Saturday, May 18, 2013

The latest batch of shorts

Looking through today's TCM schedule, I saw a short called Little White Lie showing up just after Murder By Death, or a little after 1:00 AM overnight (or late this evening for those of you on the west coast). I'd never heard of it before, but apparently it's about a girl (Sharon McManus, who danced with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh) who decides to go back to the orphanage because of something involving her parents and the young son they're adopting. I can't comment much further, since as I said I'd never heard of this one, much less seen it.

Tomorrow after Here Comes Mr. Jordan, at about 11:35 AM, is Public Ghost #1. TCM's schedule doesn't have a synopsis for the short, but IMDb reveals that it's a Charley Chase short. I don't think I've seen this one, but in general, if you've seen several of Chase's other shorts, you probably have a good idea what you're getting into. More irritating was trying to find this short on IMDb. The TCM schedule lists it as Public Ghost No. 1, and when I typed that search into IMDb, I didn't get any matches. Simply searching on "Public Ghost", however, did. In fact, I'm finding myself having increasing difficulties with IMDb's search. I was looking for another film not too long ago, where IMDb had difficulty finding a title based on a compound word instead of splitting it up into two discrete words.

The last short I'd like to mention is A Boy and His Dog (approx. 1:40 PM tomorrow), about a boy (Billy Sheffield, brother of Johnny from the Tarzan films) who finds and befriends a stray dog, only to discover that the stray is not a stray at all, but owned by a very cruel man (Russell Simpson) who wants the dog back. This short shouldn't be comfused with the 1975 feature bearing the same title.

No comments: