It's long been a tradition to decorate the graves of soldiers who died in war. After the US Civil War, with so many dead soldiers, it took on a more formal organization, with May 30 being the day to remember the Civil War dead by putting flowers on their graves. After more wars and more war dead, other it was eventually decided to make the holiday a catch-all day to remember all the war dead, which is how we got Memorial Day, with a federal law putting several holidays on Mondays moving it to the last Monday in May.
So all of that is a long way of saying that Memorial Day is this weekend. Unsurprisingly, TCM is running a programming salute of military and war-themed movies, starting tonight at 8:00 PM with Pride of the Marines and continuing through Monday's programming, whch means early Tuesday morning.
As is usually the case, World War II movies take up the bulk of the programming, in part because Hollywood made a lot of war movies for homefront morale during the war, and because it being the "good" war, they'd rather make movies about that instead of Korea or Vietnam until Hollywood changed in the 1970s.
Among the non-World War II movies is Thunder Afloat, Saturday at 7:00 AM, which is nominally about World War I having been released in 1939, but with its subject of German U-boats bombing coastal shipping in the US, it's clearly an allegory for the rise of the Nazis.
There's no Silent Sunday Nights or TCM Imports this weekend, but there's still Noir Alley, which is Act of Violence at midnight Sunday (still Saturday evening in more westerly time zones) with the repeat at 10:00 AM.
Over on FXM, I don't think they're really doing anything, although Monday's programming happens to include M*A*S*H at 10:10 AM Monday followed by Patton at 12:10 PM. M*A*S*H started showing up in the FXM rotation a few weeks back, and since I recorded it in one of those showings, I'll probably watch it this weekend to do a post on.
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