‘Alibi’, directed by Roland West and starring Chester Morris, was released on April 8th, 1929 and instantly was recognized as an unusually sophisticated piece of work. I’ve posted the whole film above but unless you’re a serious 20s/Talkies geek you’re likely not to watch more than the first few minutes.
If you grew up watching (and loving) SCTV as I did, you’ll know what I mean when I say that no matter how much I enjoy Martin Short or John Candy in other movie or TV shows, I find myself wishing that I were watching them in an SCTV skit
The only thing better than docs about old airplanes are old docs about old airplanes…or in this case ‘airships’, the fancy word for ‘Dirigibles’ which was the longer word for ‘blimps’. I haven’t watched this yet so can make no great claims for it, but I can’t imagine it isn’t
Hard to believe, but one-hundred years ago the future of air travel was thought to be found in what was known as the “Airship’, the fancy word for clumsy word ‘Dirigible’. We now know these bizarre aeronautical devices as ‘blimps’ and what we know of them is usually confined to
Here’s part two of the British-Pathe short film that I posted yesterday, showing us London in all its glory in 1950. But is it really showing us the whole story? My friend Marc Myers, Wall Street Journal columnist and author of the excellent, long-running JazzWax blog, pointed out to me
Here’s a lovely look at post-war London–1950 to be exact–as pictured in a British-Pathe travelogue, narrated by Rex Harrison, who I suspect was between divorces at the time and needed the easy money. I was last in London a year ago and was surprised how very much like London it
Good lord! What was John Huston thinking (or drinking?) when he let loose with this rambling, discursive and largely meaningless five minute diatribe on a late-1970s Oscar broadcast? He certainly sounds magnificent and is, as always, beyond charismatic. I met him in 1981 when I was sixteen years old and
Here’s a quirky little interview with John Huston shot on (or near?) the Irish location of ‘Casino Royal’, the sort-of James Bond movie which he co-directed with twenty other directors. This is ‘portrait of the artist as bullshit-salesman’ deluxe. Huston is charming, evasive, clearly perplexed by what he’s doing involved
Humphrey Bogart called him ‘the monster’ (with great affection, of course). Women found him wildly attractive (even though he treated them rather dreadfully, being proudly ‘multi-amorous’ long before the New York Times wrote admiring articles about threesomes buying and renovation multi-amorous brownstones in Brooklyn). But I digress. John Huston was
In the late 1940s and early 1950s it was generally accepted that Sir Carol Reed, the British filmmaker responsible for ‘The Third Man’, was Europe’s greatest filmmaker. This wasn’t just based on that beyond-classic noir. (Actually placing ‘The Third Man’ in a genre–like noir–is reductive; it’s many different types of