Thursday, August 11, 2016

A couple of notes on Spencer Tracy's day in Summer Under the Stars

20,000 Years in Sing Sing kicks off Spencer Tracy's day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars at 6:00 AM, although by the time most of you read this, the movie will probably already have aired. This is one of those films that for whatever odd reason doesn't air on TCM as much as you'd think it would. It was made at WB, which means it should be in what was Ted Turner's library that formed the backbone of TCM's programming when the channel premiered back in 1994. For whatever reason, some prestige movies show up more than others, but at the time 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was made, it probably wasn't a prestige movie. Tracy and Davis weren't big enough stars yet, I don't think.

As far as I can tell, I've never done a full-length post on Desk Set (6:00 PM) before. To be honest, I find it good enough, but a fairly predictable movie that gets more attention because it pairs Spencer Tracy with Katharine Hepburn yet again (the eighth of nine times, I think). Tracy plays a computer expert (in the early days of computers, of course) selling a computer to a media conglomerate's research library. Hepburn plays the head librarian, who unsurprisingly thinks the computer is being installed to take her department's jobs away. Tracy's and Hepburn's characters fall in love. The computer was re-used for What a Way to Go.

I was also thinking about doing a full length post on Whipsaw, which concludes the day's proceedings at 4:15 AM tomorrow. But then, it turns out I'd already posted on the movie back in 2011. Even if it has its problems, it's still got Spencer Tracy and Myrna Loy.

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