It's Memorial Day Weekend

Monday (May 29) is once again Memorial Day here in the US, which as I think I've mentioned on several occasions started off as Decoration Day, an observance to mark the graves of those who died in the Civil War. Nowadays it's a holiday for those who died in any war, as well as the unofficial start of the summer season.

As always, it also means a marathon of war movies on TCM. The marathon starts with the start of prime time tonight, with A Walk in the Sun, a movie that I don't think I've actually seen before despite how many times it's been on TCM. The marathon continues all the way through Monday, including prime time, and the first movie on May 30 also happens to be war-themed, Today We Live.

Unsurprisingly, the marathon is disproportionately stocked with movies about World War II, mostly I think because of how much easier it is to get the rights to show those movies. After all, Hollywood churned out a lot of stuff for the homefront during World War II, with movies about that war still being popular for decades after because action movies about other wars weren't quite so upbeat.

It looks like Noir Alley is still being programmed, as the John Garfield movie The Fallen Sparrow is on at both midnight Sunday and then 10:00 AM Sunday. There's also Silent Sunday Nights featuring the 1921 version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There are also a lot of foreign-language films about World War II, but TCM is going with two British films for the slot following The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and they're both pretty darn good ones: In Which We Serve and 49th Parallel.

FXM will be getting in on the act as well, but only on Monday; and, unsurprisingly, they only have a limited lineup of movies that are currently in the FXM rotation, including a pair of airings of The Blue Max.

I may finally get around to cracking open the box set of British war movies that I bought some time back, or watching the last movie I haven't seen before off my Mill Creek/Columbia set that included The Commandos Strike at Dawn which I blogged about two months back.