Briefs for May 28, 2014

I enjoyed the sit-down Robert Osborne had with Mother Dolores Hart last night, or at least the ones I saw, since I didn't stay up all night. I particularly enjoyed her comments about working with Elvis Presley. The point about his being unfailingly polite and referring to her as "Miss Dolores" reminded me of the piece on Elvis that Kurt Russell did for TCM, especially the portion about the conversation Elvis had with Russell's father about the way he wore his cowboy hat in the movies.

It appeared as though Lisa ran in its Cinemascope aspect ratio of about 2.35:1. A lot of the Cinemascope-era movies that Fox runs on FXM/FMC start off with the opening credits in Cinemascope, since the credits are blocked that if you tried to pan-and-scan them you'd miss a good portion of the credits. But the main part of the movies themselves often get cropped after the credits, increasingly to 16:9, as I saw with Guns at Batasi the other day. Some of the lesser-known B movies get chopped down to 4:3 still, and a few do keep the original aspect ratio.

Tonight is June Allyson's final night as TCM's Star of the Month for May. It starts off with a pair of remakes. First up will be the 1957 remake of My Man Godfrey, starring Allyson in the Carole Lombard role and David Niven in the William Powell role. That's followed at 9:45 PM by The Opposite Sex, which is a remake of The Women. It was only four months ago that I blogged about Music For Millions; that's airing at midnight.

And it looks as though TCM's website changed its favicon, the little image that you'll see next to the name of the page if you've got a bunch of browser tabs open. The old one was the profile of the gangster; now it's changed to the TCM in a rectangle logo. Or, at least, that's presumably what it's supposed to be; it's tough to tell since favicons are something like 16 pixels on a side. TCM's branding seems increasingly to have gone toward the TCM in a rectangle logo and away from the old-timey gangster profile, so I shouldn't be surprised.