I've already had a delightful hour watching most of a 1936 movie Tough Guy starring Jackie Cooper and Rin-Tin-Tin Jr. from 1936, about a poor little rich boy who runs away, and, together with an escaped criminal, cares for a dog. The boy comes to love the criminal more than his distant workaholic father--then crooks try to kidnap the kid, and the criminal--and the dog of course--helps to rescue him.

I know Cooper did such a good job in the original film of The Champ, but I've never been able to watch any of his films after seeing him in that awful version of Treasure Island. He was just a "regular boy" in this one, not a sniveling kid as he played Jim Hawkins. (If you want a defininitive Treasure Island, get the Disney version with Bobby Driscoll.)

Then I put on a videotape and went back in my own time via an Ask the Manager, to the early 1980s station tour of WSBK-TV with Dana Hersey doing the honors. This was done in two parts and is delightful and complete, from the station microwave tower and the Birmingham Parkway entrance down to the editing rooms and Studios   A and B, with all sorts of station personnel encountered in the interim. Oh, those were happy Saturday mornings, awaking before ten and having breakfast along with Dana and Joe or Dana and Dan.

Following the tour was the reason I'd put the videotape on, the MGM vintage version of Dorothy Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon, Haunted Honeymoon. Both the British Ian Carmichael and Edward Petherbridge Lord Peter Wimsey television stories are better, but this is a true curiosity, the only Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey story to be put on film. Dark-haired Robert Montgomery plays Wimsey, with Constance Cummings as Harriet Vane and Sir Seymour Hicks as Bunter. It's a workmanlike version, but with half of the charm of Sayers and too obvious efforts to be light, as if Lord Peter and Harriet were Nick and Nora Charles.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:42:00 AM

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