NICKELODEON
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Singin’ in the Rain, one of the finest movie musicals ever made, was built around the time when silent movies transitioned to sound. Nickelodeon, the 1976 film that is part of this month’s TCM tribute to director Peter Bogdanovich, is set in a moment of cinema history predating even that – when films were “flickers,” silent curiosities only a minute or two long, presented in nickelodeon emporiums when customers would watch the images on individual projection devices called kinetoscopes. In Nickelodeon, Ryan O’Neal plays the film director, and Burt Reynolds his cocky star – but Reynolds would graduate to the director role two decades later, playing an auteur making a very different type of film, in 1997’s Boogie Nights. Co-stars include Tatum O’Neal, Brian Keith, and John Ritter.