Thursday, August 14, 2014

Charlie Chaplin heads-ups

Back in March, I reported that when TCM would run Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, they would have a distressing tendency to run not the original 1925 version, but a re-editing Chaplin did in the the early 1940s complete with added narration. I didn't watch last time since I thought it was going to be the 1940s version that I don't care for. The silent buffs at the TCM borads, however, reported that it was in fact the 1925 original. Today being Charlie Chaplin's day in Summer Under the Stars, it's only natural for TCM to select The Gold Rush again; that's coming up at 11:45 AM. I don't know which version is going to run.

TCM is also showing a documentary at 8:00 PM called The Birth of the Tramp that I haven't seen before. However, it's listed as having a 60-minute running time and has been scheduled in a 60-minute slot. If Ben Mankiewicz is doing an intro, then the documentary is liable to run over. This isn't too much of a problem in the scheduling of the next movie, which is the 34-minute short A Dog's Life in a 45-minute time slot. However, as often happens with new-to-TCM documentaries, when they show up in prime time there's a repeat for the benefit of the folks on the west coast. That repeat comes up at 11:30 AM and is also in a one-hour time slot. The movie following that repeat, at 12:30 AM, is the 87-minute City Lights put into a 90-minute time slot. This is where the presence of intros from Ben Mankiewicz would cause a bigger problem.

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