Shorts update: June 11, 2014

Tomorrow is Ida Lupino's bithday, so TCM will be spending the morning and afternoon with her. I've either blogged about the movies before, or am not too interested in them -- I've never really been able to get into Out of the Fog, for example. So instead I note that there are going to be a couple of interesting-looking shorts coming up in the next day or so.

First, at about 11:45 PM, or just following The Deadly Companions (10:00 PM, 93 min plus an intro/outro) will be one called The Sky Divers. As you can guess from the title, it's about skydiving, or at least the sort of skydiving movie stuntmen do. Specifically, this one deals with the stunts for the movie The Gypsy Moths. The short sounds familiar, but I'm pretty certain I've never seen the feature film before. I tend to find most of the old "making of" featurettes worth at least one viewing, even if it's for a movie I don't like, such as the one on the location shooting for Mister Buddwing.

In the middle of the night comes The Moviemakers: Lolly-Madonna XXX Featurette. It's on at about 4:29 AM, coming on after Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (2:30 AM, 115 min). The interesting thing to me about this one is that it's about a feature I'd never even heard of before, in Lolly-Madonna XXX. It's apparently the story of two feuding families in the rural south, with Rod Steiger as the patriarch as one of the families and Robert Ryan as the other! And, there's no Tennessee Williams in sight. Instead, the screenplay is by Sue Grafton. Yes, that Sue Grafton, who wrote the Kinsey Millhone "A Is for Alibi" and on and on murder mysteries. Grafton turned 74 at the end of April; I didn't realize she's been around that long. At any rate, Lolly-Madonna XXX sounds like a movie that deserves an airing on TCM.

Finally, at 6:40 AM tomorrow, after The Glory Guys (4:45 AM, 115 min) comes Football Headliners. This is another of the RKO Sportscope pictures, looking at the college football games of 1955. I can't imagine why the people producing the RKO Sportscope shorts would think audiences of the day would find this interesting, since the events would have been a few months old already. Granted, the games weren't on TV at the time for the most part, I don't think. It's the sort of short that really needed to be in color, in which case it would have much more interesting historical value than it does.