https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0emVTQEWhjM Dig a live radio remote from the premiere of Judy Garland’s 1954 “A Star Is Born”, featuring the voices of Judy Garland, Moss Hart (who wrote the script) and Kitty Carlisle (Hart’s wife). Moss Hart sounds like a man playing the role of a playwright named Moss Hart and
‘Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb’ (1938) is the 31st short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. The film was released on Friday, May 20th 1938 (the 140th day of the Gregorian Calendar). Dates of the actual shoot are for some reason missing but we can surmise it was
All week we’ve been dancing around the first ‘Crime of the Century’, the 1924 murder of a youth named Bobby Franks by two wealthy Chicago teenagers. So let’s end things with a nice, crisp History Channel doc on the crime. Aside from those dreadful ‘reenactment’ shots using non-speaking (and therefore
Continuing this week’s Leopold and Loeb theme, here’s a clip of Alfred Hitchcock on The Dick Cavett Show’ discussing, among other things, the long-take method of the movie that I described in yesterday’s post. Far from the forbidding figure we sometimes think of him as, Hitch is amusing, droll and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggnZ-2Ns54 Welcome bac;k to Leopold and Loeb week. On Monday I posted Henry Fonda’s tour de force performance as Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who successfully kept Leopold and Loeb from being executed. Yesterday we watched the trailer of the L&L inspired movie ‘Compulsion’. Today lets watch a very impressive long-take
Yesterday I posted about Meyer Levin’s novel ‘Compulsion’, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case that rocked the world in 1924. The novel was turned into a play by Levin and then into a movie produced by Darryl Zanuck and directed by Richard Fleisher. Now I’m impatiently waiting for
What do Clarence Darrow, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and James Ellroy have in common?The answer is ‘Compulsion’, the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin based on the infamous murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 killed a 14 year old boy named Bobby Franks simply for the
On a rainy day in 1929, the Fox Movietone people mounted a camera on top of a truck and–with police escort (you can hear the plaintive wail of the siren throughout this video)–took a drive down Broadway. Bumpy though the ride proved to be, it captured a mesmerizing look at
Above I’ve posted a real weirdie. It’s stock footage of West 52nd street shot sometime in the early 1930s. It has no discernible point or reason for existence. Unlike normal stock, there is little that is simply caught. Rather it is mostly staged shots of restaurant and speakeasy tasks–a guy
In Hollywood’s somewhat frantic search during the 1950s to find ways to best television’s increasing appeal, various different cinematic visual innovations were introduced–3D and Cinemascope being the most famous. But there were others that were actually superior to those innovations yet not fully utilized to their best advantage. One of