently specialized throughout the sixties in vulnerable female roles), a polio victim with weak legs and unloving parents (Phyllis Calvert and Ferdy Mayne). But Leigh has an ulterior motive: he's going to use Deborah to help him rob the auction house at which she works. If moral ambiguity is your bag, or if you're a fan of either Hemmings or Eggar, you won't want to miss this very special, very rare treat, which also features a terrific Stanley Myers score.

9:00 PM Sundance
Nathalie... (2003 FRA): Wanna see Gerard Depardieu do the nasty? Yeah, me neither. If that sounds like a good time to you, though, by all means check out Nathalie, in which the ol' schnozzola plays an upper-middle class bourgeois who wife Fanny Ardant suspects is having an affair. So she hires a prostitute (Emmanuelle Beart) to entrap hubby...and things just get uglier from there. Especially when Gerard takes his clothes off.

11:30 PM Turner Classic Movies
Shanks (1974 USA): The final film directed by William Castle, Shanks hasn't been seen on television since an airing on TNT's 100% Weird many moons ago. It's a decidedly strange affair, and stars Marcel Marceau as the titular (mute, of course) puppeteer who has learned how to re-animate and control the dead. Quite how Marceau got roped into doing this film I don't know, but the end result is the oddest film in Castle's long career of oddness. Even more bizarrely, Shanks earned an Oscar nomination for Alex North's score, which never struck me as being particularly special.

Saturday 3/13/10

7:30 AM Turner Classic Movies
In Fast Company (1946 USA): Part 2 of the never-ending Bowery Boys series features the gang getting mixed up in a crooked taxi business. Even at this early date, the series' formula was well established, but it's still a cut above much of what was to follow. Look for reliable character actor Luis Alberni as a grocer.

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