Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day here in the States, which as always means special, if not overly exciting, programming on TCM. This year isn't quite the parade of Sidney Poitier movies we've gotten in some years, and I don't think I see even one Harry Belafonte or Dorothy Dandridge appearance. There's also at least one totally new to me film, Uptight (1:30 AM Jan. 20) which, according to TCM's page on tomorrow's programming, is a reworking of the old John Ford film The Informer set against the civil rights movement instead of the Irish independence movement. Sounds interesting enough.
A warning as always that because of how far ahead I am in putting up posts here, I sometimes have to move stuff around when the new month's TCM schedule comes out and I see movies on my DVR that are on the new schedule. The February schedule is coming out in dribs and drabs, in part because of the way 31 Days of Oscar is being programmed this year. The Oscars will be handed out on Sunday, March 15, which means that to get to 31 days and have the final day coincide with the ceremony itself, the programming would begin on February 13 and we'd have half a month each for February and March fall in 31 Days of Oscar. In any case, I keep seeing movies come up that I'm going to need to watch and schedule posts for, which means re-scheduling stuff I've already put up. And since I generally try to avoid movies with the same star or in very close genres being scheduled too close together, I may be screwing that up.
It looks like the FXM Retro block is continuing to bring some new movies out of the vault, although for the most part I've seen them and done posts on them. The Shirley Temple vehicle Curly Top was the subject of a post back in July 2019, for example, while the Laird Cregar version of The Lodger can be seen again at 7:50 AM on January 20. A search of the blog claims I haven't actually done a full-length post on this one, despite the number of times I've mentioned it in passing, so I think I'll record it and then at some point do that full-length post. I'm also pleasantly surprised that the Retro block is still going, since it's been something like 13 years and I also would have thought it might go by the wayside when Disney obtained the Fox cable channels.
There's a couple of days of tribute programming coming up at the end of January, one for Diane Keaton and another for Rob Reiner; I'll be mentioning them again when the day actually comes. With 31 Days of Oscar not showing up until the middle of February there might actually be time for TCM to schedule a tribute to Brigitte Bardot as well, although from what I've currently seen there doesn't seem to be one yet. Then again, with all those foreign films, it might take longer for TCM to nail down the rights to what they can and cannot show.
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