Lets wrap up the week with the best five minutes of your day (or perhaps week). Here’s a compendium of Buster Keaton’s most extraordinary stunts, all of which are done practically (i.e.no special effects), all of them by him (i.e. no stunt doubles) and some of them truly death-defying. That
Here’s a most enjoyable pre-code item that I’d never heard of called ‘Air Hostess’ (1933), starring Evalyn Knapp and James Murray. Knapp was a popular actress of the day with two deficits; she couldn’t act, and she didn’t know how to spell her first name. But the real stars of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBn8cuks8s4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyA__0GJqhs&t=23s Here are two different short documentaries on the making of ‘Breakfast Of Tiffany’s’ that, when taken together, add up to a larger story of what making movies is (or can be) like. In the top one, the female A.I. voice tells us in no uncertain terms that the making
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlZZgPxR3Bkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBc4AHxnHOc I thought it might be a nice way to kick off the week with a little Joey Heatherton number from the mid-1960s dance show ‘Hullabaloo’. In this clip she sings a new song celebrating the new dance known as–what else?–the ‘Huallabaloo’. But wait. Is this really a new song
I’ve been reading Scott Berg’s mammoth biography of Charles Lindbergh, a man whose life was truly a dramatic whirlwind in multiple acts. Yesterday I took the plunge and dove into the dreadful story of the kidnapping and murder of his twenty-month old son, Charles Jr. in 1932 and the ensuing
Here’s a short and very lovely reel of Paris in the 1930s. The colorization is quite good and serves, as always when married to old verite footage, to remind us that people and places looked an awful lot like they do now–with colors, skin tones and all the stuff that
Enjoy this beautifully restored footage of New York City in 1937. Everything was more beautiful then including the wonderfully dressed men and women whose faces you can see since they’re not walking around staring at that vertical black instrument thing in their palms…
Meet the extraordinary female British aviation pioneer Pauline Gower. A writer as well as a pilot, Gower first flew with another British aviation pioneer Alan Cobham and was fascinated by flying. In 1931 she met Dorothy Spicer, with whom she established an air taxi service in Kent. She was one of
As a vintage aviation geek (actually I prefer the term ‘propellerhead’) I’m fascinated by the stray bits of old film that turn up featuring the then dashingly modern craft of flying and what was considered cutting edge stuff. The concept of the passenger plane was astonishing and terrifying to people
The excellent cinematographer John Bailey (click here for credits too numerous to mention) was also a fine film theorist. Witness this unusually perceptive break-down of the shooting style that John Huston and his cinematographer Harold Rossen (click here for credits too numerous to mention, although I will offer-up ‘Wizard Of