National Film Registry night

Every year, the Library of Congress picks 25 films that are considered artistically or historically important to include in the National Film Registry for preservation, something I've mentioned quite a few times. The selections are announced in December, and in the previous two years, TCM's Ben Mankiewicz sat down with the Librarian of Congress to present a night of that year's selections. This year, TCM moved the night to January, namely tonight; I don't know whether the Librarian of Congress is showing up.

The selection of movies TCM is showing is interesting, but above and beyond that I need to mention it because of some schedule issues. TCM's weekly schedule page is missing two of the selections. One of those is a bit understandable since they picked a 30-minute documentary. The other one is omitted from the online daily/weekly schedule and the monthly schedule.

Everything starts off at 8:00 PM with The Phenix City Story, which is fun and really deserves inclusion even if only for the interviews with the real people involved that kick off the movie. The weekly schedule has a couple of regular (non-National Film Registry) shorts on the weekly schedule that for some reason have been omitted from the daily schedule.

Thankfully, at 10:00 PM, the daily and monthly schedules show I Am Somebody, a half-hour documentary about striking black nurses in South Carolina, a movie that's new to me so I can't comment on it.

At 10:45 PM there's the 1944 Ingrid Bergman version of Gaslight, which is listed as a 114-minute movie in a four-hour slot. The weekly schedule claims that the 11-minute short R.F.D. Greenwich Village is on at 12:49 AM, with nothing between that and the 2:45 AM feature Girlfriends. What comes on in the intervening time isn't mentioned on any of the TCM schedules I could find, so I had to go to my box guide to see what it said. That says (and the inclusion of R.F.D. Greenwich Village implies the box guide time might just be right) that at 1:00 AM TCM is showing the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall, about the gay rights movement, well, before the Stonewall riots. It's an 87-minute movie, so if it is at 1:00 AM, it's not going to run over the alloted time slot.

Concluding the night is Oscar Micheaux's 1925 movie Body and Soul, which features the film debut of Paul Robeson.