Stealing Home

It feels a bit like TCM has been airing more 1980s movies in recent years. To be fair, all of these movies are over 35 years old now. In any case, one that I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM was Stealing Home. Having seen it now, I can see why I hadn't heard of it.

Mark Harmon plays Billy Wyatt, and as the movie opens he's doing groundskeeping work for one of those independent minor league baseball teams. He mentions that just six months earlier, his life was a mess as he was living in a motel with a waitress. He's informed that his mother is calling him on the pay phone just outside, and she has a message for him: a name from the past, Katie Chandler, has blown her brains out. Rather strangely, Katie left a last will and testament stipulating that she wished to be cremated and that her ashes be given to Billy, who would know what to do with them.

Flash back to when Billy was about 10 years old. His parents go the same place every year for their anniversary, and have hired the neighbors' teenage daughter Katie (Jodie Foster) to baby-sit Billy, who is a big baseball fan. Katie is a bit of a free spirit and takes Billy from his home in one of the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia to the Jersey shore where her family has a vacation house. Katie also gives Billy baseball pendant, reminding him he's always a baseball player.

Fast-forward to about 16 years of age. It's the spring, and the big baseball game of the season. Teenaged Billy (played by William McNamara) and his best friend Alan Appleby (Jonathan Silverman) are on their private school baseball team together, and Billy wins the game by stealing home plate, a relatively rare feat in the sport. Billy is also approached by a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies. This enables them to get home, where Billy is supposed to do a favor for Alan by telling young Robin Parks, who lives closer to Billy, that Alan would like to take her to the prom. Unfortunately, Robin says that she's been in love with Billy for years, and the two wind up having sex togeether. Even more unfortunate is that Billy's father gets in a fatal car crash that night. Billy thinks about giving up baseball forever.

The Wyatts go over to the summer house that the Chandlers have, together with Katie (but seemingly not her parents) and Alan in tow. Alan has the stirrings of a sexual experience by engaging in voyeurism with an older woman who is renting another beach house and is actually teasing Alan because she knows he's watching. Billy has a falling out with Katie, who has also informed him that she's about to elope to Paris with some guy she barely knows. It turns out to be the last time Billy saw Katie.

We then return to the present day, where Billy isn't certain what to do with Katie's ashes, at least not until he goes to see Alan (Harold Ramis), who now owns a sporting goods store. The two relive their past in ways that are thoroughly illegal, in part because Katie's free spirit led her to take young Billy on some illegal adventures. It gives Billy ideas on what to do with Katie's ashes, although not all of the ideas are going to work out.

Critics at the time savaged Stealing Home, and I can see why. It's a pastiche of nostalgia tropes, combined with a whole lot of characters doing things that they would never do in real life. Frankly, one thing that shocked me considering this is Boomer porn (Billy would have been born about 1950, although the teenaged music references are all from the early 1960s) is that there's no reference to John F. Kennedy being shot. None of it works well, and the ending is mawkish. That would probably explain why this movie isn't well known today.

The Heat's On

Back in the spring of 2025, Mae West was honored as TCM's Star of the Month, even though she didn't make all that many movies. I didn't have much to record, in part because of a box set of hers that I have that has a lot of her stuff from Paramount and TCM's not showing her two 1970s movies. However, before decamping from Hollywood, West made one film at Columbia that was part of the salute: The Heat's On.

Mae West plays Fay Lawrence, the sort of Broadway star loosely based on West herself: for the grown-up audience, but doing the sort of show that some of the more prudish types would consider controversial. With changing times and it being World War II, however, the new show for producer Tony Ferris (William Gaxton) has been a box office flop, and Fay is thinkng of using a clause in the contract to get out of the show so she can do something with rival producer Forrest Stanton (Alan Dinehart) instead. Fay, frankly, is sick of Ferris and his bend-the-rules ways.

Wanting to see Ferris after the show is Hubert Bainbridge (Victor Moore). He works in the supply department of the Bainbridge Foundation, one of those famously prudish moral uplift societies reminiscent of the one Ezra Ounce in Dames a decade earlier was a part of. But Hubert doesn't actually run it; that job falls to his sister Hannah. The two of them have a niece Janey who has some musical and dance talent, and Hubert would like Ferris to give Janey an audition.

