Another set of movies back after long absences

It's been closing in on six years since I blogged about Roman Holiday. I think TCM must have gotten the rights to show it again from the beginning of this year, becuase it's showing up a couple of times in quick succession, at least by TCM's standards. It was on back on January 12; it's going to air again tonight at 9:45 PM, and is scheduled to be one of the Essentials in the new season. To be fair, it's a wonderful movie well worth a viewing if you haven't seen it before.

"Quick succession" means something different over on FXM, where you can easily have a movie end one morning's Retro block of programming and then show up the first thing in the next morning's. House of Strangers, which I blogged about back in 2011, was on FXM Retro this morning, although by the time you read this post you'll have missed it. Fear not; you'll have another chance to se it tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM. Richard Conte plays the spoiled son in a family of Italian immigrant bankers headed by Edward G. Robinson; his three brothers resent it.

And then there's Tampico, which I've briefly mentioned but never done a full-length post about. That's largely because I haven't gotten around to watching any of the Fox Movie Channel/FXM Retro airings when it's been on, at least not for quite a few years. It was on yesterday, and shows up tomorrow morning at 9:45 AM. Edward G. Robinson shows up again, this time as the captain of an oil tanker plying the Gulf of Mexico during World War II. He picks up a group of survivors from a boat torpedoed by the Nazis, and then has reason to believe that one of the survivors may be a Nazi collaborator herself. Oh, and he's already fallen in love with her!

FXM also repeats movies in prime time, although I think I've posted before that there's an understandable strategy for running stuff multiple times on the same evening in prime time. It's still easier for a lot of people to turn on a TV and watch whatever's on, rather than go through programming a DVR. With first-run programming, there's also something to be said for being able to talk about it at work the next morning. For cable channels, it's just as easy to run a show twice, with the first airing being at a good time for people on the east coast, and the repeat being about the same local time for folks on the west coast.