Once Upon a Screen

TCM's Star of the Month for March 2014 is Mary Astor. Her movies are running every Wednesday night in prime time, running into the Thursday morning schedule, that being the part of Thursday that's listed on the TCM schedule as Thursday, and not just the overnight hours leading up to 6:00 AM Thursday. Perhaps Astor's most famous role is as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, although that isn't airing until next Wednesday at 8:00 PM. Astor won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Great Lie, which is on tonight, at 10:00 PM. I stand by my assertions that I made six years ago that the plot contrivances are nuts, and the men of today are probably not going to appreciate the movie. I'm not certain about the quality of the DVD, as the Amazon copies are several years old, while the TCM shop only offers a "repackaged" box set. But at least it's available

But that's not really why I'm posting. I was looking for some photos of Astor as O'Shaughnessy to illustrate a post on her being Star of the Month, and one interesting-looking photo led to the link for The Maltese Falcon above. As you will have noticed, it's to a blog called Once Upon a Screen. Now, normally my thinking is not to take other people's bandwidth by hotlinking to the photos on their blog; that is, having the image show up here but with the source in the HTML IMG tag being back to the other site. If a blog hasn't been updated in a long time, as is often the case, I'll save the photo to disk, repost it to my Photobucket account, and then have the IMG tag link to that. (I did find one smaller photo leading to a blog where the most recent post was from two years ago stating that the author of the blog had died. No wonder it hasn't been updated.) I feel slightly bad about copying other people's uploaded images, but then we're all copying from the original movies.

In this case, the blog seems to be updated two or three times a week, so I decided that it would be better to forgo a traditional post on Mary Astor being the Star of the Month and instead finally add another blog to my blogroll. I think Aurora's post on The Maltese Falcon is better than anything I would have written, anyway.