Apropos of this weeks posts on non-French, non-Greek director Jules Dassin, here’s a lovely scene from his 1960 hit “Never On Sunday’, starring his wife Melina Mercouri. In an act of immense chutzpah, Dassin–who was essentially a non-actor–cast himself as the co-lead–an American who’s visiting Greece. He’s the gray haired
Apropos of yesterday’s post about the great non-French non-Greek but somehow French and Greek American director Jules Dassin, I though I’d post the legendary twenty-five (or so) minutes silent sequence of the heist scene in ‘Rififi’. Imagine my surprise when it failed to turn up on YouTube. Instead only tidbits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk_qX2VXycEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk_qX2VXycE. This weekend TCM showed Jules Dassin’s masterful ‘Rififi’ (1955) and I began a deep-ish dive into the enigmatic man behind the name. For years he was thought by many to be French–he did, after all, direct the premiere French noir crime-drama of the 1950s. But Dassin, in fact, was
It took three days to shoot the scene in which Judy Garland performs Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s haunting and highly unusual (in form) torch song ‘The Man That Got Away’, for the 1954 version of ‘A Star Is Born’. Above is a nifty split screen demonstrating two of the
As a jazz pianist, I’m less sensitive than most others of my ilk to people’s frequently (and freely) expressed negative opinions about the music that I love. This is largely due to my belief that when people say that they don’t like jazz they’re not really referring to jazz–they’re either
Phineas Newborn, Jr. is on my top-five list of greatest jazz pianists of all time. But his career was spotty, largely it appears due to a severe emotional reaction to criticism that he was all technique and no soul. So what? The technique is phenomenal and the soul is there
It’s Friday night, August 6th, 1982. You’re watching The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson introduces a new comic who’s making his first appearance not only on Carson but on network television. Carson says something cryptic about how the audience is about to see something…unusual. And then Steven Wright comes out and
The famous (in her day) nightclub hostess/chanteuse Texas Guinan was captured on film on several occasions, the most elaborate of which was a feature she starred in called ‘Queen Of The Nightclubs’. Shot in 1928, it was likely the best and most detailed view of the true look, tone and
I occasionally get obsessed with a recording and go on a listening jag that defies explanation. This happened yesterday with the above recording of a song by Doris Day accompanied by Harry James and his Orchestra. It’s called ‘Would I Love You?’ and is hardly so well-known or even terribly
Yesterday I posted Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s screen tests for ‘The Godfather’, in which we also got a view of the young, then-fatso Francis Coppola directing. Today we move backwards thirty-five or so years for a glimpse of Paulette Goddard’s test for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in…oh,