Briefs for August 6-7, 2020

Wilford Brimley died over the weekend, so I planned to watch Cocoon in order to do a post on it, having put it on the DVR the last time TCM ran it. But I was very surprised to see that it seems to be out of print on DVD. The sequel, Cocoon: The Return is available on Amazon Prime video, but not the original, from what I can tell.

Tomorrow's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Sylvia Sidney, and her day kicks off at 6:00 AM with One Third of a Nation. I can't recall if I've done a full-length review of this, but it's a hilarious awful piece of propaganda in support of slum clearance to build public housing projects that turned out to be just as awful as the slums that were supposedly gotten rid of. The best part of the movie is 14-year-old Sidney Lumet as the kid brother; he has a fever dream in which the tenement talks to him!

I got around to watching Scandal: The Trial of Mary Astor, a documentary TCM ran back in January about Astor's child custody trial that took place while she was making Dodsworth, and the salacious personal diary that nearly was made public. Unfortunately, the parties reached a settlement, so the trial fizzled out and with that, the documentary kind of did, too. (Not the documentarian's fault, of course.) This one isn't on DVD either, because of the clips from Dodsworth and the attendant rights fees. In fact, the director, Alexa Foreman, had worked for TCM, pointed that out in her interview with Ben Mankiewicz and said that by a bit of serendipity, she received a bequest in Robert Osborne's will that allowed her to pay for the clips.

I missed that FXM had the original Flight of the Phoenix on yesterday. I didn't look at the FXM schedule for this week because I knew I was going to be blogging about My Gal Sal, so it was only when I got home from work that I saw it was running. I'm guessing it will start showing up more often, so it's one to look out for. Both the original and the remake seem to be available on Prime video.