TCM, 6:00 a.m. ET
The star saluted for this month’s, and hence this year’s, final evening of TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars” is Kirk Douglas – a star with so many famous films that a lot of his big titles are not even represented today and tonight. But many others are, and that entertaining roster includes Douglas as a slimy movie producer in 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful (2 p.m. ET), as Vincent Van Gogh in 1956’s Lust for Life (4 p.m. ET), and as gunfighter Doc Holliday, opposite Burt Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp, in 1957’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1:30 a.m. ET). Strong movies all – but the strongest of this last day of “Summer Under the Stars” has the father of Michael Douglas playing, at 8 p.m. ET, the title role in 1960’s Spartacus (pictured), an epic toga drama directed by the great Stanley Kubrick.
HBO, 8:00 p.m. ET
Melissa McCarthy plays a real person, literary forger Lee Israel, in this 2018 movie that allows for plenty of character-driven laughs, while staying basically true to the story of the woman who wrote, forged and sold bogus letters alleged to be actual written correspondences from Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward and others. Starring as Israel’s co-conspirator in this white-collar crime wave is Richard E. Grant, whose byplay with McCarthy is dryly delicious.