Another set of briefs

Duel in the Sun, which I blogged about back in February 2008, is on TCM again overnight tonight at 12:30, or this evening at 9:30 PM Pacific Time for those of you out on the west coast. I didn't make any mention at the time of its DVD status, which is that it got multiple DVD releases according to Amazon, but they all seem to be out of print. TCM Shop doesn't list it as available for putchase.

The last of the movies in Peck's day of Summer Under the Stars is How the West Was Won at 3:00 AM; that's followed a little after 5:45 AM by the Traveltalks short Natural Wonders of the West. I have to admit I'm not quite as big a fan of those Traveltalks shorts that look at natural things that are still around as I am of the shorts looking at places that have changed: the Hungarian peasants of 1938, "Modern" Tokyo as it was in 1935, the bombed-out buildings of London; and so on. But Natural Wonders of the West has one of those, in the form of brief scenes of Mount Rushmore while the four faces were still being carved. It's a shame we couldn't get a longer Technicolor short focusing solely on Mount Rushmore and its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, as he was making the monument.

Ann Blyth will be the star spotlighted by TCM tomorrow. Her day kicks off at 6:00 AM with One Minute to Zero (available from the Warner Archive), a movie that I've seen the beginning of several times but never bothered to sit all the way through. But what's interesting is that it's a Korean War film that was actually made during the war, in 1952. The Korean War didn't go on as long as World War II, and didn't have the public support that World War II did, so I don't think the studios were lining up to make movies about it to keep up the morale of the folks back home. Also, Ann Blyth plays a UN worker, back in the days when the United Nations was viewed much more positively by the American people.