Ferris isn't pleased with this intrusion at first, until he realizes Hubert is from the Bainbridge Foundation and what they have a reputation for. The Bainbridge Foundation can get the show raided and shut down without Ferris having to pay off Fay's contract. And then, when Fay starts working with Stanton, Ferris sets about manipulating Hubert to get back at Stanton. Fortunately for Ferris, Hannah has gone off to Seattle for two months to preside over a conference of the foundation's western branch or something. Ferris sees how weak-willed Hubert is, and uses that to get Hubert to do all sorts of things that are dishonest at best and highly illegal at worst, which of course brings up the question of how Hubert is going to get out of this movie both satisfying the Production Code, and staying out of prison.

For most of this section of the movie, Fay is not really a part of the movie, at least not on screen. But then she learns that Ferris has used Hubert to get control of Stanton's musical that she's in, and she takes pity on Hubert and cooks up a scheme of her own to get back at Ferris and have a happy ending.

Having watched The Heat's On, I can see why Mae West got out of movies after this and why this one isn't very well remembered. If it hadn't starred Mae West, it's the sort of movie that would probably have a reputation for a second-tier movie designed to entertain the home front during World War II by not actually making much reference to the war. (Lloyd Bridges has an early role as a solder boyfriend to Janey, and Hannah is asked whether her trip to Seattle is really necessary, but that's about it.) Mae West is terribly underused and doesn't have the best one-liners her. Also, most of the music is forgettable, with the exception of Hazel Scott, the black pianist who is quite good.

The Heat's On is for Mae West completists only, I think. Well, maybe for Lloyd Bridges completists too.

TCM's Diane Keaton tribute

Diane Keaton (l.) and Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977), 8:00 PM

Actress Diane Keaton died back in October at the age of 79. It's time for TCM to do its programming tribute to her. This one is a bit different in that a lot of the tributes are an entire night of prime time, or for people with enough movies, an entire 24 hours. Keaton, on the other hand, is getting a tribute starting tomorrow, January 25 at 12:30 PM after Noir Alley and continuing through the first two movies of prime time, concluding in time for TCM to run its normal Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports programming blocks. This is still enough time for TCM to run five of Keaton's movies:

12:30 PM Father of the Bride, the remake of the classic Spencer Tracy movie;
2:30 PM Reds, about journalist John Reed who went to the nascent Soviet Union to document the revolution;
6:00 PM Manhattan Murder Mystery, a Woody Allen comedy about, well, murder mystery;
8:00 PM Annie Hall, another of Keaton's collaborations with Allen, this time winning her an Oscar; and
10:00 PM Baby Boom, with Keaton becoming an unexpected adoptive mother and moving to Vermont.

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I've got a couple of days coming up where TCM is running a programming salute worth mentioning. Usually, I want to supplement the post simply mentioning TCM's programming with another shortish post on a short film. With two such days in close succession, I decided to do a post on an experimental film instead: Man With a Movie Camera.

There's no plot here, in part because the movie's director, Dziga Vertov, believed that cinema was a medium for something completely new, meaning among other things eschewing movies with traditional narrative plots. The narrative here, if you want to try to call it that, is documenting "a day in the life" of a modern Soviet city as it was in the late 1920s. Except of course that this is not one day, nor is it even one city. Vertov decamped from Moscow to Ukraine which wasn't under quite as tight reins as Moscow was, and filmed in part in Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov.

Also in terms of "narrative", the movie is divided into six chapters, which look sort of at different times of day as well as different parts of life. The first part, for example, is dedicated mostly to the morning. There's another section that juxtaposes a woman giving birth, another woman mourning her husband at a cemetery, and a man being taken by ambulance to a hospital. A third chapter looks mostly at sport.

But it's the juxtaposition if you will that's worth mentioning, because that's part of the main thrust of Vertov's work. Believing that cinema was a new art that should stand on its own, Vertov used all sorts of film techniques: slow motion, double exposures, time-lapse, running film in reverse, and on and on, to get the style he wanted. There's also a fair bit of breaking of the fourth wall as one of the two recurring characters in the movie is the man with the camera whom we see trying to get the shots while filmed by a second camera. This can include filming from a convertible, filming from the water, being suspended over a watercourse, and so on. This cameraman was in fact played by Vertov's younger brother Mikhail Kaufman, who was a noted cinematographer in his own right.

