Yesterday I posted the astonishing ‘The Continental’ dance sequence from ‘The Gay Divorcee’. It turns out it was the work of a man named Dave Gould, not Hermes Pan as I’d always assumed. Now, I don’t mean to sound like a jerk but there’s very little about movies of the
Here’s an extraordinary piece of musical filmmaking that really should be more celebrated than it is. It’s the big, fat, ultimate dance number from ‘The Gay Divorcee’ (1934), the second film to pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first to be properly considered a starring vehicle for them.
‘Monkey Business’ (1931) is the Marx Brothers third movie and the first not to be an adaptation of a stage play. The movie is a non-stop delight–75 or so minutes of one laugh after another., And yet the last line of the film is famously (amongst Marxists anyway) disappointing. After
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNnDaNSAog Apropos of Monday and Tuesday’s posts, which showed fights breaking out during baseball games as well as at the end of a boxing match, I was going to post a reel of NFL football fights. But isn’t that redundant? After all, the whole point of NFL football is to
I was listening to a Gilbert Gottfiried podcast while driving today in which he and his guests began extolling the remarkably varied talents of Jerry Lewis. Not only was he a comic, a director, a writer, a philanthropist but he was also…an excellent dancer? Well, sort of. It’s true that
Click on the above ‘watch on YouTube’ sign and enjoy a marvelous seven minute collection of bench-clearing fights during televised baseball games. Since most people will agree (even baseball fans) that baseball is the most boring sport ever invented, these fights are cherished for their ability to wake up anyone
Athlete’s are athletic types, as we know. And athletic types often express themselves athletically. Hence the occasional meltdown in professional sports, wherein an organized game of athletic endeavor devolves into a street brawl that can’t be contained. Witness the above 1960 boxing match as captured by British Pathe, featuring a
Early talking films are invaluable relics of a dead civilization–namely the 1920s. The acting, pacing, diction, style and behavior are as incomprehensible and different from anything we now consider normal as sitting around a cave might be with its cro-magnin inhabitants. The movies aren’t really useful anymore to us in
Compare and contrast two different 7-Up ads from two different decades. Above, we see a retread of the famous Gene Kelly/Jerry the Mouse half live-acrtion half-animation dance routine–and quite well accomplished it is. Below we see the great Geoffrey Holder twenty-some years later shilling for the caffeine-free soda in a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt3Mi1YAcshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PluLAxa3u2A Continuing our look at commercials for old soda brands–yesterday we watched some RC Cola ads–today lets focus on Fresca. Above are two commercials from the 1960s. In the first, the idea was to show icy, snowy weather environments in order to invoke Fresca’s icy, snowy refreshing taste. Was this