Maggie Smith heads-up, and a few random comments

TCM's star for Summer Under the Stars on Thursday, August 22, is Maggie Smith, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which will be airing tomorrow evening at 9:45 PM. Starting the day off, however, is The V.I.Ps, at 6:00 AM. I blogged about this one back in November 2010. Back when I blogged about it, I failed to mention the movie's DVD status, which is that it's gotten a release, but doesn't seem to be in print any longer. At least, it's one of those movies that you can get on DVD at Amazon, but not from the TCM Shop.

The V.I.P.s is one of those movies that causes problems with the IMDb's search function. In looking for it on IMDb this morning, I made the mistake of not including the initials. The result was a whole bunch of movies and TV episodes about VIPs, but where the title didn't have the periods. IMDb's fuzzy logic, or fuzzy illogic, didn't think to include VIPs with periods as near matches. Enter the periods, and immediately get the 1963 movie as the top match. Ever since IMDb ent to its new search algorithm some time back, I've been having more problems if I can't remember the exact title of a movie.

Following The V.I.Ps, at about 8:00 AM, is a short called Filmmaking on the Riviera, which has run a couple of times in the recent past. The last time it was on, I came in during the middle. It's one of those "making-of" featurettes, and as a featurette it didn't seem to be particularly notable. However, the movie it's about, Joy House, sounds much more interesing. It's one I don't think I'd ever even heard of before I saw the featurette. It's on DVD, but it's not on the TCM schedule for any time soon. TCM could have run it when they did a day of Alain Delon movies back in May, but it wasn't one of the selections. In fact, I've got the TCM monthly schedules going back to mid-2007, and a search of them didn't yield any hits.