Monday, March 18, 2024

Sedmikrásky

I've argued before that there are a lot of critical types out there who seem to praise arthouse films to high heaven just because the movies aren't your traditional commercial fare. I tend not to care for the arthouse stuff, and I'm sorry to say that this view was confirmed when I recently watched one of the TCM Imports from a few months back, the Czech New Wave film Daisies.

The movie starts off with a sense of the absurd, with the opening credits playing out over intercutting of the sort of industrial wheel Charlie Chaplin got mixed up with in Modern Times, and shots of the destruction wrought by bomber planes. After the credits, we get two women in bikinis, both named Marie. They talk about nihilism, with one of the two suggesting that the world has gone spoiled, so perhaps they should be the ones doing the spoiling! Cut to a shot that could just as well be the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit.

After that, it's off to a restaurant where one of the two young women has gone with an older man on a date. The other Marie then shows up to crash the dinner, claiming to be the sister of the one on the date. After more absurdity involving a series of cuts in which each new scene is tinted a different color, the two women then leave the man alone on the train when he thought he'd be taking one of them home with him. Boy are they rude.

And they're not just nasty to other people. After a scene in which they annoy the hell out of everbody trying to watch the floor show at a night club. One of the Maries decides she's going to commit suicide, and the other Marie returns home to this. The non-suicidal Marie is ticked, less worried that her friend has tried to kill herself, and more about the cost of the gas that was used in trying to committ suicide. Who's going to pay for this? Dead men tell no tales! Obnoxious giggle.

It goes on like this for another hour or so, with more dates, more trying to strand the men on trains, and more intercutting with other absurdities back at their apartment. It doesn't seem to go anywhere, and there's really no plot to resolve.

People who like the absurd may enjoy Daisies, as will people who enjoy stuff that's decidedly not Hollywood. As you can guess, I mostly intensely disliked it. In the movie's defense, however, I will also add that director Věra Chytilová shows a high level of technical proficiency with the cinematography, the editing, and the changing use of color, with some of the effects being well done too. It's a shame that all of this is in the service of a badly plotless movie.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Johnstown Flood

Not too long ago, the George Eastman Museum restored the copy it had of the 1926 sielent film The Johnstown Flood. TCM gave the movie its world television premiere, and since the movie sounded interesting, I decided to record it. TCM is showing again tonight as part of Silent Sunday Nights, overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (so technically March 18 here in the Eastern Time Zone but still March 17 in more westerly time zones).

As you may recall from American history, Johnstown is a smallish city in western Pennsylvania where a dam in the hills overlooking the town failed in 1889, sending a cascade of water down into the city below and killing a shockingly large number of people. The story is something that should be cinematically interesting, if you can do the special effects for the actual flood properly. With that in mind, this telling of the story centers on an engineer named Tom O'Day (George O'Brien). He works for John Hamilton, who owns a lumber concern in the region.

Hamilton also owns the dam that's going to break, not that I'm spoiling anything considering the title of the movie and the fact that it's based on real events. Hamilton uses the dam to control the level of the water and help float his logs down the river to get to where they're going to be sold off. And he's recently signed a large contract with a firm in Pittsburgh. It would mean a lot of money for all involved. But it also means that the water level in the dam is going to have to be kept high, with the logs hitting the dam and putting pressure on it. Tom understands -- and in fact most of the town does -- that if the water level isn't reduced, one big rain could lead the dam to burst, with disastrous consequences.

Meanwhile, Anna Burger (Janet Gaynor) is the daughter of one of the forestry workers. She sees big old handsom Tom, and falls in love with him. The feeling is not quite mutual. Not that Tom doesn't like Anna, it's that he meets Hamilton's niece Gloria (Florence Gilbert) and understands that there would be good reasons for the two of them to wind up together. And they do seem to have some genuine feelings for each other. But there's still that dam.

The locals push ever harder for a state inspector to come in and look at the dam, which eventually happens. The company Hamilton signed the big contract with, however, tells him that if the water level in the dam gets lowered, they'll take their business somewhere that can fulfill the contract on time and on budget. So Hamilton hires a bunch of goons to "protect" the dam from the locals who want to lower the level of the water.

Now, of course, we all know that the dam will eventually burst, and in this version of the story, it does so just as Tom and Gloria are about to be married. Anna finds out about the dam break first, and rushes to town to try to save people....

What surprised me about The Johnstown Flood is that it's not really an epic at all. It runs a little over an hour, and the actual flood doesn't come until the final reel. Before that, it's a all the standard-issue stuff you'd seen in a disaster movie like the Clifton Webb version of Titanic. The build up is passable if not great, but th special effects in the final reel make up for it. The advancement of special effects meant that there would be better disaster movies in the years to follow, but The Johnstown Flood isn't a bad little movie. And with the restoration, it's also quite pretty to look at.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

King Solomon's Mines

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR and that is coming up again soon on TCM is MGM's 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines. As usual, in order to be able to do a post on the upcoming airing, I sat down to watch the copy already on my DVR. That airing is coming up tonight at 8:00 PM, so now you get the review.

After some nice opening credits in Technicolor with backdrops of Africa as well as informing us what parts of Africa the movie was actually filmed in (what are now Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and eastern DRC), we're informed that the action is set in 1897 Africa, so when Britain was in control of a lot of east Africa, and when Europeans felt they had a moral duty to "civilize" the so-called Dark Continent. One such person is Allan Quatermain (Stuart Grainger), a safari guide working in British East Africa for the past 15 years, which is much longer than the average life span for a (white) guide in that part of the world.

Having come to the region from the UK is Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr). She's the wife of Henry, an adventurer who apparently had the crazy idea that King Solomon got his gold and gems from mines somewhere to the west of the British colony, in a part of Africa that's unexplored by the white man, and that supposedly many of the local tribes don't want to venture towards. Henry sent Elizabeth a "map" of the quality suitable for Hollywood movies of the era, where you wonder how anybody can find anything. Elizabeth would like Henry to guide her to where she thinks her husband would be if he's still alive, and to help she's brought along her brother John (Richard Carlson).

Allan isn't certain whether he wants to take on the job, but Elizabeth is offering a lot of money. Allan is a widower with a son back in England, and taking this job would help secure his son's future, so Allan reluctantly decides to take the job. It doesn't take long for Allan to think that perhaps he was right not to want to take on this job, as Elizabeth is one of those Victorian women who seems decidedly unsuited to going out on this type of adventure, being scared of every little thing and not properly provisioned.

Along the way, however, Elizabeth starts to become a bit more self-sufficient. She and Allan also go through that movie trope of developing feelings for each other even though there's still the question of whether Elizabeth's husband is alive or dead. The expedition also faces any number of westen tropes about Africa from the period: an animal stampede; local tribes that the guides aren't certain whether they're friendly; and a lot of wildlife. Much of this serves as a hook for a lot of lovely scenery.

There are a few set-pieces, if you will, in and among all the travelogue. One involves finding a white man out in the middle of nowhere (Hugo Haas), although Quatermain eventually determines who that white man is. There's also a lone African from a tribe Quatermain doesn't recognize at all; that guy joins them and his back story is revealed at the end of the movie. And then everyone gets to a cave that may just be what Henry thought was the titular mine. But is there anything there, and will they find Henry?

To be honest, I found large parts of King Solomon's Mines to be slow, largely because the characters have to trek quite a ways to get to the putative mines. There's only so much they can do along the way. With that in mind, the scenery might just be the best part of the movie. For 2024, that's a bit of a sad statement, only because getting color footage of exotic places is so commonplace. For 1950, when the movie was released, it would have been a big deal to audiences, and it's no surprise that this was one of the biggest box office hits of the year.

My comments about the scenery are not to imply that King Solomon's Mines is a bad movie, however. It's more that looking at it from almost 75 years on, it's the sort of stuff we've seen so many times since. But this would have been one the earliest, most previous Africa movies using studio backlots to stand in badly for Africa. So definitely give the 1950 King Solomon's Mines a watch.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Convicted Woman

I'm getting close to the end of all those B movies that TCM ran during the spotlight on B movies back in July or so. Today's selection is a prison movie from Columbia: Convicted Woman.

The movie starts off pleasantly enough, with a young woman named Betty Andrews (Rochelle Hudson) in a city park trying to get her shoe back from a dog. That's not relevant to the plot, other than her being in the park in the middle of the day is a sign that she is currently unemployed and looking for work. She had found a promising want ad in the paper, so she decides to go there and look for a job. That place is a department store, but she has to fill out an application form and then they'll inform her when there's an opening.

Betty goes into the female employees' lounge to fill out that form, and as she's doing so another woman comes in. Surprisingly, that woman looks a lot like Betty, and is even wearing the same dress! The woman then goes out onto the shop floor, where she sees a woman looking for a shop assistant. This other woman sees an opportunity. She takes the customer's $10 bill and claims she's going to make change, but she just disappears. And since Betty is wearing the same dress as the thief, it's unsurprising that the customer identifies Betty as the thief.

The case goes to trial, with a young reporter from the local paper, Jim Brent (Glenn Ford in an early role), covering it. He has quite a bit of sympathy for Betty, but there's not much he can do to help. Betty is found guilty, and despite the fact that the crime was only stealing $10, which seems like petty larceny, she's actually sent to the Curtiss women's prison for an entire year!

Under the direction of Chief Matron Brackett (Esther Dale), it's a tough place, leading one of the woman to commit suicide. Worse, the matron insists that the dead woman had pneumonia and that everybody knows it. Worse, if Betty tries to tell anybody about it, she's going to get in big trouble, like the worst jobs if not getting sent to solitary. Betty is able to get a call out to Jim, who shows up claiming to be her lawyer. When Jim prints the story, it comes to the attention of the Commissioner of Prisons, who appoints Mary Ellis (Frieda Inescort) the new warden. Mary has even more sympathy for Betty, because she was Betty's defense attorney at trial.

Mary sets about doing some Hollywood-standard prison reform, which is even going to involve furloughs, and that's going to lead to the climax over whether any of the women given a furlough is going to violate the terms, even if unwillingly.

Convicted Woman is a B movie, to be sure, but it's not bad as far as B movies go. Glenn Ford was at the beginning of his career and the studios I think didn't yet know what they had in him which is why he's underused here. Rochelle Hudson does well, and the plot, while nothing new even in 1940, works well enough.

I don't know the next time Convicted Woman is going to show up on TCM, but having been released by Columbia, it might show up on their Cinevault Classics channel that's on the Roku Channel app.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Billy Budd

When I was in high school, one of the books we had to read was Herman Melville's Billy Budd. It's really only a novella, because Herman Melville never actually finished it and what we have is what he left behind at the time of his death combined with some compilation and editing by his widow and later scholars. The book was popular enough, however, that in the late 1940s the material was adapted into a stage play; it's that play which is the basis for the 1962 movie Billy Budd.

The year is 1797, and if you remember the movie Damn the Defiant! that I reviewed a several weeks back, you'll recall that this was the year that the British Royal Navy suffered the Spithead mutiny, which was quite a serious thing. Edward Vere (Peter Ustinov) is the captain of the HMS Avenger, and in need of replenishing his crew. Since there's a war on and he's at sea, going to port and impressing the men there, as we've seen from other naval movies like Mutiny on the Bounty, is a non-starter.

Ah, but the laws of war suggest that in a time of war the Royal Navy may impress men from British-flagged merchant ships. After all, they're already sailors. So when the Avenger encounters the Rights of Man, Capt. Vere takes some of the crew, including a young foretopman named Billy Budd (Terence Stamp in his feature film debut).

Billy is considered a naïf by his crewmates, but he also has a strange sort of charisma, where practically everybody he meets loves him because he's just so... something or other. This even though he doesn't seem to have any desire to be a leader of men. He just wants to get on with his work. The only person who soesn't seem to like Billy is the ship's Master of arms, Claggard (Robert Ryan). That, however, is because Claggart doesn't like anybody. In a bit of reversal from Mutiny on the Bounty, it's Claggart who feels the need for iron discipline, while the captain has a more nuanced view.

Still, Billy is just so nice that he's going to try to get in the good graces of Claggart not out of any desire to toady up the a boss who has considerable power over him, but because it seems he's incapable of doing anything else. Claggart isn't stupid, and sees the power that Billy unwittingly has over other crewmen, so Claggart decides he's going to trump up charges against Billy by any means necessary. Knowing of the Spithead mutinies, Claggart gets his loyalists to try to fabricate evidence that Billy is part of an incipient mutiny.

