Monday, October 15, 2012

So much unseen

I've recommended a lot of the movies that are airing tonight in prime time as part of the third week of Spencer Tracy's turn as TCM Star of the Month. But he made so many movies that his films are continuing well into Tuesday morning. And when I look at the Tracy movies that are airing on Tuesday morning, I find myself astonished at how many things there are for me still to see.

I've already seen Northwest Passage (6:30 AM), which is a nice Technicolor adventure movie set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War.

Malaya (8:45 AM), on the other hand, is one that I probably should have heard of, but which doesn't sound familiar at all. It stars Tracy and James Stewart in what sounds like a fairly formulaic World War II story. Still, it's Tracy and Stewart together.

The Devil at Four O'Clock (12:30 PM) sounds like a lot of fun, even if it's probably not Tracy's best. He plays a Catholic priest running a leper colony for juveniles on a South Pacific island, and has to evacuate all the kids when the volcano is about to erupt. You'd think that by this point in his career, Tracy would have been able to get better scripts.

Finally, at 2:45 PM tomorrow is The Mountain, which stars Tracy as a mountaineer together with brother Robert Wagner (really, how far apart were the two in age? 30 years?) trying to get to a mountainside plane crash for different reasons. Another one that sounds like fun if not particularly good, aided by widescreen visuals.

I can't wait to see how right or wrong I am about some of these.

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