Briefs for September 28, 2014

I probably should have mentioned Laurence Olivier's Henry V, airing at 10:00 this morning ib TCN, yesterday. It's one of those movies where it's amazing that the movie got made at all, considering that it was made in the UK in 1944, when World War II was raging and there was all sorts of rationing and problems with filming movies. That, and the movie was made in color. I can only imagine the difficulty of getting that much color film stock into Britain during the war, although to be fair, Michael Powell had made The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in color the year before.

I don't know much about director Whit Stillman, who is sitting down with Robert Osborne tonight to discuss two of his movies. Then again, it's not as though Stillman has made very many movies and wasn't working for any of the major studios. Unfortunately, the synopsis for the first movie, Metropolitan (8:00 PM) sounds like it's not so likely to be my cup of tea, being about wealthy Manhattanites coming of age in the 1970s.

Tomorrow morning at 6:00 TCM is showing a short that's new to me, Doctor's Orders, which is the first film in Hal Roach's "Boy Friends" series. This one has David Sharpe and Grady Sutton (ah, there's a name I recognize) faking a car accident so that they can "recover" at their girlfriends' place, being taken care of by the same girlfriends. One of the writers is a young George Stevens, who also did the photography on this and the short The Real McCoy, which is coming up a bit after 7:45 AM tomorrow. Yes, it's the same George Stevens who would go on to become a prominent Oscar-winning director for films such as A Place in the Sun.