More geekery

I was watching Dangerously They Live this morning as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars salute to John Garfield. Garfield was a bit miscast as a doctor, but he's a good enough actor to make the movie entertaining; the material, while formulaic, was also entertaining. The main plot point involved a British agent who knew the location of the convoys (for reasons I couldn't quite figure out) and trying to get it to Halifax, with the Nazis wanting that information. At one point, the lovely spy (Nancy Coleman) lies and says the convoy is at 31 degrees 15 minutes. Now, I don't know that much about the World War II convoys and what route they use, but I know enough about geography that such a latitude would immediately raise my suspicion: it's as far south as Bermuda! I don't know how quickly German U-boats would have been able to get to such latitudes, and whether Nazis in the US would have been able to broadcast to Nazi U-boats, as they would have needed quite a powerful short-wave radio. Still, for that (and all the other) plot holes in the movie, it would be worth watching if it were on DVD.

Wednesday night, I was watching The Old Maid, which is one of Bette Davis' weaker movies thanks to a muddled plot. Anyhow, the movie starts off with a newspaper headline reading "Monday, April 15, 1861". I know I've mentioned it before, but when I see an old date like that in a movie it immediately gets me to trying to calculate what day of the week it actually was. For once, they got things right, which they did throughout the movie, when they mentioned a date in, I think, 1866. It didn't make the movie any better, though.