Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Tracking down a film

I've always prided myself on being able to track down a film I see on TV. You know how it is, you come into it half-way, maybe you recognise an actor but can't recall the name. Anyway, by a process of deduction I can usually find the name of the film using a combination of IMDB.com, Yahoo TV listings, etc etc.

Only last night, a grainy English B&W had me stumped. It was on TCM, which ought to have made it really easy to find it - just go to the Schedule on tcm.com, right? Only every one of their schedule listings - US, UK, France, Latin, had not the film I was watching. IMDB character name searches pulled up nothing. General Google searches failed me. What was going on? So naturally I just sat through the movie to the end, for the credits. It was the 1964 'classic' "Children of the Damned".

But why didn't it show up on TCM's schedule? 24 hours later I figured out to search TCM's database (which by the way is almost as good as IMDBs). Bingo! There was the film, but the time it was playing was a full 8 hours after I saw it... No wonder it didn't show up.

By the way, I did get the previous film on TCM that night: The Thing From Another World. A '50s classic sci-fi horror red-menace, with the classis ending line "Keep watching the skies!"

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