Perhaps I should actually watch the movies

A few years back, I briefly mentioned the TCM Programming Challenge we have a couple of times a year over at the TCM boards. No prizes or anything, just a good way to stretch our brains and come up with programming ideas that, if we're lucky, will win the ultimate prize: getting used on TCM. There was another one this month, and I decided to set myself the extra challenge of programming only movies that I hadn't seen in their entirety. (In a few cases, that meant having tuned in five or ten minutes after the movie started and seeing the rest of it, which some people may consider cheating.)

One of the themes I thought up was movies with women's full names in the title. The problem is, several of them I couldn't use having already seen them: Alice Adams, Marie Antoinette, and Stella Dallas all come to mind. But I thought of a few others, and was able to come up with enough stuff to fill a night of programming.

But then, somebody pointed it out to me. I included the 1947 movie Cass Timberlane. "Cass", it turns out, is actually a man, played by Spencer Tracy. Really. Who thinks up these character names? Well, in this case it was Sinclair Lewis, who wrote the novel.