TBS, 7:30 a.m. ET
Beginning at 7:30 a.m. ET, and running all day and into prime time, TBS presents a full day of Star Wars movies. Its programming hook is the date: It’s May 4, an excuse for TBS to promote its Star Wars marathon as “May the Fourth Be With You.” The marathon begins with 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope, which once was titled, simply, Star Wars. Personally, I worry when network publicity and programming departments stretch so far, and stoop so low, just to embrace a particular pun, and “May the Fourth Be With You” certainly upsets me a bit. In fact, I have to admit, it makes me very Tenth.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Tonight’s “Starring Natalie Wood” salute on TCM presents four very watchable, very different movies in prime time. The genres are as varied as the performances: 1961’s Splendor in the Grass kicks things off at 8 p.m. ET, co-starring Warren Beatty in a dour character study about a young woman depressed by her Depression-era life. Then, at 10:15 p.m. ET, comes 1956’s The Searchers, a raw John Ford Western in which Wood plays a girl abducted and “adopted” by Indians. At 12:30 a.m. ET, 1962’s movie musical Gypsy stars Wood as a child vaudeville performer turned striptease artist. And finally, at 3 a.m. ET, the salute ends with a generational flash point dramatizing teen angst: 1955’s Rebel without a Cause, opposite James Dean. And as a bonus, today at 9 a.m. ET, TCM also presents the rarely televised 1966 comedy Penelope, in which she plays a chameleonic kleptomaniac who disguises herself – as a stylish redhead (pictured), a French blonde and an old woman – to rob banks owned by her own husband.
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
This is pure coincidence… but what timing. Over the weekend, President George W. Bush called for an end to partisanship in combating the coronavirus crisis, leading to a combatively reactive tweet by President Trump. But long, long before that, PBS and
American Experience had produced and scheduled this new biographical study of George W. Bush himself.
Check local listings. For a full review, see
David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower, and for background information, see
Mike Hughes' Open Mike.