For better or worse, the end of this year's Daylight Saving Time, and other briefs

In the past, I've done posts in March and the beginning of November about the start of Daylight Saving Time here in the US and how it means there's one programming day where TV channels only have to program for 23 hours. Then, in November, we shift back, which means there's a day with 25 hours. Usually, I've been able to figure out how TCM is going to program either for the missing hour or for the extra hour, the latter seemingly disproportionately with one of the Some of the Best shorts.

Unfortunately, all of the "upgrades" to the TCM site have meant that their online schedule is more useless than before. I decided recently on a lark to try to figure out how that extra hour is going to get filled tonight, and was disappointed to see that TCM's daily schedule is even worse than before. (Surprisingly, it was already four years ago that I complained about anothre site change.) Now, the site not longer gives the running times of movies. Instead, it only gives the length of the time slot into which TCM has put a movie. So, as an example, Young Dr. Kildare, airing as part of the Saturday Matinee, starts at 10:08 AM and has a running time of 67 minutes. But the TCM schedule site simply gives 1 hour, 23 minutes, with the next part of the matinee starting at 11:30 AM (so this is off by one minute).

As far as DST goes, the clock switches back at 2:00 AM to a second 1:00 AM, which here on the east coast means 0600 UTC. That should be during the first showing of Noir Alley, which because of the Two For One lineup is listed as beginning at 12:30 AM instead of midnight. That movie, Nobody Lives Forever, runs 100 minutes. But Eddie Muller always has an extended intro and outro, so the movie is in a two hour slot. Or is it a three hour slot. It's followed on the official schedule by Soylent Green at 2:30 AM and another dystopic Charlton Heston film, The Omega Man at 4:15 AM. The logical thing to do is to fill up the extra hour between Noir Alley and Soylent Green.

But then I looked though some of the listing sites, and one of them suprisingly gets things wrong by putting Deep Valley into the Noir Alley slot. I haven't been able to find out much about other movie channels or the FAST streaming services, either. Why everybody seems to want to keep their medium-term schedules secret is a mystery to me.

The Velvet Touch

Some months back, TCM aired a couple of Rosalind Russell movies in quick succession. I'd heard about Mourning Becomes Electra before, but don't think I've ever watched it, so I'm hoping to get around to doing that at some point. The other film was a new to me movie called The Velvet Touch. Not having heard of it, I decided to watch that one first.

The movie opens with one of those panning shots of New York City from above which, as is so often the case, winds up focusing on midtown Manhattan. Also unsurprising is that the focus goes to the Great White Way, because studio-era Hollywood loved itself movies about the theater. The theater is the Dunning Theater, where producer Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) has been putting on the latest in a series of comedies starring Valerie Stanton (Rosalind Russell).

After the performance, Valerie goes upstairs to Gordon's office to have a serious talk with him. Comedies have made Stanton a star, but she wants to prove that she can really act, and so is looking to do a drama like a revival of Hedda Gabler. So when the newspaper reports have come out saying that she's going to do another comedy, reports fed to the papers by Gordon, she's pissed. Not only that, but Valerie has fallen in love with one Michael Morrell (Leo Genn) and is planning to marry him. It turns out that Valerie and Gordon previously had a romantic relationship of their own, and that Gordon is extremely jealous over the idea of Valerie's breaking that off. So jealous, in fact, that he says he'll tell Michael all sorts of nasty gossip that will make Michael never want to see Valerie again. When she tries to leave and Gordon tries to restrain her, she picks up a statuette and hits Gordon over the head with it. He falls to the floor, very much dead.

Now, this is where The Velvet Touch has a big problem. The Production Code is out there, and this isn't one of those cases where there's a struggle for a gun and the victim shoots himself. Valerie could try to claim self-defense, but good luck getting a jury to believe that. More likely is a manslaughter conviction ruining her career, and the Production Code says the killer must be punished. Plus, we're only a couple of minutes into the film. But in any case, Valerie is able to get out of the theater undetected and get home. It's up to Valerie's estranged costar in the play, Marian Webster (Claire Trevor), to find the body.

The papers have the reports of Dunning's death the next morning, and even though Valerie already knows about it, she acts hysterically (well, she is an actress) and has a flashback about everything that led up to the killing. And that's the second problem with the movie, that the flashback is an overused device and in this case only runs about a third of the movie before we catch up to the present.

Back on the morning after the killing, police detective Danbury (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up at the theater to interview everybody. In a group, not separately, which I'd think is a big mistake because this lets the suspects conspire to prevent Danbury from finding out the truth if that's what the suspects want to do. The only person who doesn't show up is Marian, and that's because she's gone into hysterics herself and has been hospitalized. She's also the obvious suspect to Danbury, but we know what really happened. The one bright spot here, I suppose, is that at the theater Danbury is given a very small wooden folding chair to sit in, and the joke is whether or not it's going to support his rather ample weight.

The Velvet Touch is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved in making it would have wanted to be involved, as the story has so much potential. But unfortunately, it winds up being a lot less than the sum of its parts.