The latest set of briefs

TCM is showing Secret Service of the Air at 10:45 AM this morning. It's the last of the four Brass Bancroft movies. Presumably, another series will be starting up on Saturday, March 9, after the end of 31 Days of Oscar, but I haven't looked up the March schedule to see what TCM is going to be putting in that time slot.

Following Secret Service of the Air is Torchy Blane in Panama at noon. This is the first of a couple of Torchy movies that don't have Glenda Farrell playing Torchy. Farrell would return for Torchy Runs For Mayor, which I'm pretty certain will be running toward the end of March, as the Torchy Blane series will be continuing after 31 Days of Oscar.

In the wee hours of tomorrow morning, at 4:45 AM, TCM is showing Miss Robin Crusoe. You can probably guess the story, at least a bit. It's a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, only with a woman (Amanda Blake) as the castaway; complete with a female Friday and, eventually, a man to come between the two of them. I think this one first showed up on TCM when they were supposed to run Luis Buñuel's version of the Robinson Crusoe story starring Dan O'Herlihy. Some mix-up. Is there a good print of the Buñuel version available for TCM to run?

Finally, I came across a radio documentary on Herbert Selpin, the man who directed the Nazi version of Titanic, at least until his arrest and death under mysterious circumstances. However, as you can tell if you clicked on the link, it's in German, which means that most of the readers here won't be able to follow it. (I haven't tried running it through Google Translate to see how bad the translation is.) My German is good enough that I don't have much problem with the introduction page that I've linked to, but when it comes to actually listening to such documentaries, I'm usually doing other stuff on the computer, which means that I end up not paying quite enough attention to the radio program to understand it as well as I should. To be fair, though, that's also a bit of an issue with stuff in English. But for those who have a good enough command of German to listen, you can download the program here. It's 47MB and 51 minutes.