Briefs for October 8-9, 2018

I probably should have mentioned the death of actor Scott Willson earlier, as he died over the weekend at the age of 76. I shouldn't be surprised that the obituary headline mentions the zombie TV series The Walking Dead, especially since that's just begun its new season. For movie fans, I'd recommend a young Wilson opposite Robert Blake in In Cold Blood, the story of two young men who commit a particularly gruesome murder in Kansas.

Also dying recently is prodcuer Arnold Kopelson, who won an Oscar for producing Platoon, as it's the producer who picks up the Best Picture Oscar nowadays.

TCM's prime-time lineup tonight is a pair of double features in which the second movie is a remake of the first, with one of the key roles being given to a woman where there was a man in the original. The first pair is The Front Page (8:00 PM) followed by His Girl Friday at 10:00 PM, the latter having Rosalind Russell as the lady reporter having to cover an execution. That's followed by a movie I didn't realize got a remake, Strangers on a Train at midnight. From the brief synopsis I read, Once You Kiss a Stranger (overnight at 2:00 AM) has Carol Lynley taking on the role originally done by Robert Walker.

Tuesday's morning and afternoon lineup on TCM is a bunch of documentaries, more or less. The first film of the morning is Resisting Enemy Interrogation a 6:00 AM, which really isn't a documentary, but a training film that was never meant for public consumption. A bomber crew gets shot down over Italy in World War II, and the Nazis use subtle techniques instead of torture to try to get information from them. It's got some names you'd recognize, like Arthur Kennedy, although no credits since those weren't necessary for its intended use. Later tomorrow, at 12:30 PM, there's The Secret Land, which I mentioned once or twice before, about the US military's post-World War II expedition to Antarctica. It's narrated by a couple of MGM's contract players and in Technicolor.