This being Memorial Day weekend here in the US, it's no surprise that TCM is airing war movies, as I've already mentioned the past two days. I should also point out the other programming features haven't been overlooked. Noir Alley seems to be there, as the same movie was in the midnight slot a few hours back and comes up at 10:00 AM: Charlton Heston as an army doctor returning to his hometown in Bad For Each Other, a movie I blogged about a few months back. Not particularly a war movie, but not too many war noirs out there. Act of Violence or John Hodiak in Somewhere in the Night might qualify, but the latter is Fox.
Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports also show up, except that they're pushed back a ways because The Best Years of Our Lives only starts at 11:15 PM. That's due to a series of documentaries at the start of prime time tonight, first up at 8:00 PM being the 1944 Memphis Belle, not the feature film of the same title from much later. Some of William Wyler's footage was found many years later, and that was turned into two documentaries, The Cold Blue (9:00 PM) and a making-of documentary at 10:30 PM. Silent Sunday Nights sees one I don't think I've watched before, The Flying Fleet at 2:15 AM, followed by a double feature of foreign movies about World War II: The Burmese Harp at 4:00 AM and The Cranes Are Flying at 6:00 AM.
FXM is, perhaps surprisingly, getting into the war movie lineup, albeit rather more abbreviated than TCM. On Monday, May 27, the Retro block has nine hours of war films (the early movie, David and Bathsheba, doesn't really qualify):
6:00 AM On the Sunny Side which I mentioned a few weeks back;
7:15 AM Great Guns, with Laurel and Hardy near the end of their careers;
8:30 AM Something for the Boys, a homefront musical about helping the wives of those stationed overseas;
10:00 AM A Bell for Adano, set against the invasion of Italy;
11:45 AM Call Me Mister, with Betty Grable near the end of her career working in occupied Japan; and
1:25 PM All Hands on Deck, a lousy Pat Boone service comedy.
And, I should have mentioned a couple of deaths from this past week. First up, of course, is Darryl Hickman, a child star with a bunch of memorable roles, although the first one I always think of is as Cornel Wilde's younger brother with polio who tries to impress new sister-in-law Gene Tierney by going for a swim in Leave Her to Heaven. Hickman was 92, and I think a good candidate to get at least a Sunday night double feature tribute if not longer, depending on what films TCM can get.
The other death is songwriter Richard Sherman, not to be confused with the former NFL star. (Not that a lot of classic movie fans are going to remember the other Richard Sherman.) Sherman and his brother Robert wrote a bunch of songs for Disney movies in he 1960s and beyond, notably Mary Poppins. Because they wrote for Disney films, and we all know how stingy Disney is with their IP, who knows if there's going to be any sort of salute to Sherman. He died yesterday aged 95.
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