Polly of the Precodes

Way Back Home (1931): A preacher in a small New England community protects a vulnerable boy from his dysfunctional father, and shames the town out of its prejudice against the child of a previous generation's scandal. I really like how religion is shown as a force for forgiveness and community. Bonus: A young Bette Davis in a supporting role.

I'll have to look for Hardcore. In the meantime, Schrader's The Card Counter (2021) is in theaters, although probably not for much longer. "Dark" definitely applies to this film.

Also The Mad Genius (1931). Barrymore's ballet master is a mashup of Diaghilev and Rasputin.

https://silver.afi.com/Browsing/EventsAndExperiences/EventDetails/0000000010?_m_utk=a3a13aac0a9b7dde1052a7d3b5d92931 AFI Silver just announced the Noir City DC 2021 lineup. So many tempting titles. But I'm most intrigued by the 10/16 9:30pm Surprise Show. Anyone else interested in going, and maybe meeting up?

I dunno...I'm already worried about a leaky roof. Now I gotta worry about a leaking floor?

Yes. The rest of the film is a race to get Virginia & Mac back together before she can be expelled.

Arrowsmith (1931). I'm almost bewildered that John Ford and Ronald Colman produced such a snoozer. I walked out of The Tree of Life (2011). The dinosaur sequence was actually good. But scene after scene after scene demonstrating that Brad Pitt's character is 1) an exceptionally stern version of a 1950s father, and 2) disappointed with his life....The reports of a 5-hour director's cut strikes me as a crime against humanity.

Every once in a while, I suspect that someone came up with a title, and wrote a screenplay to make use of it. Blubberella joins that list. And thank you for watching it, so the rest of us don't have to.

Mrs. Tracy appears to have maintained a certain amount of denial. Probably Spencer and Kate each had their own ways of denying this or interpreting that which justified, if only in their own minds, what they were doing and with whom. A comedian whose name I can't remember once said that a man is as faithful or unfaithful as his options. As a leading man Tracy would have had considerable "options."

A Lady to Love (Sjöström, 1930). Edward G. Robinson couldn't do everything--his Italian-American schtick in this film wears very thin very quickly. If you've seen Tiger Shark (1932) or Manpower (1941), you've seen this film (a romantic triangle between EGR, the leading lady, and his kid brother, set in an Italian-American grape-growing community in the Napa Valley) in its essence already. I kept telling myself Sturgeon's Law applies to pre-Code films as much as it does to everything else. Per Movie Collector OH's database, this aired several times in 1994, and has not been seen on TCM sin

"Dyke" + "Icon" = "Dykon." And SS is very much a part of that legacy.

The hosts could use Hepburn's rumored sexual proclivities (and those of Tracy, if you believe the late Scotty Bowers) as a lead-in to discussion of the realities of being nonheterosexual in studio-era Hollywood, and how that played out in the press and on the screen? (TCM: Please, don't.) Never mind that Hepburn has been a dykon since her film debut; and trying to apply the current language of sexual identity and practices to people who lived 60 or 80 years ago is potentially problematic.

Oh but surely they must have focus-grouped it, tweaking it ever so incrementally, until they got the desired response. (When I see other items that I know have been heavily focus-grouped, I assume the selected focus group has absolutely nothing in common with me.)

I do like these logos, and so far am not fond of the new logo. But the programming--as of right now--is sufficiently unchanged that I can live with it.

Yes. But I rather doubt: That would be enough to cover the costs of scanning EVERY title in the TCM library (I don't want to rewatch Casablanca, I want to see that rightfully obscure MGM 1930 short that features no one you've ever heard of and is moldering at the back of the archives), and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to catalog every title and make them available on demand. That the executives would authorize something like this, when their established business model is to require people to pay for a cable or streaming package bundled with channels the viewer doesn't w