Summer Under the Stars is back

It's August already. My how the time flies. August, of course, means Summer Under the Stars on TCM, when each of the 31 days of the month is dedicated to 24 hours of movies from a different star. This of course means no Friday Night Spotlight, no Silent Sunday Nights, and no Imports (although Catherine Deneuve is coming up later in the month; a portion of her day will be French movies).

The first two days os Summer Under the Stars aren't particularly exciting to me, to be honest. Today is a full day of the films of Humphrey Bogart, except that the earliest of the movies is High Sierra, the 1941 movie that really made him a star. There are some good movies during the day, such as The Caine Mutiny at midnight, although I wouldn't have minded seeing some of Bogart's earlier stuff show up on the schedule as well. Also, TCM decided to start prime time off with The Big Sleep, which is one of my least favorite Bogart films. It's so muddled, and I've never really understood the "greatest romance ever" thing between Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Friday's star is Doris Day. So, we get a bunch of her musicals throughout most of the day. I'm sure Doris Day's musicals appeal to some people, but I'm not one of those people. The Fox Movie Channel has been running Do Not Disturb in its current rotation, but it's not airing again until August 15. Besides, it's not a particularly great comedy. Even Caprice is better.

So I think I'd rather mention Four-Minute Fever instead; you can catch it overnight at about 3:49 AM, between The Left Hand of God (starts at 2:15 AM) and The Harder They Fall (starts at 4:00 AM). It's an RKO Pathé Sportscope short from 1956 about whether or not a four-minute mile is ever going to be run on American soil. Of course, Roger Banister and several other white guys had already run the mile in under four minutes. But no American had done it, and that's what counts. Of course, nowadays middle-distance running is dominated by East Africans, and none of them are to be seen here. It wasn't really until the Rome Olympics in 1960, I think, that Africans began to dominate the distance events.