Tuesday, June 13, 2017

A heads-up on Marlene Dietrich night

Tonight's prime time lineup on TCM is several Marlene Dietrich movies which get varying degrees of airplay on TCM. Universal seems more willing to let TCM get the rights to the Paramounts that Universal has, but not so much the movies Universal produced back before about Universal-International. So we don't get Destry Rides Again, while we do get a couple of Paramounts from the era, including Desire at 8:00 PM and The Song of Songs at 10:00 PM. TCM has two synopses for the first movie, and that's where the heads-up comes in. Apparently the one-sentence synopsis about a rich couple marrying down instead of each other comes from the plot of an earlier movie titled Desire. If you look at Leonard Maltin's brief review when you expand the title, you'll find what IMDb agrees is the plot of the Dietrich Desire, a romantic crime movie.

In between the two features, at about 9:50 PM, is a short that I've never seen before and sounds interesting: Leo Beers, World Renowned Whistling Songster. Well, he's not world-renowned any more. This is an early Vitaphone short from 1928, and I'd guess that the title implies exactly what it's about.

1 comment:

joel65913 said...

I'm really looking forward to Song of Songs, it's the one Dietrich film that I've never seen. Good or bad at least now her filmography will be complete.