Tuesday, September 29, 2015

A heads-up on Something Always Happens

Tommorow, September 30, is the birth anniversary of British-born director Michael Powell, who was born on that day in 1905. TCM is running a morning and afternoon of his movies, and one of the highlights for me would be another airing of Something Always Happens, which is on at 7:00 AM.

The reason I consider it a highlight is that it was never intended to be seen in America. As I mentioned in the post linked above, the movie was made at the Teddington Studio, which was Warner Bros.' British arm. Back then, the UK had a protectionist system wherein a certain percentage of movies shown in British cinemas had to be British films. The Hollywood studios dealt with this by setting up shops in the UK to make cheap B movies which they could pair with the prestige movies from Hollywood. TCM got the rights to half a dozen of them several years ago, and the quality ranges about as much as wth Hollywood's B movies. Some of it wasn't all that good; some of it was highly entertaining even if not on a par with the prestige movies. For me Something Always Happens is in that latter category. If you haven't seen Something Always Happens before, I can definitely recommend it. There's a synopsis somewhere in between the length of a brief post like this and a full-length post at the link above.

No comments: