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
Here’s a one-hour doc about the making of John Huston’s 1984 adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under The Volcano’. Actually it’s less a doc than it is a collection of footage gathered on the set and put it into a semblance of order, as if it were the initial assembly of
Here is SCTV’s ‘Ricardo Montalban School of Fine Acting’. (The inclusion of ‘fine’ is very important, in an SCTV-ish kind of way). Every piece of this skit kills me but none so much as Joe Flaherty playing Terry Malloy as played by Ricardo Montalban. Oh, and Gene Shalit learning to
In Elia Kazan’s1989 autobiography he reflects toward the end of the book on the pain of failure and missed opportunity in show-biz. Of course he manages to work Orson Welles into the story, bemoaning the lost promise blah blah blah.Then he bitchily references a tale of Welles keeping a whole
There are very few Sidney Lumet movies I haven’t seen–and that’s saying a lot since he made so many movies. One is something called ‘Lovin’ Molly’ which he squeezed in between ‘Serpico’ and “Murder On The Orient Express’. (In his book ‘Making Movies’ he mentions in passing that he did