There are also several shots of the movie's editor, Vertov's real-life wife Elizaveta Svilova, as she engages in the editing process. The other self-referential part includes showing shots of what are various parts of a movie theater, presumably as the film that we are about to see is being premiered.

But do the avant-garde techniques in Man With a Movie Camera work? I can see people not liking it, and certainly critics of the day had issues with it. To be fair, however, Vertov's work was so new that contemporary critics had probably never seen anything like this before and wouldn't know what to make of it. Modern-day critics, on the other hand, go too far in praising Man With a Movie Camera solely (in my opinion) on the grounds that it is so different. Overall, it's mostly interesting although I can't blame anybody who finds Man With a Movie Camera a bit pretentious at times.

Twice in a Lifetime

A movie that TCM could easily have used for the "working class" spotlight this month is, instead, showing up on a Saturday evening. That movie is Twice in a Lifetime, which will be on tomorrow (Jan. 24) at 8:00 PM.

Gene Hackman stars as Harry Mackenzie, who works in a steel mill in a small town between Seattle and Tacoma, going home to a cramped house where he lives with his wife Kate (Ellen Burstyn) and two daughters. Helen (Ally Sheedy) is about to graduate high school and has a boyfriend Tim, while Sunny (Amy Madigan) is married to Keith (Stephen Lang) and has two children of her own. Keith is currently out of a job, which seems premised on the idea of the steel mill having something like the corrupt union in On the Waterfront based on a scene in which we see a foreman calling out who gets work that day, with Keith not being mentioned.

Harry is about to turn 50, which seems quite young to have two grandkids of the age he does, but don't bother yourself with that plot point. The whole family celebrates at the Mackenzie house. Kate doesn't really want to go out that night, but Harry's friends do, so Kate encourages Harry to go out to the local bar with his friends for a second birthday celebration. There's a new woman behind the bar, Audrey (Ann-Margret), and Harry's friends suggest that the two of them kiss since Harry's wife isn't there.

Something happens, and Harry and Audrey decide to meet up for a lunch. Harry then helps Audrey do some electrical work back at her apartment, and before you know it, the two of them are having an affair just because Harry wants a bit of excitement in his life. Kate isn't a bad person, but she just can't bring herself to put any sort of spark back into the marriage considering all the other stuff that's going on trying to keep a family going.

Anyhow, one day, one of Kate's gossipy friends happens to be driving through town and pulls up to a stop sign next to Harry and Audrey. She immediately suspects something is going on, and blabs it to Kate. Harry admits it to Kate, who isn't exactly happy but is relatively determined to go on with life. Sunny, for her part, is hysterically pissed, taking it out on anybody and everybody. Indeed, when Dad finally moves out of the house and into a Seattle apartment with Audrey, Sunny is the only one who doesn't want to give Dad a hug or shake his hand.

Kate, meanwhile, is left to rebuild her life, and with a bit of help from Sunny she starts breaking out of her shell, first by getting a job as a hairdresser and then by going to a Chippendales-type club. Helen, for her part, realizes that she's not going to be able to afford college with the family situation the way it is, so she's going to marry Tim and maybe try night school to get credits here and there. (Nowadays, of course, she could just try one of the online universities, but this was the mid-1980s.) It's the impending marriage that finally forces Dad to meet up with Mom again, but what sort of relationship if any are they going to be able to have going forward?

I think I'd agree with most of the other reviews that I read: Twice in a Lifetime is a well-acted movie. But it's one with a mess of a script in that there's not a whole lot going on and nobody's charcters get to be as fleshed out as they should be. Ann-Margret is also much too glamorous for her role, or maybe she should just have been glammed down the way Burstyn is (to very good effect). Also note that the print TCM ran last time was panned-and-scanned down from 1.85:1 to 4:3. Indeed, I wondered at first whether this was a TV movie. As it turns out, Amy Madigan received an Oscar nomination, so no, it's a genuine movie.

Bachelor Bait

I'm always up for Hollywood's B movies of the 1930s, even if they often turn out to be no great shakes. One that's interesting if uneven that I recorded off of TCM and recently watched off my DVR is Bachelor Bait.

