It’s a gloomy day in the Connecticut countryside and I’ve been stuck in a low-grade depression for most of it. (It may not help that for some reason I’ve spent much of the day watching YouTube videos of fatal airplane crashes). How to get oneself out of these funks? I
Let’s put a button on this bizarre, embarrassing and absurd week–I speak of events on the world stage–with something that makes absolute, delicious sense. Here’s Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth doing the ‘Shorty George’ from ‘You Were Never Lovelier’ (1942). Watching this perfection is like drinking a long, cold glass
Actor Keith Baxter never achieved the level of respect and stardom that other British actors of his generation–Albert Finney, Robert Shaw, Richard Burton–did. But his superb turn as Prince Hal in Orson Welles ‘Chimes At Midnight’ will forever assure him a place in movie history. Here he is, sitting in
Yesterday I posted an interview with Rock Hudson in which he speaks about his collaboration with director Douglas Sirk. One of the eight films they made together was ‘The Tarnished Angels’ (1957), based on a novel called ‘Pylon’ by William Faulkner. It’s the story of a trio of barnstormers–flyers who
Douglas Sirk directed Rock Hudson in eight films– Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952), Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), Magnificent Obsession (1954), Captain Lightfoot (1955), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Never Say Goodbye (1956), Written on the Wind (1956), Battle Hymn(1957), and The Tarnished Angels (1958). Their’s was clearly a happy collaboration and, like Ford and Wayne, Hitchcock and Grant (and Stewart) and a handful of
This weekend we watched Fritz Lang’s classic crime drama ‘M’, starring Peter Lorre as a child molester/murderer. The film is still shocking. Cinematically it’s filled with technical achievements years ahead of the times. Dramatically it’s perverse, scary and ultimately moving in a quite horrific way. Click here to read more
Robert Shaw is probably best known for his roles in ‘Jaws’, ‘The Sting’ and as Henry the 8th in ‘A Man For All Seasons.’ But he was also a fine writer–his play (and later film) ‘The Man In The Glass Booth’ is a compelling and quite provocative study of an
In 1941 my father was an Army Air Corps grunt who was enlisted for flight training in the event a war were to occur (it was still several months prior to December 7, but as he used to tell me ‘the war was in the air’). There were three training
For the past couple of years I’ve been comparing where we currently are with Artificial Intelligence with where we were in 1994-1995 with the internet; alternately impressed and scared, dismissive and fascinated, eager to figure out how to use it to give us some kind of advantage we never thought
As humor goes, blooper reels are set at a pretty low bar. Hearing actors screw up and punctuate things with a tasty expletive gets old fast. So why am I posting a 14 minute reel of Warner Brothers contract actors blowing their lines from films made in 1939? Because it’s