For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

FLICK PICKS: All-star Veteran's Day

There's the battlefront. Then there's the homefront. Where they intersect -- in movies, at least -- is in star-studded R&R. Turner Classic Movies salutes Veteran's Day tonight with three of those entertain-the-troops extravaganzas so popular in the 1940s during World War II.

This Is the Army (Tuesday at 9 p.m., TCM) has an entertainer's kid staging a show with his fellow soldiers. The war's real-life Lt. Ronald Reagan stars as the offspring, who gets help from 17 Irving Berlin songs, plus cameos from boxing champ Joe Louis and singers Kate Smith and Frances Langford.

Hollywood Canteen (11:15 p.m., TCM) has Bette Davis spearheading work at the Tinseltown nightclub, where the parade past visiting soldiers includes Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Benny, Roy Rogers (and Trigger), the Andrews Sisters, and big-banders Jimmy Dorsey and Carmen Caballero, among others.

Stage Door Canteen (1:30 a.m., TCM) shifts the action to Manhattan, for appearances by Peggy Lee with Benny Goodman's band, Ethel Waters with Count Basie, Katharine Hepburn, Harpo Marx, Johnny Weissmuller, Tallulah Bankhead, and many more. Even Gypsy Rose Lee!

Preceding it all is the new hour documentary Warner at War (8 p.m., TCM), chronicling the Warner Bros. studio's undertakings to support the war effort.

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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