Another pair of repeats

I think I mentioned a few days back that TCM is spending its 31 Days of Oscar this year looking at "Oscar Around the World"; that is, the movies are grouped more or less by the locations where they're set. TCM has been spending most of this weekend in Merrye Olde Englande, or, at least, England in various time periods. Contemporary England finally arrives this afternoon. It stars off with the Ealing comedies The Lavender Hill Mob at 4:45 PM and The Ladykillers at 6:15 PM. But the lesser-seen movie that I've blogged about in the past and would like to mention again is The VIPs, which ends the visit to England in the wee hours of the morning, at 5:15 AM tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning, TCM switches its focus from England to the Continent, starting off with a bunch of movies set in Central Europe, by which I mean the countries in the former Communist bloc west of the defunct Soviet Union. Note that this doesn't mean the movies are all set during the Communist era; there historical movies such as Conquest at 10:30 AM tomorrow and the Chopin biopic A Song To Remember at 7:15 AM. (Interestingly, Madame Curie, which received seven Oscar nominations, is not among the films, although it is disproportionately set in France.) The only one of the films set during the Communist era is a movie I blogged about previously, though -- and by coincidence, only five days after The VIPs: The Firemen's Ball tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM. I'm really pleased to see this one finally show up on TCM, which has much broader coverage than IFC and which doesn't interrupt the films with commercials the way IFC now does.