Color film began much earlier than most people think–it was in 1908 that Kinecolor process was first introduced. But I’m only one sentence into today’s post and already I’m getting lost in the weeds. The purpose of today’s viewing is to demonstrate a later (but still early) process called MultiColor.
‘Three Smart Saps’ (1942) is the 64th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Tuesday, April 7th through Friday, April 10th 1942 and was released on Thursday, July 30th of that year (the 211th day of the Gregorian Calendar). This is peak Curly,
Yesterday I posted a reel of trailers of a number of Marx Brothers movies. The reel failed to include trailers for their first four films and, in an uncharacteristically lazy moment, I theorized that perhaps they’d been lost. Wrong! Above is the trailer for their third film ‘Monkey Business’ (1931)
Here’s a nice little compendium reel of some Marx Brothers movie trailers. It’s by no means complete–the first four films are represented by sloppily assembled half-trailer/half-clip reels instead of proper trailers. (Possibly the original trailers were lost?) And perhaps ‘The Cocoanuts’, which dates from 1929, never had a proper trailer
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