A few briefs about today's schedule

I wish I had seen His Greatest Gamble, which aired at 10:15 AM, before. Large parts of it are not particularly good, but these parts have a hilarious earnestness. I could swear I just saw the actor who played the butler (Leonard Carey) in another film in the last week (also as a butler) or two that made me look up who played the butler in that one, but looking at Carey's credits, I can't figure out which one it was. Or, more likely, it was anothe rone of the serial butlers. It definitely wasn't Arthur Treacher, and I don't think it was Eric Blore. This is the sort of thing that's going to bother me for days.

I'm not certain if I've done a full-length post on 1962's Cape Fear, which is airing tonight as part of a night of movies devoted to Robert Mitchum. It's the sort of movie that really deserves a full-length post, but I always find myself a bit uncertain whether I want to do full-length posts on movies that even the more casual movie viewer is likely to know the plot to. I like recommending movies that aren't so well known, and whenever it comes to a more famous movie, I feel as though I need to think of an angle that, if it hasn't been said before (which is highly unlikely), is at least relatively infrequently mentioned.

Cape Fear is being followed at 10:00 PM by River of No Return, which I first blogged about back in August 2008. What's worth mentioning about this one is that it's another Fox film. More and more since the change in the Fox Movie Channel's format, it seems as though TCM has been able to get better access to classic films from the Fox library. At least, films that are either more prestigious today (as in anything with Marilyn Monroe) or significant for some other reason, such as Best Picture nominee Decision Before Dawn, which I think was a TCM premiere when it showed up in prime time back in February. It's good to see that at least if what's left of FMC isn't going to show the films, that at least TCM will show some of them. I don't know if TCM will ever get around to showing much of the stuff that's less well-known today, though.