Briefs for February 6, 2015

I apologize that the posting hasn't been up to even the normal quality lately. I'm in one of those areas that actually has to deal with winter, and although that "great blizzard" of two weeks ago that hit Boston with a vengeance just missed us, there's been enough to do this winter. Being seven years into blogging, and finding that a lot of the movies on the schedule are ones I've arleady blogged about, also has something to do with it.

Today's Ronald Reagan's birthday, isn't it? It's too bad that the B movies he made at the beginning of his career never got nominated for any Oscars because as I've commented before, a lot of those are quite fun. It helps that Reagan was at Warner Bros, since I think they had the best B movies of all the ones I've seen. Granted, TCM doesn't get much of the B movies from Paramount or Universal so I can't judge those, but I tend to prefer the Warner B movies to either MGM or RKO, and what little we've gotten from Columbia or Fox.

London Can Take It!, which I blogged about back in May of 2012, is on the TCM schedule at 7:50 PM today. If you hacen't seen this one before, I think it's certainly woth a watch, taking a look at London well before the US got involved in World War II. The bombings of London had already come to the screen in the finale of Foreign Correspondent four months earlier, but London Can Take It! is much more real.

And then there's Strauss Fantasy, airing tomorrow morning at 10:31 AM on TCM. I don't think I've seen this one, but I find myself wondering how it can be that much better than Capriccio Italien, which I brought up last summer. One of the IMDb reviewers suggests this might be in a wider aspect ratio than Capriccio Italien, although the IMDb page doesn't give any information. It's just the MGM orchestra playing a medly of songs by various members of the Strauss family.