Thursday, July 5, 2012

TCM Guest Programmer Spike Lee

I mentioned in my post the other day on the death of Andy Griffith that Spike Lee had selected Griffith's A Face in the Crowd as one of his four movies that he'd be showing as TCM's Guest Programmer. Lee shows up tonight, and the rest of his line-up is:

No, that's not TCM Guest Programmer Spike LeeJournalsit Kirk Douglas deliberately keeps a man trapped in a mine to get a story in Ace in the Hole at 8:00 PM;
Robert Mitchum wants Peter Graves' kids to tell him where daddy hid the money in Night of the Hunter at 10:00 PM;
Marlon Brando could have been a contender in On the Waterfront at 11:45 PM; and
The aforementioned A Face in the Crowd comes on at 1:45 AM.

For those of us who watch TCM religiously, there's nothing particularly rare in Lee's selections, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few fans of Lee's work who are much better versed in the movies of Spike Lee's era, ie. from the 80s to today. For any such people, Lee's picks are a good way to introduce the somewhat harder-hitting movies of the 1950s which, while tame by today's standards, certainly would have challenged audiences of the 1950s and to a small extent the folks enforcing the Production Code.

No comments: