It's Martin Luther King Day again

Ah, the annual day where we get a bunch of black-themed movies on TCM, with a lot of them being repeats because Hollywood just didn't make too many and anybody who wants to show old movies appropriate for the day would be picking from the same set.

I probably should have posted this last night since it would have been nice to make mention of the fact that the day kicks off at 6:00 AM with Hallelujah, something that I blogged about not for Martin Luther King Day, but in March six years ago. In that post I also linked to my post on Cabin in the Sky, which is also unsurprisingly on today's TCM schedule at 10:45 AM.

Immediately proceeding Cabin in the Sky, at 9:30 AM, is The Duke Is Tops. I've briefly mentioned this one twice; you can probably guess that once of them was in conjunction with Martin Luther King Day a couple of years ago. The other time was when Lena Horne, the female lead, died. This was at the very beginning of her career when she wasn't in Hollywood, but making a race movie. This one has a standard Hollywood plot with Horne playing a young singer discovered by the producer of a traveling revue with the two falling in love, only to be discovered in turn by a New York guy who could get her to perform in the big time of Harlem.

Finally, going back to the them of late last week of TCM getting more movies from Fox, I see that at midnight tonight there's what I think is the TCM premiere of Trouble Man. This one from the days of blaxploitation but not nearly as over the top as the ones with female leads, is pretty good although as with a lot of movies that have one good guy against a bunch of bad guys, the ending is a bit improbable.

Today's TCM schedule has all of the movies I've mentioned above listed as having links to buy them at the TCM Shop; I haven't checked to see if the links are accurate and not to things on backorder. One movie that doesn't have a link -- and to be honest I was surprised to see it not have a link -- is Sounder at 4:00 PM.