Thursday, November 30, 2017

More new-to-me movies

Today is apparently St. Andrew's Day, the day of the patron saint of Scotland. So TCM is running a series of movies tonight set in Scotland. They were able to get a couple that I have to admit are new to me. To be fair, there are probably a lot of vintage British movies that never really made it to the States. As with the movies Warner Bros. made at its Teddington unit, there was stuff designed for internal consumption with no intention to export.

Anyhow, the night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Wee Geordie, staring Bill Travers as a Scot who's qualified for the Melbourne Olympics. Travers is one of those British actors who shows up in a bunch of stuff, probably best known in the States for Born Free. I've mentioned him once, in The Littlest Show on Earth, which apparently got renamed Big Time Operators when it was distributed in the US. (The Peter Sellers box set I got it on has it as The Littlest Show on Earth.)

That title change brings us to our next movie, The Maggie, at 10:00 PM. Paul Douglas plays an American executive who just has to get to one of the islands off the Scottish coast, and the only way there involves a rickety old ferry that could probably capsize at any moment. (At least, all this according to the synopsis, since I haven't seen it.) TCM's schedule page lists it as The Maggie, but the little drop-down "Leonard Maltin Review" ends with the amusing bit, "Originally titled THE MAGGIE." That would probably explain the difficulty I had in finding the movie on IMDb. Apparently the movie was released in the US under the title High and Dry, and that's the title of the movie's IMDb page, with a smaller mention below the title that The Maggie was the original UK title.

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