Briefs for August 3-4, 2018

I probably should have mentioned the passing of Mary Carlisle earlier. Carlisle, who died on Wednesday at the age of 104, was a supporting player in quite a few 1930s movies, although they were mostly lower-budget films I don't recall so well. One title that did stick out is Should Ladies Behave, if only because every time I see that title I immediately want to respond "No!" She was also the last of the surviving WAMPAS Baby Stars, a group of young actresses picked by the West coast distributors who felt these actresses were about to become stars. Many did (one of the fellow Baby Stars the year Carlisle was picked was Ginger Rogers); others didn't.

Tomorrow's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Clint Eastwood, whose day kicks off at 6:00 AM with The First Traveling Saleslady. I thought I had done a full-length post on it since that apology post, but dammit, I never did. Eastwood plays a supporting role in which he winds up romantically involved with Carol Channing. The actual star is Ginger Rogers, playing a woman selling barbed wire out west. A check of the TCM shop today suggests that the movie is still not on DVD.

The First Traveling Saleslady is in a two-hour slot even though the movie isn't that long. That gives time for a short, and that short will be the recently mentioned Beauty and the Bull, at about 7:39 AM. Bette Ford, before she became an actress, spent some time as a bullfighter, and this is a dramatization of that story.