When America banished Charlie Chaplin in the early 1950s during the height of the ‘The Commie’s Are Coming’ era, Chaplin fled with his wife Oona and their two young children Michael and Geraldine to Vevey, Switzerland where, by all accounts, he led a tranquil life of semi-retirement. Above is a
I often post the videos of the YouTube artist known as NASS, who specializes in colorizing old urban documentary footage, slowing the frame rate down to make them feel more realistic and adding an appropriate bed of sound. Here’s one that I somehow missed–it was posted a year ago. We
Yesterday we looked at one of the earliest sound films made in 1908 by Thomas Edison’s company. The next big step forward in sound film was made by Dr. Lee De Forest in 1923/24, one of radio’s (then called ‘wireless’) great pioneers. ( I can’t go into the details of
Not many people realize that sound film existed well before the advent of ‘The Jazz Singer’ in 1927 and one of the pioneers of early experimental sound film was of course Thomas Edison. In 1913, the Edison Company made talking pictures using a sound-on-cylinder system called The Kinetophone. These pioneering
Let’s close this autumnal week with some madcap 1920s dancing featuring Joan Crawford. Above and below I’ve posted a few minutes from ‘Our Dancing Daughters’, the 1928 silent vehicle that officially launched Crawford’s career and world wide fame. Actually, calling the film ‘silent’ isn’t quite accurate as it was released
It’s hard for us to realize from this distance how miraculous color television must have been when it finally arrived in the early 1960s–though why they used the term ‘living’ color has always puzzled me. After all, it’s not actually living…it’s being broadcast from another remote location. And does the
Over the next several weeks a retrospective of the work of the great American director George Stevens is taking place at Film Forum here in New York City. This past Sunday I was able to attend the opening day’s film which was a superb documentary about Stevens made by his
To finish up our week of Gloria Swanson immersion, here’s Gloria’s appearance on Ralph Edwards ‘This Is Your Life’ from 1957. If you’ve never heard of the program the format takes some explaining. The subject was invariably a celebrity of the past and people from the persons distant life were
Today I offer two views of this week’s subject Gloria Swanson in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Above is a little reel that jams together a few obscure but interesting snippets of film–it’s a bit of a hodgepodge but I thought worth including in our loose and free-wheeling survey of La
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_XcR8noJZk The real Gloria Swanson is so different from Norma Desmond, the character she famously portrayed in ‘Sunset Blvd.’, that I’ve constructed an alternate universe explaining the discrepancy. In my alt-reality, Norma Desmond and her younger sister Gloria Desmond were a sister act in Vaudeville and came to Hollywood in