pinckelopes

Last Saturday (Sept. 13), TCM showed "Strangers on a Train," one of my favorite Hitchcock thrillers. It was, of course, terrific, and the print was good. But the last part of the movie seemed to have been lopped off. To explain (without giving away plot points): The TCM version ended with a phone call, but a version I saw several years ago featured a coda on a train, with two characters reacting skittishly to a fellow passenger's request. What happened to this footage?

Why did TCM stop its "Darkness After Dawn" series on Saturday mornings? I enjoyed seeing the gems of that genre, and the introductory footage, compiled from several such movies, set just the right tone.

Is it possible to get a playlist of the movies shown in "100 Years of Film"? Being a thorough film buff, I know most of the movies, but I'd like to know the names of those I don't recognize.

And in that same film that's a terrific piece of editing, what's the movie near the end in which two black people embrace in what seems to be a kitchen?

I had always thought TCM could be relied upon to show wide-screen movies in letterbox format so that viewers could see what the director intended them to see. Yet "Around the World in 80 Days," which was shot in the 70mm wide-screen process Todd-AO, was shown April 20 in pan and scan, depriving viewers of extraordinary wide-screen vistas. Why?