Veteran's Day, a holiday which was originally Armistice Day to mark the end of World War I, is one of the public holidays in the US not moved to a Monday, instead always being on the anniversary of the armistice on November 11. This year, that falls on a Saturday, but I'm posting about it quite a bit early for a couple of reasons.
The first is that FXM doesn't seem to have any military movies in the Retro block on Saturday itself, but does have several in the run-up to the day. First, tomorrow (November 7) at 3:00 AM is the fine Steve McQueen movie The Sand Pebbles, set in China in the 1920s and starring McQueen as an iconoclastic sailor stationed there who has to deal with an increasingly chaotic situation. Then, most of the lineup on Wednesday, November 8 -- from the hard 6:00 AM start to the end of the Retro block -- is military movies:
6:00 AM All Hands on Deck, a Pat Boone service comedy;
7:40 AM Crash Dive, the World War II movie Tyrone Power made before serving in the war;
9:30 AM The Hunters, a Korean War movie with Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner;
11:20 AM Blood and Steel, a B movie from the late 1950s about World War II; and
12:25 PM The Blue Max, the only World War I movie in the lot.
There's another couple of war movies on Thursday; I recently reviewed A Bell for Adano but there's also the recently-returned Immortal Sergeant and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.
As for TCM, there's surprisingly little, which I think is largely because the 11th is a Saturday this year. TCM isn't jettisoning its programming blocks, so the Saturday matinee runs untli noon, followed by the musical matinee. There are only three war movies before prime time, in part because there's a three-hour movie in The Best Years of Our Lives. There's more Bruce Lee at 8:00 PM, which is why the war-movie block ends relatively early.
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