Daylight Saving Time preemption

You'd think the TCM programmers would remember which day marks the start of Daylight Saving Time in the US and program only 9 hours in the prime time/overnight lineup instead of the usual 10. But no; once again the original monthly schedule had a full ten hours of movies starting at 8:00 PM tonight. Tonight also happens to be the start of a new season of The Essentials on TCM, with Drew Barrymore returning for her second season of presenting moives with Robert Osborne. This season's first selection is Grand Hotel at 8:00 PM, which is a well-deserved selection indeed. That's followed at 10:00 PM by Weekend at the Waldorf, a 1945 movie which is more or less a remake of Grand Hotel. That movie is followed by an early Vitaphone sound short, and then the fun begins.

For those of us in the Eastern time zone, the time change will occur during the night's third feature, The Big Chill. The monthly schdeule I downloaded a few weeks back, as well as the on-line schedule for Eastern Time, actually gets the timing on this one right, I think. It starts overnight at 12:30 AM and runs for 105 minutes, which is through the hour to move our clocks ahead. So this 105-minute movie should end just after 3:15 AM EDT, which will still be 1:15 AM CST.

The fourth feature, The Rules of the Game, is listed as starting at 3:30 AM EDT -- but the schedules only gave it a one-hour block despite its being a 106-minute movie. So of course it will actually take two hours to run, and the skipped hour for those of you in the Central and Mountain time zones will come during this movie if you're trying to record it.

The final movie in the Saturday night lineup is Fun on a Weekend at 5:30 AM EDT, a delightful little movie in which poor Eddie Bracken meets equally poor Priscilla Lane and together, the two con their way into high society for a day. That 5:30 AM EDT start time is still 1:30 AM PST, and the spring forward for those of you on the Pacific coast will occur during this film.

The upshot is that the movie which was originally on the schedule for early Sunday morning but has been removed is The Stork Club. It's been replaced by Now Playing: The Show, and the two-reel short Alice in Movieland, in which Joan Leslie plays a newcomer to Hollywood. Note that the on-line schedule lists this block as being at 6:15 AM, when in fact it runs from 7:15 to 8:00 AM.