This being a month dedicated to Warner Bros. on TCM, it's unsurprising that most of what's on is stuff I've already seen especially over the 15-plus years that I've been blogging. One movie that is definitely worth recommending again, if only for the insane casting is The Oklahoma Kid, which will be on at 3:00 PM, April 21. Neither James Cagney nor Humphrey Bogart were well-suited to westerns, and certainly not the sort of western Warner Bros. put them in. Bogart commented that Cagney looked like a mushroom in that 10-gallon hat the studio put him in.
Surprisingly, the picture I used to illustrate The Oklahoma Kid still shows up when I see the post I linked above, a post written back at the end of 2009. I was using Photobucket back then, since it was a free and easy-to-use photo hosting service that had obvious link naming for pictures one uploaded. I don't recall how many years ago it was that Photobucket decided to go to a mostly-paid model and screw up embedding photos. But over the past couple of weeks I've been getting even nastier nastygrams from them telling them the account has been deactivated because they no longer support free accounts at all. And yet, the picture is there, if heavily watermarked.
Somebody at FXM has a sense of humor, or at least is trying to think halfway creatively when programming the channel. The April 21 schedule includes, in order:
The 1944 (Laird Cregar) version of The Lodger at 7:15 AM;
The House on 92nd Street (a very entertaining docudrama) at 8:40 AM;
House of Strangers, a pretty good drama remade as the western Broken Lance, at 10:10 AM; and
The House on Telegraph Hill at 11:55 AM. A lot of houses there.
Finally, when I watched Bullets or Ballots recently, I noticed it was an 82-minute movie programmed into a 1:45 slot. This gave TCM more than enough time to insert a short, which was one of their bandleader shorts which were a thing in the late 1930s and the 1940s. This one was Swing Cat's Jamboree, starring Louis Prima and his musicians and singers. It's nothing particularly special if you're not a big fan of the music, although Louis Prima is a more remembered name nowadays than some of the other bandleaders who were spotlighted. As of right now, this one is on Youtube:
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