Shorts report for April 9-10, 2016

Last night, I got around to finishing my watching of Lightning Strikes Twice, a terrible RKO B movie I recorded last month. It only runs about 65 minutes and TCM had it in a 90-minute slot, so they filled out the slot with a short, Strange Glory. It's one of those Carey Wilson-narrated shorts, telling of a woman who claims to have given Abraham Lincoln the plan to cut Tennessee in two during the Civil War. The direction, by a young Jacques Tourneur, is interesting, but the short doesn't seem to be available on DVD.

With that, I'll mention a couple of upcoming shorts on TCM. First up, at 7:48 AM tomorrow, is Doin' Their Bit, which is a late Our Gang short, having the kids putting on a show as their part in the World War II effort.

The other one, at 11:39 AM tomorrow, is Dixieland, a Vitaphone short from the days before MGM would put out all those Traveltalks shorts. This one goes around the South showing various relics or reminders of the era before the Civil War. This is the sort of short that could have used color, although I suppose trying to lug a Technicolor camera around the South would have been prohibitively expensive for Warner Bros., if they even could have had acces to one of the few three-strip Technicolor camers around at the time. I don't know how James A. FitzPatrick did it.