Pam Grier night

TCM's new "season" of its podcast is about actress Pam Grier, and it looks like the first episode was just released, going by all the news stories of Grier plugging the podcast. Unsurprisingly, TCM is going to be doing some promotion of its own, by having a night of Grier's movies, with her sitting down with Ben Mankiewicz to present them. Heaven only knows how many times the podcast will be mentioned.

Grier's two most iconic roles, or at least the ones that made her a star, were in Coffy and Foxy Brown, and those, for whatever reason, are in the middle of the lineup, at 10:00 PM and midnight respectively. The night begins at 8:00 PM with a new-to-me movie, Sheba Baby from 1975).

And, finally, at 2:00 AM, is a movie I thought I had seen an blogged about before: Black Mama, White Mama. The synopsis reads:

Two intimidating female prison inmates have an ongoing feud and are bound together by chains and transferred to another location for the purpose of keeping the peace but along their journey they continue to clash and provoke a gory shootout.

Now, that sounded familiar to me, but in looking up Grier on my blog, I saw that I had done a post on a different movie, The Big Doll House. But that one is also a women-in-prison movie, and was also made on the cheap in the Philippines. There's also Women in Cages and The Big Bird Cage. No wonder why these movies sounded familiar to me.

For whatever reason, TCM isn't concluding the nighttime lineup with a fifth Grier movie, even if she wouldn't be around to talk about it with Ben. Instead, at 4:00 AM, there's another women-in-prison movie, Caged.