Here’s a wonderful clip of silent screen vamp superstar Theda Bara in 1936, speaking at the end of a Lux Radio Theater presentation of ‘The Thin Man’. Since that movie was directed by W.S. Van Dyke who was known to everyone as ‘Woody’, I assume the person who she’s speaking
Last week I posted about the incredibly strange early silent sex symbol Theda Bara. Since her films are more or less all lost, and her vampiric personality exceptionally strange from the photographs we have of her, it might be something of a surprise to hear that she was, in fact,
Laaving no turn unstoned in our look at various strange cinematic attempts at telling the story of ‘Salome’, here’s a reel of selects from one of the strangest–and most eerily lovely–of all silent films. I speak of the Russian actress Alla Nazimova’s 1923 ‘art’ version of the tale. It isn’t
Yesterday we saw fragments of the lost 1918 version of ‘Salome’ starring Theda Bara. Today we jump ahead thirty-five years (it feels like thirty-five centuries) to the 1953 version starring Rita Hayworth. Above I’ve posted the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ scene which was choreographed by Valerie Bettis, a well
The story of Salome, her father King Herod, her passion for John the Baptist, his rejection of her which somehow leads her to do a suggestive dance that arouses her stepfather (I think) to grant her whatever she wishes which turns out to be John the Baptist’s head on a
I missed my Labor Day Jerry Lewis posting yesterday but it’s never too late. Or, maybe it never is late enough. That might be a wisecrack, but I doubt it. (Apologies to Groucho). We can’t miss the tradition so above I’m giving you one of Jerry’s wonderfully dreadful telethon sign-offs.Yes,
Did you know that there were no regulations in place for flying airplanes until 1926? And that pilot’s liscences, control towers, flight plans, flights schools and the FAA didn’t exist? You did? I don’t believe you. I didn’t know this until watching the above very nice short doc on what
Our semi-deep dive into vintage aviation continues with the extraordinary 1931 Hal Roach comedy ‘Air Tight’. The film is one in the series of short comedies known as ‘The Boy Friends’, which starred Mickey Daniels, Grady Sutton, Mary Kornman and other Roach-trained veterans of the silent incarnation of ‘Our Gang’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA8wvbu8E0Qhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWawpf67rz4 It’s a little known fact that air passenger travel owes much of its origins and popularity to the legendary anti-semite Henry Ford, who developed and introduced the Ford Tri-Motor Passanger Plane in 1926. Between that time and 1933, about two-hundred of these tin beauties were produced and they were
Last month my son and I made a visit to McMinnville Oregon specifically to visit Howard Hughes’ ‘Spruce Goose’ in a museum constructed specifically to house and display that magnificent aviation folly. My interest in vintage aviation continues to grow. I’ve been collecting old New Yorker Magazines for years but