Thursday, April 2, 2015

Repeats, and a silent

Tomorrow is the birth anniversary of Marlon Brando, so TCM will be spending the say with Brando's films, many of which I'm sorry to say I don't really care for. At least over on FXM Retro they're going to be showing a movie I haven't mentioned in quite some time: Five Fingers. Istanbul is actually an interesting location for movies for several reasons. Turkey was neutral during World War II, which made Istanbul a natural place for people on both sides of the war to meet; something we also see in Journey Into Fear. Being on a very important shipping lane also meant that people from all over the world would show up, so Istanbul's location as a place for people to wind up together works in something like From Russia With Love, where James Bond is trying to get a Soviet cipher machine from the consulate in Istanbul, while the Soviets are trying to prevent it and SPECTRE are trying to get it themselves. End of the Game also starts off with a scene in Istanbul just after the end of World War II. And then there's Istanbul's being reasonably exotic, at least compared to the rest of Europe. That exoticness certainly looks nice in Topkapi.

Going back to tonight, however, TCM will be running a night of movies with men of the cloth, which is reasonably suitable since Easter is this weekend. The night starts off with One Foot In Heaven, which I mentioned last October. One thing I didn't mention back in October is that the movie being shown in the scene where Fredric March decides that moving pictures are actually suitable for Methodists is an actual vintage silent, The Silent Man from 1917 starring William S. Hart. Even though the movie is in the public domain, I was unable to find it on Youtube. So you'll have to settle for Hart's earlier film The Return of Draw Egan instead:

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