Oscar goes to Germany

Oscar Around the World continues tonight on TCM with a bunch of movies set in Germany; the German-set movies continue into tomorrow morning. Now, a lot of Oscars went to Germans in that once Hitler took power, a lot of creative people fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood, and a good number of them won Academy Awards. Amazingly, the AMPAS database claims that Fritz Lang is not among them. Shame, shame shame.

But of course, honoring the birthplaces of people is not what TCM's programming scheme for this month is about; as I mentioned, it's where the movies are set that matters. The night kicks off with Decision Before Dawn was nominated for two Oscars; one for its editing and one for the big prize of Best Picture. It's another Fox film and one that I'm surprised to have blogged about nearly two years ago. Anyhow, you can catch the very good Decision Before Dawn at 8:00 PM.

A movie I've briefly mentioned a number of times, but not for over two years, is Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, which comes up overnight at 1:30 AM. Edward G. Robinson stars as Ehrlich, the man who comes up with a treatment for syphilis, only for his work to cause controversy that lands him in court in a libel trial. The movie itself would have been controversial back in the day, if only for the use of the word "syphilis", which would shock the people enforcing the Production Code. Yes, people had sex back then, and people got venereal diseases.

As for blogging about some movies I haven't done before, well, that's probably going to come up in the near future. That, and hopefully finally getting around to adding some more tags to posts, if only because the Blogger search function is acting up again.