This being December, TCM has been running Christmas-themed movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We're getting closer to the big day, and we've reached the point of TCM's annual Christmas marathon. Starting with prime time tomorrow (Dec. 20) and continuing for 120 hours, through Christmas morning and afternoon but ending when prime time on Dec. 25 rolls around, TCM will have nothing but Christmas movies.
The first film, tonight at 8:00 PM, is Meet Me in St. Louis, which introduced the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" that has since become a Christmas standard. Some of the movies have much bigger connections to Christmas than a couple that are somewhat more coincidentally set during the Christmas season and may or may not be thought of as Christmas movies. In this post, I'm going to limit myself to mentioning a couple of films that I first saw as a result of last year's Christmas marathon and are showing up on the schedule again this year.
I'm putting this post up today instead of tomorrow because in fact I have a post scheduled tomorrow for one of the films in the marathon, On Moonlight Bay. See that at noon on December 21. I'm assuming that it's part of the Saturday Musicals series that TCM has been running following the Saturday matinee block (not running this week) and will be presented by Dave Karger.
In the early hours of Sunday, Dec. 22, at 2:15 AM, there's Miracle on Main Street, about a woman with a boyfriend on the run who finds an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve and decides to keep the baby, at least until the boyfriend comes back and shows what a nasty piece of work he is.
Noir Alley doesn't have its usual double airing at midnight between Saturday and Sunday followed by a repeat at 10:00 AM Sunday. However, the film in the 10:00 AM slot on Sunday, Dec. 22, is a noir set around Christmas: Lady in the Lake. I wasn't a fan of Robert Montgomery's use of a POV camera in directing himself as Philip Marlowe.
Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports are a part of the Christmas marathon schedule. TCM is running a block called Christmas Past which is a bunch of silent Christmas-themed shorts, at midnight between Dec. 22 and Dec. 23. That's followed at 2:15 AM by Mon Oncle Antoine and at 4:15 AM by My Night at Maud's, which I frankly hated.
Another Christmas noir is I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (Dec. 23, 8:30 AM), while The Man I Love (Dec. 23, noon) has noirish elements.
December 24 and 25 repeat a lot of stuff shown over the previous three and a half days.
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