Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Briefs for the end of October 2024

I was saddened yesterday to see news of the death of actress Teri Garr, who had a long battle with multiple sclerosis. Garr was 79. She started off as a dancer and was one of the backup dancers in the concert movie The T.A.M.I. Show, but I couldn't spot her in the YouTube clips I looked up. I seem to recall her wearing a bullseye shirt, but I didn't see that anywhere. As for her acting, she was memorable in several films of the 1970s and 1980s such as Young Frankenstein, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Tootsie. I'd guess that TCM will honor her in December with one of the latter two films since those seem to show up more often unlike Young Frankenstein which was done at Fox.

Halloween is tomorrow, and TCM is running programming today and tomorrow. The programming starts off with a handful of Hammer films, although thankfully those end before the end of the daytime block as Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim is on at 6:45 PM. The evening of the 30th brings movie that are more horrifying than horror movies, such as Psycho at 8:00 PM and Michael Powell's controversial Peeping Tom at 10:00 PM.

Halloween itself brings more "classic" horror; I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I did the post on Bela Lugosi that his 1931 version of Dracula would be getting a second airing on the afternoon of Halloween. I've got a standalone post for that which will appear later today. Also worth mentioning are Mystery of the Wax Museum at 7:30 AM, Freaks at 10:15 AM, and Frankenstein at 5:15 PM.

Very much of note on Halloween night on TCM is the 8:00 PM airing of The Other. This one is a Fox release, my having done a post on it some time back the last time it was in the FXM rotation. Somewhat surprisingly, it's on FXM tomorrow as well, at 1:15 PM. FXM isn't doing much for Halloween; their retro block has The Other preceded by Hand of Death at 12:10 PM. The ad-supported evening half of the schedule has some of the movies from the Alien and Predator franchises.

Finally, I'd like to continue to November 1. The TCM schedule for that morning and afternoon is a bunch of stuff based on the works of W. Somerset Maugham. He wrote a lot of stuff that's been turned into movies, and I've done posts on quite a few of those adaptations. Among the ones airing on Friday is the 1934 Greta Garbo The Painted Veil at 4:30 PM. It's been adapted for film at least two more times since, once about 20 years ago with the same title, and in the 1950s with the title The Seventh Sin. I've actually got that one on my DVR, but haven't gotten around to watching it yet since I've got so many other films I've done posts on.

No comments: