End-of-the-month briefs, August 2018

The time flies by as we've reached the end of another edition of Summer Under the Stars. The last star to be honored is Joan Crawford, and I should probably have mentioned the prime time lineup a bit earlier. It starts with Sudden Fear at 8:00 PM, a movie that almost never aired until a few years back, I think because of rights issues. It was distributed by RKO, but produced by Joseph Kaufman Productions, and having such an independent production company probably had something to do with it. Those got cleared up and a new Blu-ray was released, so TCM can run the movie once in a while.

Sudden Fear will be followed at 10:00 PM by Harriet Craig, a fun movie that got more airing on TCM when they had greater access to Columbia's back library. Crawford plays the title character, one of the most controlling wives you'll ever meet, and by that end of the movie everybody just wants to be done with her. Crawford near her over-the-top hissably hateful best.

The Saturday morning block returns tomorrow. I can't remember what episode of Tailspin Tommy they're up to, although I think it runs through the end of September -- the episode on September 29 is titled "The Last Stand". The 10:00 AM Saturday slot has been running the Tarzan movies, and they're up to the Gordon Scott Tarzans of the late 1950s.

I'm looking forward to getting a couple of things off the DVR in September. The last time I checked Criterion, they're putting out a new disk of Andrei Rublev at the end of the month, so I plan to watch that at some point. For some reason, I thought Bright Victory was an MGM movie that should have gotten a release from the Warner Archive. But it's from Universal, and they haven't put it out on their MOD scheme yet. That too is coming up at the end of the month, so I'll have to get around to watching it.