Briefs for October 24, 2024

I probably should have mentioned the passing of Mitzi Gaynor earlier; she died last week at the age of 93. She was active until fairly late in life, although her movie career ended fairly early in the 1960s. She also made a lot of her movies at Fox, so I don't know how much of a salute TCM will be able to do for her. I noticed that Les Girls is part of TCM's prime-time lineup on Monday (technically, midnight between Monday and Tuesday ET), but beyond that I could see Gaynor being honored on one of those nights in December when TCM runs one film each for a bunch of people who died over the past year.

Ron Ely died at the end of September aged 86, but his death wasn't announced until a day or two ago. I've been a game show fan since I was a kid, so I first came across Ely as the host of a now mostly-forgotten game show from the early 80s called Face the Music. From that I learned he was one of the many actors to play Tarzan (in his case, on TV). So I was surprised when I first got the Fox Movie Channel and saw him in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker.

Since the beginning of September, TCM has been running a series of "political" films on Fridays in prime time. This week, they're finally getting to one that to me is a very surprising pick from them: Leni Riefenstahl's two-part Olympia on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The IOC has an official Olympic film every Olympiad, and in conjunction with the release of a Criterion set of them some time back TCM ran a bunch of the movies, notably skipping Olympia. It's airing early Saturday at 4:15 AM for the first part and 6:30 AM for the second; those times are surprising as well since I'd think it's normally the early section of prime time that has the guest on to let everyone know who wicked Riefenstahl was for making the movie, because you're only allowed to think of movies like this or Gone With the Wind in the way TCM's hosts think you should.

Before all that, however, TCM has a morning and afternoon of disaster movies, including Transatlantic Tunnel at 8:15 AM. I probably should have posted this earlier; I did a post on Transatlantic Tunnel many years back and it's one that doesn't show up very often. But I've been concentrating more on getting ahead of the game by writing up posts two to three weeks in advance, and have been a bit derelict in my duty to post things like obituaries and mentioning upcoming films that I've already blogged about.