When Vere calls Claggart and Budd in for a meeting, Budd has one of his few weaknesses, which is a nervous stammer. He's incapable of saying what he's thinking because Claggart's bullying has made him so scared. So he instinctively reacts physically, accidentally striking Claggart, who falls backwards and hits his head, killing himself. In a modern-day court of law on dry land, this would probably be negligent manslaughter, but at sea during war, it's a court-martial offense, and the penalty is death, even if everybody is secretly relieved that Claggart is dead and nobody really wants Billy to die if they had their way.

Herman Melville is not my favorite author, so when I had to read Billy Budd back in high school I wasn't too thrilled with it. This movie adaptation, however, really makes the material come to life, thanks in no small part to a series of excellent performances by the three leads. There's also smaller supporting roles for Melvyn Douglas and David McCallum, among others.

If you haven't seen Billy Budd before, do yourself a favor and watch it. It's much better than the Melville novella.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Love Is a Racket

I've said on a lot of occasions how I like Warner Bros.' B movies. They also had a lot of good programmers in the 1930s, with a good example of this being a movie I recently watched off my DVR, Love Is a Racket.

Jimmy Russell (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is a reporter stereotyp, as we see when he gets a call waking him up at 5:00 -- PM, not AM. He writes the Broadway gossip column for one of the New York newspapers, and has a roommate in the form of Stanley Fiske (Lee Tracy), whose purpose in being there is never really quite mentioned. Also showing up at the apartment is Sally Condon (Ann Dvorak), who really holds a torch for Jimmy. But he's got a bit more of a torch for young Mary Wodehouse (Frances Dee), an up-and-coming actress.

Mary, for her part, has a couple of other guys interested in her, notably Broadway producer Max Boncour (Andre Luguet), as well as gangster Eddie Shaw (Lyle Talbot). One of Eddie's current rackets involves the dairy business, and in fact Jimmy has heard some gossip that might help blow the racket wide open. But Jimmy doesn't want to report it, in part because that's not his beat, and in part because it's not confirmed enough. One of Jimmy's colleagues, however, does try to report it, and Jimmy has to do some fast work to spike the story.

But the dairy racket is not the real thrust of the movie. That thrust involves Mary, who lives with her aunt and has been living beyond her means. She's written a couple of checks that are going to bounce, so somebody decides to be a good Samaritan and cover the checks for her. Of course, it's not all altruism. As you might be able to guess, it's Eddie who bought the checks, and he wants something back for having done so, which is specifically Mary as his girlfriend.

Jimmy isn't about to let that happen, so Eddie, who has decamped to Atlantic City, sends Mary a telegram threatening her, and Jimmy, being chivalrous, tells Mary he'll try to help her. But it's a ruse, and Jimmy is detained in Atlantic City by one of Eddie's underlings. He is able to escape and get back to New York, but when he goes to see Eddie, he finds that Eddie has just been killed!

As you can see, there's a lot going on in Love Is a Racket. To be honest, it's doesn't all quite mesh. But director William Wellman and his cast approach the material with such verve that they make this little pre-Code an eminently interesting watch. Objectively, it's not the world's greatest movie by any stretch of the imagination, but you could do a lot worse than Love Is a Racket.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Technically they're thirsty

A lot of my movie watching is of films that were made before I was born, but now that I'm getting up there in years, there are a lot of movies made after I was born that getting to the "old movies" era. As an example, one of the movies I recorded last year off of TCM had just turned 40 years old: The Hunger.

The movie starts off in one of those early-80s nightclubs that played new wave music and had lots of neon and other wacky lighting effects. One couple invites another home with them, which would normally be a cue for some sort of kinky sex. Well, that sort of happens, but the sex concludes with the two members of the first couple taking the ankh necklaces they wear, and using them to stab the other couple to death! The living couple then drinks the victims' blood before putting the dead bodies into the incinerator.

This couple is Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) and John (David Bowie). Miriam is a vampire, and drinks the blood to keep herself looking so young, something that she's been doing for millennia. Intercut with this are scenes from a research center somewhere in midtown Manhattan. There are a bunch of monkeys kept in cages, and as Miriam and John are cutting up their victims, one of the monkeys is killing another. The next day, Dr. Roberts (Susan Sarandon) wonders what the heck happened. This isn't the sort of research she had been expecting to do on her monkeys.

