Ok.
I get it. You have ideas. You get ok’s and go-aheads.
Marlena Deitrich for a 24 hour period. That’s fine. Until we get into the lost and broken films. The ones with no plot but to showcase her various talents. Please no more of that voice.
Then yesterday. 24 hours of the Bowery boys.
I like the 3 Stooges. A bit of the Marx bothers. But the freakin’ Bowey boys?
Was this crappola ever thought of as good? Couldn’t have been.
Especially when they were 40years old. Come on, TCM.
One every great while, I can take. A whole day of my life. 24 hours I can’t ever get back. Nooooooooooooo!
Now today. Friday. And it’s effing Fred and Ginger. All day. All night. The same movie, just different costumes and song and dances. Yeah, no…
You’re losing me, I say again: LOSING me.
I’m fixin’ to pick up the remote and send you away.
You are a viewer of distinction. Truly. Follow me carefully here. The Three Stooges are famously notable for being lower on the spectrum of entertainment sophistication than Bugs Bunny cartoons, because the latter sometimes have lines with double meanings intended to appeal to adults as well as kids, whereas the Three Stooges have no such pretensions. The Three Stooges are like white bread with peanut butter, like eating takeout foods right out of the container they came in.
The Three Stooges take us back to our childhood. They let us shed our pretensions like … well, like this:
Slow time of year, maybe? One that doesn’t take a lot of thought, perhaps? Just put on a Bowery Boys festival, or a Fred and Ginger festival at the start of a holiday weekend when a lot of people will likely not be watching TV, and be done with it.
Now, once the holiday weekend is over, if TCM chooses to show the original 1937 Lost Horizon, I wouldn’t mind at all.
I just watched that on some low-rez channel. I doubt hi-rez or def would have helped. The film was very grainy and actually missing some scenes. They put a still photo up and kept playing the audio. Very weird.
It’s TCM’s annual Summer Under The Stars programming. For like the last 20 years they’ve devoted every day in August to one star in particular. Some people can’t handle that, I guess.
It wasn’t 24 hours of the Bowery Boys, it was 24 hours of Leo Gorcey. About half the movies were Bowery Boys movies.
It’s not a day of Fred and Ginger, it’s a day of Ginger. Looks like of the 12 programmed Ginger Rogers movies, only 3 star Fred.
The original Lost Horizon was basically lost for a number of years. For some reason, it existed in pieces—some reels here, some frames there. Sometime around 1981, somebody put the pieces back together in correct order. Problem was, that while the soundtrack existed, not all of the moving pictures did. So they ran a still over the existing soundtrack at those points, and re-released it to theatres.
Where it did nicely. Maybe not “summer blockbuster” great, but it did pretty well considering it was a 44-year-old movie. I saw it in a theatre back then. I’ve only seen it once since, and it was on TCM. It’s a great story, and if it has stills replacing the movie while the sound plays, I’m fine with that.
Yeah. The channel I saw it on was *FMC, Family Movie Classics. It’s on my dish line up. They repeat playlists in their entirety for a couple of days in a row. So it was on several times this past week.
(*A kinda cheesy movie channel but it has saved my life more than once)
I got to see Lost Horizon on CHCH Toronto a few years back when I was working all night, and I’ve seen it a couple of times since then. It’s one of those movies that really draw you in, even though you know it’s pure fantasy. Two to four a.m. really is the best time to see it, when you’re all alone in your living room and the lights are turned down low.
I know there’s a remake from 1973. I’ve never seen it, but I can’t imagine it’s better than the 1937 original.
And hey, lay off on the Bowery Boys, will you? They were a huge part of my childhood!
My Pop told me how he and my Uncles loved the Bowery Boys. That was back in the 40’s and 50’s before anything good to do was invented. I guess.
Back in the 70’s on Sunday late mornings WTMJ Channel 4 would have “All For Four” (or something like that) where they had 4 shows run back to back. Adventures of Superman, Abbott & Costello, I don’t remember #3, and the Bowery Boys. When the Bowery Boys came on we knew it was time to go do something else.
Regarding Lost Horizon. Yes, there was a remake in 1973. It … well, it wasn’t great, to be as kind as I can possibly be.
It told the basic story, and that was expected. And there was nothing wrong with the cast: Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, George Kennedy, Michael York, and others. But the producers made it a musical, with lots of singing and dancing, which kind of “broke it up,” for lack of a better term. Conway is conflicted, trying to decide whether to stay or go, to accept the High Lama’s offer or to follow his brother—wait, let’s just turn to a song-and-dance number featuring two dozen children, that is unrelated to Conway’s inner conflict. Yep, the 1973 version was like that.
The 1937 version, as best pieced together as it is, is far superior.