The movie starts off with a prologue of sorts: Stuart Eriwn stars as William Watts, heading to his job as a clerk in the marriage license bureau of a typical-for-Hollywood big city of the early 1930s. A young couple who will have no further importance to the plot (the bride is played by Anne Shirley) are there before hours to elope, while William is right on time, because the boss is supposedly going to fire anyone who shows up to work late. Wouldn't you know it, but William's image-conscious colleague shows up an hour late, and when William tries on his co-worker's hat and cane, William is the one who gets fired for tardiness, which also makes no logical sense other than we need a way for William to be out of a job for the main plot.

Having been fired, William goes back to his apartment where his unemployed neighbor Cynthia (Rochelle Hudson) is mending his shirts. William decides he's going to go into business for himself as a sort of dating service, which is eventually going to be called "Romance Inc." With a little help from Cynthia, William takes out an ad in the paper: men, send me $5, and I'll find you a wife. When William goes to his post office box to get the mail, he finds he's been deluged with enough mail and $5 bills that he can open a swanky office. His taxi driver Van Dusen (Skeets Gallagher) is an out-of-work lawyer who goes to work for William, with Cynthia taking on the job of front-office secretary.

The business somehow immediately becomes a massive hit, which again makes no sense from a logical point of view but this is a depression-era fantasy of sorts so just roll with it. Showing up to Romance Inc. among others is the local political boss, Barney Nolan (Berton Churchill), who wants a piece of the action and is also certain this is a racket. So when William says no, he's not letting a political fixer in on the business, Barney sets about getting his hand-picked DA to trump up a crime. Also showing up is Allie (Pert Kelton), who is the former Mrs. Van Dusen from a brief marriage and now looking for five years' worth of alimony. But since she's an unmarried woman, she'd be a good candidate for Romance Inc. to marry off.

This point becomes important when an Oklahoma oil millionaire, Don Belden (Grady Sutton), writes in looking for a wife. Allie would be perfect for this, while the description of an ideal woman that William describes just happens to fit Cynthia. Apparently William is too stupid to realize how much Cynthia has the hots for him, so it's going to take the rest of the movie for the right people to wind up romantically paired with each other, as well as wrapping up the other plot points in a way that satisfies the Production Code.

Bachelor Bait has all the makings of a fun, zippy little B movie, but as I said at the beginning it's rather uneven. I think that's because the movie really should be a straight-up comedy, while large portions of it feel too much like a drama. The cast is workmanlike if not terribly memorable here. I suppose back in 1934 the audiences would have enjoyed this as a second feature for the few weeks it was in the feature, before going on to the next set of movies to come to their local picture palace. But there's a reason why Bachelor Bait is another of the largely forgotten movies.

Better than a Ben Mankiewicz podcast

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, January 22, is all six of the Hildegarde Withers mysteries followed by all four of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies, before prime time brings us another night of the films of Jean Arthur. I've actually got one film each from the two mystery series sitting on my DVR. But since I don't really feel like doing two mysteries in a row, today's post is going to be on The Plot Thickens, tomorrow at 11:00 AM.

We don't actually meet Hildegarde Withers for a good ten minutes or more. Instead, we get a starting scene in a park, with a woman calling up wealthy John Carter to say she want to meet him there. Carter, meanwhile, has a guest at home and some servants who would prefer the night off. There's the butler, Joe the chauffeur (a young Paul Fix two dozen years before The Rifleman), and Marie the maid who seems to be in romantic entanglements with both Joe and the butler. Everybody's out of the house when a mysterious figure comes out of the bushes in the park and shoots Carter dead during his assignation. But the body is only found the next day, with the investigation also finding a young couple, Bob (Owen Davis, Jr.) and Alice (Louise Latimer) having been at the park so they could be suspects.

It's up to police detective Piper (James Gleason) to solve this. Well, not quite of course. He's the boyfriend of teacher Hildegarde Withers, here played by ZaSu Pitts. Piper calls her up, and as usual she's excited to take part in another murder investigation, although not so excited to deal with incompetence beyond being able to sling acerbic quips at anybody she sees as not up to the task. This of course includes Piper, who is just as good at slinging those barbs back at Hildegarde. The Withers movies are as much about the interaction between Piper and Withers as they are about the mysteries.

In any case, during the investigation at Carter's house, Hildegarde finds a precious gem and learns that it had been stolen some years back in France. The New York police learn from their French counterparts that the man who had stolen it was recently freed from prison, so the assumption is that it might be the same man involved. This also shifts the action to an art museum, specificlly to the exhibit of the "Cellini Cup", an allegedly valuable Renaissance-era piece of fine silver work which also has a pearl hanging from it in one strategic spot. The two things are clearly related, but how is something that we're only going to learn in the final reel when the guilty parties are caught.