While Dr. Roberts pays the bills doing that research, Miriam and John have to pay the bills do keep their eternal life, which they do by giving classical music lessons, especially to budding violinist Alice (Beth Ehlers). She comes to her music lesson one day, and, taking a Polaroid of John, tells him that he looks awful. He certainly feels it, too. And when he looks at himself in the mirror, he starts seeing... wrinkles, and other signs of aging! As it turns out, John isn't a vampire by birth, but brought into the vampire business by Miriam. So he doesn't quite get the same eternal youth that Miriam does. And he's about to start aging extremely rapidly.

This is where the two stories are about to come together. Dr. Roberts is a gerontologist, doing research on aging. She can't promise eternal life, but she is working on longevity, trying to slow down the aging process. Not that there's been much success there, although there has been the opposite: speeding up the aging process. John, having read the book, decides to visit Dr. Roberts, who thinks John is a crank, leaving him to cool in the waiting room. It's only when she returns a few hours later that she realizes just how wrong she was.

Things get much more complicated when John wants out of this existence, resulting in his going missing, at least to the people in the outside world. Dr. Roberts goes to John and Miriam's place to look for John, and then the police come looking too....

The Hunger is one of those movies that's stylish and certainly has a relatively uncommon atmosphere about it. That certainly makes it interesting, and in some ways compelling. But at the same time, large portions of the movie feel like they have more atmosphere than substance, with the plot a bit hard to follow at times and the ending being a bit bizarre. So I think The Hunger is going to be the sort of movie that isn't going to appeal to everybody.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Not the Donna Summer song

I mentioned a few weeks back that Call Me Mister was one of the few films currently in the FXM Retro rotation that I hadn't written a blog post about. It turns out there's at least one other, although it's also one of the most recent films that the FXM Retro block runs: the 1994 western Bad Girls. It's got another airing tomorrow (March 12) at 1:15 PM, so I recently watched it to do the review here.

The movie starts off in the stereotypical movie western town of Echo City sometime in the 1890s. Four women have fallen on hard times, with the result that they've had to resort to working at the local brothel to earn a living. Meanwhile, the local branch of the Temperance Union has been campaigning against prostitution. So when Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson) kills in self-defense a john who tries to hurt her, nobody other than the other prostitutes has any sympathy for her. The town intends to hang her, but as she's on the gallows, three fellow prostitutes -- Cody (Madeleine Stowe), Eileen (Andie MacDowell), and Lily (Drew Barrymore) -- come to her rescue, literally absconding with her.

A lot of people are on the trail of the four women, notably the Pinkerton detectives. But it's a lone, man, Josh McCoy (Dermot Mulroney), who runs into them first. He claims to be a prospector, but none of the women believe him since he's not grizzled enough for that. But he gives the ladies the news that they're not going to be safe hiding out where they are.

Anita only went into prostitution because she's a widow. Her husband had a homestead in Oregon, and Anita would like to go there to claim her inheritance, but she's in need of money. Thankfully, Cody has saved up enough for the four of them to get to Oregon and work the land together. They just have to go to the bank to get it. And then they do, they discover that the Pinkertons have shown up in town as well. Worse, they and the Pinkertons have gotten there just as an old flame of Cody's, Kid Jarrett (James Russo) and his gang have decided to rob the bank!

Cody decides she's going to try to get Anita's money back from Jarrett, while the other three make their way to a ranch that just happens to belong to a man they met in town and whom they tricked into freeing Eileen from jail. Meanwhile, the four women figure out a way to try to get revenge on Jarrett, starting with double-crossing him on a train robbery....

It's easy to see why the four actresses in the lead role would want to make a movie like Bad Girls. Or, at least it's easy to see why they would have wanted to make what was in the original script. Script changes among other things led Bad Girls to be a critical failure upon its release in 1994. Personally, I think that terrible critical reception is mildly unfair.

The plot is mostly serviceable, in that it's something that you could have seen in any western from the golden era of westerns 40 years earlier, only with female protagonists instead of male protagonists. But that is in fact one of the problems with the movie, that there's pretty much nothing original in the movie beyond the female protagonists. The other big flaw for me was the too-modern filming techniques. Bad Girls repeatedly came across to me as one of those movies where the direction and cinematography are intrusive, with needless zooms and switching to slow motion.

