So This is a Placeholder

Each week around this time, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear tries its darndest to get up a review for Overlooked Films, a participatory event among many other wonderful individuals in Blogtopia whose contributions are catalogued, indexed, stamped and what-have-you at my friend Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom.  I’ve been guilty these past few weeks of backsliding in the first degree…my only excuse is that the time I spent previously watching and reviewing movies for this is now eaten up by the preparation for Mayberry Mondays…which I keep promising to have done by the Sunday before its posting date, and never do.

But I actually have something this week!  Only you’ll have to take a short trip to the Radio Spirits blog for this one—it’s an essay on So This is New York, the 1948 satire starring “radio’s bad boy,” Henry Morgan, and based on Ring Lardner’s novel The Big Town.  Caught this one about a week ago via a trial subscription to Netflix (ha ha…suckers…) and the reason for my interest in this movie is twofold: 1) I hadn’t seen the darn thing since the 1980s, when it played one time in a late-night slot on a local Savannah, GA station, and 2) it dovetails nicely with a new collection that Radio Spirits has just released—a five CD set containing ten broadcasts from Morgan’s 1946-48 comedy show on ABC Radio.  I’ve always been a big fan of Morgan’s ever since I was young enough to remember watching My World and Welcome to It, and if you have a few shekels, an investment in this set would definitely be worth your while.  (The movie—Morgan’s only feature appearance save for a small role in 1960’s Murder, Inc.—is also worth a look at Netflix if you got it…it is truly the definition of an “overlooked film.”)