As I said, the Hildegarde Withers movies are as much about the relationship between her and Piper as they are about the actual plots. ZaSu Pitts does a good job here, although she doesn't come across quite as well as Edna May Oliver when it comes to striving for a classier attitude. Oliver could seemingly pull that off in her sleep, while Pitts feels a bit more like the Staten Islander types who would be the wives of New York cops. She's still funny, mind you, and the repartee and "mystery", such as the mystery is, do work, making The Plot Thickens an enjoyable entry in the series.

Catch-22

Many years ago when I was in high school, one of the books we read in English class one year was Joseph Heller's Catch-22. I had learned at that time that the novel had been adapted into a movie, although I hadn't seen it in part because in those days it wasn't quite as east to watch whatever classic movie you might want to. With that in mind, when TCM ran the film adaptation of Catch-22, I decided to record it so that I could finally watch the film and do a post on it.

The story revolves around Capt. Yossarian (Alan Arkan), a bombardier at one of the Americans' southern European air bases in the latter days of World War II after the invasion of Italy had already begun. Despite the romanticization of the flyboys, bombing runs were thoroughly unromantic and suffered from a high rate of mishaps. If you could get through 25 bombing runs you were lucky and could be rotated out, at least for the most part. Unfortunately for Yossarian and the fellow crews at his base, their commander, Col. Cathcart (Martain Balsam), keeps pushing the men further and further in attempt to win fame for himself. Every time it looks like crews are going to reach Cathcart's target, he ups the number of bombing raids they have to run.

Yossarian understandably wants to get out of going on these raids and get himself declared unfit to fly. There is, however, a catch. In theory, if you're insane, you would be declared unfit to fly. However, if you say you're crazy and that flying the missions is crazy, that's a sign that you are in fact quite sane, which means that you're pretty much never going to be declared unfit for service. This despite all the things Yossarian tries to do, such as showing up to inspection stark naked. None of it is going to get him out of service.

Meanwhile, other of the people around Yossarian have come up with their own ways of trying to get out of service. Capt. Orr (Bob Balaban) keeps crashing planes before he disspears over the Baltic. The base chaplain, Tappman (Anthony Perkins) pretty much no longer believes in any sort of God. And then there's Lt. Milo Minderbender (Jon Voight), who has a rather more extreme way of dealing with things. He's gone into the black market and become a sort of king of the black market, with all sorts of enterprises throughout the part of Italy the allies control. One wonders how he has any time to do his military service, and how nobody anywhere in the military hierarchy is willing to stop him.

Eventually, Col. Cathcart and his adjutant Lt. Col. Korn (Buck Henry) offer Yossarian a deal. We'll let you get out of flight service, and even recommend you for a promotion, but you have to do something for us, which is to give us all the credit and get us the publicity we crave. Will Yossarian knuckle under, or will he find some other way to cope?

I have to admit that I wasn't the biggest fan of the book version of Catch-22 when I was in high school. As a result, I'm also not the biggest fan of the movie version. There are going to be other people who like the book and not particuarly care for the fact that a lot of changes had to be made for the movie since the book is the sort of narrative it's difficult to make a movie out of. Many people, however, recognize this and think that the changes that Buck Henry (who wrote the screenplay in addition to taking on the role of Lt. Col. Korn) made mostly work. Indeed, author Joseph Heller himself did ultimately think Henry's working the novel worked for the film. There's also a whole of other stars that I haven't mentioned yet, notbaly Orson Welles as a general who shows up at the base.

Ultimately, I think that Catch-22 is the sort of movie you're going to want to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

The Woman Racket

Quite some time back, TCM did a night mentioning the Moore brothers of silent film; all three of them appeared together in the 1929 movie Side Street. Another movie that aired, starring Tom Moore, was The Woman Racket. Since it sounded interesting and I'm always up for early talkies, I of course recorded it and eventually got around to watching it and writing up this post that I saved to post at a suitable distance from Side Street.

The Woman Racket was released at the beginning of 1930, which of course was right in the middle of the Prohibition era. And if you know your Hollywood movies of the time, the speakeasies that served alcohol also had gambling and or a floor show. Singing at one of these floor shows is Julia (Blanche Sweet). But wouldn't you know it, this just happens to be the night that the place gets raided by the authorities, forcing everybody to try to flee to keep the cops from nabbing them. Julia does the same, but she is in fact nabbed by one of the cops, Tom (Tom Moore).

Despite Tom's seeming to be an honest cop, he immediately falls for Julia and basically offers to keep her from being arrested if only she'll date him. And she's so willing not to be arrested that she's OK with becoming his girlfriend. It goes farther, and the two get married with Julia quitting her job at the speakeasy. It's only then that she learns that trying to be the wife of a cop, or more importantly on a cop's salary, isn't exactly a bed of roses.

Julia was used to having the better things in life considering how well she was paid at the club. Tom wants her to be happy, and scrimps and saves to buy Julia a stylish dress from the vintage clothing store. Julia, being bored out of her mind having to stay home while her husband pulls the night shift, decides she's going to put on that dress and pay a visit to her old stomping grounds. There, she finds that her old boss has gone into business with Chris (John Miljan), who is a fairly slimy dude. Tom discovers that Julia has gone out, and it's basically going to be splitsville as Julia wants to go back to work at the club.

Worse, Chris almost immediately starts trying to put the moves on Julia himself, even though she doesn't really want it. So she basically threatens Chris with the idea that she could go back to Tom and tell Tom that she's got the goods on Chris, who is much more intertwined with the underworld than her old boss was. Chris decides that he's got to do something about Julia, so he engineers a way to get her framed for murder. But will Julia fall for it?

The Woman Racket is an interesting enough little early talkie, although people who aren't the biggest fans of movies of this vintage may find the plot a little unbelievable. That, and the movie certainly does have technical weaknesses that aren't really the film's fault. Sweet does a good job and probably should have had more of a career in talkies. The Moore brothers were already beginning to get up there in years by the time sound came in, so it's not a surprise that they didn't become big talking picture stars. Miljan would go on for the next several year to play a bunch of elegant-looking but sleazy types and had a fairly long career as a character actor.

Briefs for January 18-20, 2026

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day here in the States, which as always means special, if not overly exciting, programming on TCM. This year isn't quite the parade of Sidney Poitier movies we've gotten in some years, and I don't think I see even one Harry Belafonte or Dorothy Dandridge appearance. There's also at least one totally new to me film, Uptight (1:30 AM Jan. 20) which, according to TCM's page on tomorrow's programming, is a reworking of the old John Ford film The Informer set against the civil rights movement instead of the Irish independence movement. Sounds interesting enough.

A warning as always that because of how far ahead I am in putting up posts here, I sometimes have to move stuff around when the new month's TCM schedule comes out and I see movies on my DVR that are on the new schedule. The February schedule is coming out in dribs and drabs, in part because of the way 31 Days of Oscar is being programmed this year. The Oscars will be handed out on Sunday, March 15, which means that to get to 31 days and have the final day coincide with the ceremony itself, the programming would begin on February 13 and we'd have half a month each for February and March fall in 31 Days of Oscar. In any case, I keep seeing movies come up that I'm going to need to watch and schedule posts for, which means re-scheduling stuff I've already put up. And since I generally try to avoid movies with the same star or in very close genres being scheduled too close together, I may be screwing that up.

It looks like the FXM Retro block is continuing to bring some new movies out of the vault, although for the most part I've seen them and done posts on them. The Shirley Temple vehicle Curly Top was the subject of a post back in July 2019, for example, while the Laird Cregar version of The Lodger can be seen again at 7:50 AM on January 20. A search of the blog claims I haven't actually done a full-length post on this one, despite the number of times I've mentioned it in passing, so I think I'll record it and then at some point do that full-length post. I'm also pleasantly surprised that the Retro block is still going, since it's been something like 13 years and I also would have thought it might go by the wayside when Disney obtained the Fox cable channels.

There's a couple of days of tribute programming coming up at the end of January, one for Diane Keaton and another for Rob Reiner; I'll be mentioning them again when the day actually comes. With 31 Days of Oscar not showing up until the middle of February there might actually be time for TCM to schedule a tribute to Brigitte Bardot as well, although from what I've currently seen there doesn't seem to be one yet. Then again, with all those foreign films, it might take longer for TCM to nail down the rights to what they can and cannot show.