Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Foreign fun with box guides

TCM aired a couple of Yul Brynner movies today, including The Magnificent Seven. However, while looking through the on-screen guide of my satellite box, the movie was listed under the title The Magnificent Seven, but with a plot synopsis and cast list that clearly belonged to The Seven Samurai (Toshiro Mifune and the 1954 date were dead giveaways). Odd, even though it's reasonably well-known that The Seven Samurai is the original movie on which The Magnificent Seven was based.

More interesting is a movie that came up earlier in the morning: Joan Crawford's 1941 film A Woman's Face. For even more bizarre reasons, the box guide listed this as being from 1938, and starring Ingrid Bergman. In fact, again, the Crawford movie was based upon a Swedish original from 1938, which indeed starred Bergman before she came to the US. (If memory serves, it even got aired on TCM several years back when Ingrid Bergman was Star of the Month.) That having been said, it's probably much less known that A Woman's Face was originally a Swedish picture. How the people sending out the box guide info got this into the schedule is beyond me. Especially since the TCM schedule page correctly listed the Joan Crawford version.

In interesting, if bizarre and ultimately meaningless mystery.

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