Briefs for March 12, 2015

Richard Glatzer, who co-directed last year's Oscar-nominated film About Alice, died on Tuesday at 63 as a result of his ALS. It shows how much I follow current movies that I didn't know the director has a terminal illness.

It looks as though IMDb's search function is acting up again. Yesterday, TCM aired a British movie titles Obsession. However, an IMDb search of that title doesn't bring it up. That might be forgivable when you consider that Obsession is the British title and it was renamed The Hidden Room for US release. However, when I do an IMDb search for Obsession, the top two hits I get are for films that only have "also known as" for Obsession.

Obsession isn't the only title not being found. Overnight tonight at about 3:35 AM, TCM is running Storm, an unorthodox entry in John Nesbitt's Passing Parade Series about weather forecasting. It's not as if the IMDb title search doesn't bring up shorts, either, as I use it a lot when I'm looking up Traveltalks shorts, for example. More interesting is that when I did a name search on the director, Paul Burnford, he showed up... with the movie Storm being used to distinguish him from people with similar names.

Following Storm is the movie Escape From Crime at 3:45 AM, which is part of a night of movies with Jackie Gleason in the cast. What makes this less-than-stellar B-movie interesting isn't so much the fact that Gleason shows up briefly, but the fact that Warner Bros. remade Picture Snatcher with this one. Picture Snatcher is much the better movie, and is airing at 4:45 AM.

I wish I had seen The Sorcerers before yesterday evening's airing on TCM. It's a movie that at times is a howler and at times really interesting, in no small part because of the presence of an elderly Boris Karloff in the cast. I don't do the streaming video thing, so I don't know if it's available on Watch TCM for the rest of the week.