Briefs for January 20-21, 2016

I probably should have mentioned the marathon of Saint movies airing in prime time tonight on TCM. Simon Templar was played by several actors over the course of the series, and we get entries from Louis Hawyard, George Sanders, and Hugh Sinclair during the evening and overnight. I'm not certain which of them I've seen; I'm probably getting the Saint movies mixed up with the Lone Wolf movies. Ah yes, Melvyn Douglas played the Lone Wolf in a movie. And Louis Hayward would play him on TV. No wonder it's so darn easy to get the series mixed up.

Much has been made of the fact that TCM just happened to have A Face in the Crowd on today's schedule, what with the presidential inauguration. People of a certain political stripe want to compare Donald Trump with Lonesome Rhodes, something I thought I mentioned here once before during the campaign. I would have compared Trump with a character in a different movie on today's schedule: Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead. I've long believed that Ayn Rand's characters work better when considered as archetypes. Wynand and Trump both come across as people who say what they think the people want to hear, but when it comes to having something for themselves, what do they really want?

I should probably also mention the death of actor Miguel Ferrer, at the young age of 61. Ferrer, son of José Ferrer, was in Robocop, a bunch of TV shows, anddid a fair amount of voice work.