Briefs for July 10, 2014

TCM's lineup for tonight is a bunch of documentaries. I have to admit that I know next to nothing about most of these other than the brief blurbs on them, so they'll be new to me. The only one that was familiar to me is Come Back, Africa at 11:30 PM, which showed up some time back when TCM did a night of movies made by independent documentary film maker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin wanted to make a movie about the apartheid situation in South Africa, this in 1959 before it really became a hot-button topic in the western world. The South African authorities obviously wouldn't have wanted this, so Rogosin had to lie about his intentions and smuggle his work out.

The first two documentaries sound moderately interesting. First, at 8:00 PM, is Salesman, a late-1960s movie about door-to-door Bible salesmen. When's the last time anybody saw a door-to-door salesman, somebody for whom that was actually their job? I'm not talking about Girl Scout cookies, or Jehovah's Witnesses trying to sell God for free. That's followed at 9:45 PM by The Times of Harvey Milk, the gadfly politician on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors best-known for being gay and getting shot by a rival politician, along with the thoroughly straight mayor.

I mentioned last week that retired general Wesley Clark is presenting the Friday night spotlight of World War I movies. In fact, for the rest of July, the World War I movies will be running all day Friday starting at 6:00 AM, although Clark won't be presenting the daytime movies of course. Tomorrow kicks off with the silent version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse starring Rudolph Valentino. Never having seen the 1960s remake with Glenn Ford, I was surprised to see that the remake is updated to be set in World War II, which would explain why it's not on TCM this month.