Set your DVRs: It's Kibbee Time!

Yes, I had to rush back to blogger this week and post again, pronto, because of the momentous event taking place tomorrow on The Greatest of All Cable Networks, Turner Classic Movies. Tomorrow morning into the evening, it's a Guy Kibbee marathon! That's right, folks--Guy Freakin' Kibbee all day.

If you don't know the name, you may well know the face. He is one of the best-loved character actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in, by my own guesstimate, millions of movies. The chubby thespian often appeared as a benign, harmlessly silly kind of presence, but he was in all sorts of flicks, including classics like the Busby Berkeley musicals of the 30s and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." TCM periodically runs am interstitial devoted to the man, one in its "What a Character" series, and it shows many of those millions of movies, but not often in one big chunk of Kibbee like this.

These aren't well-known classics compared to something like, say, "Fort Apache," but that makes them all the more appealing to me. Take something like "Big-Hearted Herbert," a 1934 effort showing at 7:30AM tomorrow. According to the TCM description, "A plumber's business success makes him neglect his family." Now, doesn’t that sound delightfully random for a movie? A comedy about a plumber who gets too big for his britches (and anyone who recognizes Kibbee will thank me for not making a "plumber's crack" reference here)? Sign me up. It sounds like the kind of lean (this one's 59 minutes), unpretentious, entertaining pictures they cranked out back then.

Throw in some (arguably) even cooler character actors of the day like Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins in several of these films, and you have yourself a must-see extravaganza. I wish I could vouch for any of the individual titles, but, hey, I don't think I've seen any of them. So it's another DVR/VCR-busting day for me on TCM.

And this is really what makes Turner Classic Movies so great, and also what makes my DVR constantly beg me for mercy as I stretch its capacity: The fact that they would even run a Guy Kibbee Festival. Cool stuff like this happens so often that I can never stay up with it, but it's a great problem to have.