Still, the four leads are appealing even if they aren't stretched enough. And as always, you may want to watch for yourself and draw your own conlusions.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Well, not Thelma Ritter

One of the movies I recently watched off my DVR had 20 minutes between the end of the movie and the allotted time slot, so there was enought time for TCM to insert a two-reeler. That short was one of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts, A Thrill for Thelma.

After the credits, and a montage of crime-related things like gunshots and sirens, we hand it over to Your MGM Reporter (played here by William Tannen; I'll have to look it up to see if MGM had different people playing the reporter). He's at the local Women's Prison, where the warden (an actress, not a real warden) and a police captain (again, an actor, not a real captain) want to inform everybody that Crime Does Not Pay. To let our viewers know this, they call in one of the women marching in formation: Thelma Black (Irene Hervey).

Flash back to two years earlier. Thelma is just graduating from school and talking to her classmates. Some of them are looking for men so they can settle down and start a family, but not Thelma. She wants excitement out of life while she's still young enough to enjoy it all. With that in mind, she goes to beauty school and even gets a job at a hoity-toity salon, where she eventually meets Steve (Robert Livingston).

One night, Steve and Thelma are out driving, when they pass a parked car that seems to be doing the Lover's Lane thing. Steve comments that perhaps they should stop and give such couples a fright, just to see their reaction. After all, these couples don't want to be found out by the general public. They even do it once, but in the aftermath, Thelma is horrified to think that Steve took the man's wallet. She thinks they should return the wallet forthwith, but Steve is having no part of that. When Thelma tries to turn around, Steve tries to take the wheel, and that results in a car crash. Not that it hurt Thelma or Steve; the incident forced another car off the road and that car crashed into a tree, killing the driver.

So now Thelma is a fugitive. She thinks about going to the police, but Steve reminds her that she was driving, and being the driver in a hit-and-run that resulted in someone in the other car dying is serious business. So now Thelma is in with Steve, straight down the line as Edward G. Robinson might have said in Double Indemnity.

A Thrill for Thelma isn't a bad little short, although this one is only number 4 in the Crime Does Not Pay series and it really hadn't hit its stride yet. As always, the shorts in this series are laden with MGM moralizing, but they're still fun for the most part. It's been about a dozen years the the Warner Archive put all of the shorts out in a box set, so you should be able to find it somewhere.

Notes on the TCM March 2024 schedule

I pointed out a month ago how TCM decided to start its annual 31 Days of Oscar in the middle of the month in order to have the final day of the programming coincide with the actual awarding of this year's Academy Awards. Well, that final day has arrived, which means we get back to regular programming on TCM. Well, more or less regular.

Since the "regular" programming is only going to be three weeks, that means that a traditional Star of the Month wouldn't get a proper treatment, if you go by having one night a week for the rest of the month. Then again, you could argue that a month like this is when they should pick one of those "stars" who didn't have a whole lot of movies for whatever reason. But if you did that, this would also mean that the other regular features, especially the monthly spotlight, would also only get three nights.

So TCM decided to have two week-long spotlights. The Star of the Month is coming up later in the month, so when that comes I'll write up a post them. No; this first week of What's Left of March is the week for the non-star spotlight, and the theme is "Working Women". The movies are going to be more or less in chronological order, with each night being a later decade than the previous night. I will point out that 40s night on Tuesday brings another airing of the wonderful British World War II movie Millions Like Us (March 13, 4:00 AM), about British women who go to work at the start of the war to do their part for the war effort.

There are also a lot of morning and afternoon themes not only spotlighting individuals -- director Raoul Walsh gets a birthday salute tomorrow (March 11) -- but themes as always. I bring this up because the "Under Ground" theme on March 12 has a movie I was hoping to do a full-length post on. That on is The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (March 12, 9:00 AM). I recorded the previous airing and sat down to watch it to do a post on it, but unfortunately the recording somehow had picture and sound so out of sync that I couldn't stand to watch it. It's a lot like that scene in Singin' in the Rain where it looks like the man is saying no and the woman yes.

As it turns out, there's another movie airing March 12 that I decided to do a full-length post on, so I watched that instead. That's also why this post is getting posted today (March 10) instead of tomorrow, and along with a second post on a short. Actually, I've got several posts coming up later in the month on movies that are getting re-airs.