People are actually celebrating the anniversary?

We're coming up on the 100th anniversary of the "October Revolution" that brought the Communists to power in the Russia that would, after a civil war, become the Soviet Union. Russia at the time was still using the Julian calendar which drifted from proper time by about 12 days. So the revolution was in the end of October by Russian time reckoning, but early November according to the Gregorian calendar. Anyhow, TCM will be running a night of movies set against the backdrop of the revolution, starting with Doctor Zhivago at 8:00 PM, which I think is way overrated.

And actually, the look at revolutionary Russia continues all through the day Thursday with some interesting movies, mostly from the 1930s. I've mentioned both Knight Without Armor (1:30 PM) and British Agent (3:30 PM) before. Anyhow, there are also a couple of Sergei Eisenstein movies. Battleship Potemkin (9:00 AM) is the well-known one; Strike (7:30 AM) isn't so well known, and is the one I'm looking forward too.

But the look at Communism is going to continue in November, with a spotlight on the Hollywood Blacklist, as if we haven't looked at that enough. Not that most of them should have been blacklisted; only a couple of writers who were actively trying to thwart what producers wanted on screen should have lost jobs. Other than that, I'm reminded of the beginning of The Iron Curtain discussing how the Soviets set up a bunch of "peace" organizations to dupe credulous Canadians of a certain political strip. And the latter-day apologists for Communism really need to be treated as no better than Holocaust deniers.

Somehow, they never bother to mention Leni Riefenstahl when talking blacklists, either. There are any number of good non-political silents they could show, as well as the 1990s documentary on her, which is fascinating.