January 16 is the third Monday in January, which means that we're at the annual Martin Luther King holiday here in the States. At least, it's a holiday for those who work for the government; I don't get the day off. But TCM is marking the day, as they do every year.
The surprise, however, is that TCM isn't spending the entire day, or even just the morning/afternoon or the evening with the films of Sidney Poitier. In fact, it looks as though there's only one Poitier film on the schedule, In the Heat of the Night at 10:00 PM. The rest of the day has quite the variety of movies.
There are a couple of race movies, those made by black directors for black audiences. One of the first such directors was Oscar Micheaux, and we get both his Within Our Gates at 8:30 and a documentary about him following that at 10:00 PM.
There's also a documentary about another director, Gordon Parks, titled Moments Without Proper Names, at 2:45 PM. That's followed at 4:00 PM by his feature film The Learning Tree. And for more traditional documentaries (by which I mean movies not about the movies), there's Freedom on My Mind at 6:00 PM.
Prime time is mostly serious post-Code movies (ie. not blaxploitation), including one I really enjoyed, Cooley High at midnight. And there are a couple of movies from the Studio Era when it was considered a big deal and daring. One of these is the MGM programmer Bright Road at 1:30 PM; where I panned Bannerline last week, Bright Road is one of the better programmers from that era.
1 comment:
Thanks. All of these movies playing on Monday sound excellent. I need to clear off space on my DVR since I'm hitting the limit. I still have a ton of stuff I recorded from last year. LOL
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