Briefs for June 30-July 1, 2021

I have a couple of posts already scheduled for tomorrow, so today is just a briefs post, even though one of the things I'm mentioning would normally get a mention tomorrow. That would be TCM's new Star of the Month for July 2021, since the month begins tomorrow. Every Thursday in prime time, TCM is showing the movies of Elvis Presley, which I know a lot of people like but aren't necessarily to everybody's taste, largely because Col. Tom Parker typecast him.

In fact, I was recently listening to this interview with Irwin Winkler from November 2019, being way behind in my podcast listening. One of the things that isn't mentioned in the text exceprts on that page is that Winkler claims Elvis saw Point Blank and wanted to star in a movie like that, but Col. Tom would never greenlight that. I think movies like King Creole show Elvis was a better actor than he gets credit for, although I don't know that he could have pulled off that sort of role.

Among today's birthdays are Oscar-winner Susan Hayward; she was born on this day in 1917. Also born on this day -- and in 1917 too -- was Lena Horne. However, neither actress really got honored on TCM since the daytime theme was pregnant women. (Susan Hayward does show up in Susan Slade, which was on earlier.) Interestingly enough, the prime time lineup is for somebody whose birthday is tomorrow, that being the 105th birth anniversary of Olivia de Havilland. Why TCM isn't spending tomorrow morning and afternoon with her instead, I don't know.

I looked at StarzEncore Westerns and saw The Broken Land on the schedule, tomorrow at 5:03 AM. For some reason the title looked familiar and I was thinking of one of those B westerns that Fox distributed while they were trying to get the Elizabeth Taylor Cleoptra to the screen. But then I was thinking the ones I blogged about were The Purple Hills and One Foot in Hell. As it turns out, I was right on both parts, as you can see from the link. The Broken Land has a very young Jack Nicholson right at the beginning of his career.