FLICK PICKS: Alfred Hitchcock and a Big Invisible Bunny

JAMES STEWART FILMS
Tuesday 6 a.m.-Wednesday 7 a.m. ET, Turner Classic Movies

Don't panic. They're not together. The fearmongering director and the fantasy creature simply share James Stewart in common.

Tuesday would have been Stewart's 100th birthday -- if only I could celebrate by composing the kind of doggerel poems Stewart used to bring to The Tonight Show -- so TCM goes all out with an all-day all-night marathon.

Here's the lineup:
6 a.m. -- The Stratton Story (1949): Stewart plays the one-legged baseball pitcher, with June Allyson as his wife.
8 a.m. -- The Mortal Storm (1940): Stewart and Margaret Sullavan under Nazi terror.
9:45 a.m. -- The Shop Around the Corner (1940): Stewart and Sullavan again, as secret pen pals, under Ernst Lubitsch's sparkling direction.
11:30 a.m. -- The Philadelphia Story (1940): Jimmy was on a roll this year, costarring here with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in a breezy romance among the rich.
1:30 p.m. -- The Glenn Miller Story (1954): Another biopic, about the big band leader lost in a wartime airplane.
3:30 p.m. -- The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956): Stewart costars for Hitchcock with Doris Day.
5:45 p.m. -- Vertigo (1958): Jimmy's got it, and Kim Novak's got "it," in this spellbinding Hitchcock suspenser.
8 p.m. -- Rear Window (1954): Laid up with a broken leg, Stewart witnesses a murder across the way. Hitchcock masterpiece costars Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr.
10 p.m. -- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): John Ford's elegiac western with John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and that great Gene Pitney theme song.
12:15 p.m. -- Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Otto Preminger's courtroom tale.
3 a.m. -- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939): Frank Capra-corn at its finest, with clever cookie Jean Arthur shepherding Stewart's new hayseed senator through Washington's political cesspool.
5:15 a.m. -- Harvey (1950): Jimmy's a rich loon (or is he?) hanging out with the title character, a six-foot invisible rabbit.

Read more about Stewart and his movies at TCM's tribute page.