Although the new month started quite some time back, we didn't get a new Star of the Month on TCM for quite some time for a couple of reasons. That Star of the Month is Dorothy Dandrige, who didn't get to make all that many movies because she died young and Hollywood wasn't making many movies with black leading characters back in Dandridge's day. So TCM is only showing eight Dandridge movies, running them on Sunday nights before Silent Sunday Nights. And with last week being the Labor Day weekend, we got all those concert movies on the first Sunday in September, leaving just three Sundays to put those movies into.
This first night of Dandridge's spotlight includes her Oscar-nominated role in Carmen Jones, at 8:00 PM. That will be followed by a really good role in Bright Road at 10:00 PM, and a musical number in Sun Valley Serenade at 11:30 PM, the last of those being decidedly not a starring role for Dandridge. She and the Nicholas brothers dance to Glenn Miller's Oscar-nominated song "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", and you can see a couple of pretty obvious points where the exhibitors in the south could cut the number out so that white southern audiences wouldn't have to have their pretty little eyes polluted by, horror of horrors, black people dancing.
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