TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
This 1964 comedy is a real captured-in-amber look at the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, and the chauvinistic male reaction to it. In 1962, psychologist Helen Gurley Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl, a frank book that was the spiritual precursor of Sex and the City – the column and the HBO series. This movie, based on that book in the loosest sense, stars Natalie Wood as Helen Gurley Brown, and Tony Curtis as a magazine reporter who signs on as a new patient of hers in order to both seduce and expose her. Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall co-star, and one of the screenwriters is Joseph Heller, who just three years earlier had written his iconic anti-war novel, Catch-22. And one year after this movie was released, the real Helen Gurley Brown got a job she held, influentially, for three decades – as the editor of Cosmopolitan.
AXS TV, 9:00 p.m. ET
AXS does it again, and presents another Alfred Hitchcock classic to enliven our Monday night TV options. In previous weeks, AXS already has shown The Birds, Psycho, and Rear Window. What could possibly follow those brilliant suspense movies? How about 1958’s Vertigo? James Stewart stars as a man with more psychological problems than just the one in the title, and Kim Novak co-stars as the woman that becomes the object of his affections – and obsessions.
PBS, 10:00 p.m. ET
This new documentary profiles Lea Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer who for decades has defended the rights of Palestinians to resist the occupation. Political and courtroom opponents refer to her as “the devil’s advocate.” With much more fondness, so do many of the people she represents.
Check local listings. For a full review, see Mike Hughes' Open Mic.
TCM, 2:00 a.m. ET
This 1985 movie rarely is televised – and though it’s easy to understand why, it’s also a fascinating flop. It’s a fantasy about four icons who end up one night in the same hotel room. They’re identified only by occupation – the professor, the actress, the senator, and the ballplayer – but clearly, they’re meant to be Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy and Joe DiMaggio. And they’re portrayed, respectively, by Michael Emil, Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis… and Gary Busey. Nicolas Roeg directs, and was involved with Russell at the time, which is the only understandable reason for her being cast in that role. As bad movie performances go, hers, in Insignificance, goes a very long way.