Another round of briefs

All of the feature films in the TCM lineup for tonight and tomorrow are available from the TCM shop on DVD, with the surprising exception of The Champ, which I would have guessed had gotten a DVD release from the Warner Archive collection, or as part of a two-film set along with the 1979 remake. In fact, The Champ did get a DVD release, back in 2006 according to Amazon, which implies that that particular DVD release is now out of print.

So instead perhaps I should talk a bit about shorts. TCM ran The Broadway Melody at 6:00 AM this morning, which of course leads me to think of The Dogway Melody, which pretty much tells the story in two reels, and with dogs. I was going to embed a Youtube video of the short, but either my search skills are not up to snuff today, or the short is not available in its entirety. Oh, there are a lot of clips available, which will give you an idea of what the Dogville shorts were about if you've never seen any of them. And there are a lot of videos that look to be mash-ups of some sort. (I didn't watch them.) But it doesn't seem to be out there in its entirety.

An interesting short that is airing on TCM is Double or Nothing, which comes on just after Grand Hotel, at about 11:40 PM. I ran across this one about halfway through some months back when it aired on TCM, and it's an interesting two-reeler worth watching because the actor playing the lead has an extended dream sequence in which he plays alongside a bunch of famous Hollywood stars -- except that all of those famous stars are played by doubles, some of whom are quite good. Viewers of today who don't recognize the people probably will find it about as funny as a George Raft pun, but for those who watch lots of old movies, you'll recognize the actors being portrayed.