TCM is remembering Ralph Meeker on his birthday again

Last November 21 I wrote a blog post about actor Ralph Meeker, whose birthday it was. (Well, birth anniversary; he died in 1988.) It's one year on from that, and TCM is running some of his movies tomorrow morning. I've mentioned Jeopardy on a number of occasions; that one is airing at 12:45 PM. I thought I had done a full-length post on Shadow in the Sky before, but it turns out I only gave it a one-paragraph synopsis back in May when TCM ran a night of James Whitmore movies.

I've actually mentioned it a couple of times; the first time the mention wasn't quite as positive as last May: I said that it goes hilariously wrong at times. On further reflection, I think both reviews are OK: I always find the early 50s MGM B movies interesting, but they're still MGM movies. MGM always had a lot of glitz, but by the 50s outside of the musicals, that glitz was fading at the edges. There are a lot of smaller movies like Shadow in the Sky that have interesting ideas but for whatever reason -- they have a message to make being one of the big ones -- they don't get things quite right. Those MGM Bs from the 50s are mostly movies I'd recommend to people who are already fans of old movies, but for people just getting into it I'd start elsewhere.