Movies 'Til Dawn Blog

CITYSCAPE; NYC IN THE LATE 40s

Here’s some outstanding colorized footage of New York City in 1948-49. (The dates are approximate based on the cars of the period). The YouTube artist known as NASS posted this a few days ago and as always I’m sharing it with you. It’s a remarkable moment of time travel, thanks

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COMMERCIALS/DRINKS/1950s/YOU GET IT

Here’s a nice little reel of beverage commercials the late 1950s to mid 60s. If nothing else, this grouping of ads shows us how poor the ideas and execution of commercials were before they got jazzed up in the middle-60s, as well as how poor the public’s taste was in

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DINNER ON ‘CITY ISLAND’

Tonight there’s a screening of my 2010 movie ‘City Island’ at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, New York. I’ll be there with co-star Julianna Marguilies to do a Q&A after the screening. Since you’re receiving this at roughly the same time the screening is taking place–and since I doubt many of

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NOBLE AND BOWLY ON FILM!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l-09_fAUSk (NOTE: CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TODAY’S LINK ON YOUTUBE). Yesterday’s clip featured the lovely 1934 recording of ‘The Very Thought Of You’ by the Ray Noble orchestra with vocal by Al Bowly. I gave you a little info on Bowly but didn’t expect to find any actual film of

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LONDON, 1934; THE VERY THOUGHT OF BONDAGE

I’m not usually one for YouTube music/film mash-ups but I stumbled across this one and found it so evocative and lovely that I’ve decided to share it with you. It consists of clips from the 1934 version of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage”, starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis,

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MILTON BRADLEY, GAMESMAN

I guess I always assumed that the Milton Bradley sung about on TV in commercials for games that I saw on TV as a youth was either the last two names of the men who invented the games (Bob Milton and Eddie Bradley), or the Anglicized name of a fat

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THE MOST RACIST COMMERCIAL EVER MADE

Behold an early 1980s commercial for a local Los Angeles business ‘Gary’s Mattress’, located in Van Nuys, California. Gary, spokesman for his own store, manages to squeeze more offensive stereotypes into less than a minute than…well, I wish had a slick and amusing comparison to make but I just don’t.

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SMOKES

Anti-Cigarette ads began with PSA’s brought to us by the American Cancer Society in the late 1960s. They were considered controversial at the time, as was putting warning labels on cigarette packages, a practice which started in 1965. It’s astounding to me that sixty years later the damn things still

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CREDIT SEQUENCE THEATER PT. 4; ‘NEW YORK NIGHTS’

We tend to think of the evolution of the title sequence as moving from a simple series of cards with actors names on them (sometimes splashed up a little with caricaturist representations of the actors), gradually becoming more dramatic, exotic or even story-heavy as the years progressed. But back in

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CREDIT SEQUENCE THEATER PT. 3: ‘TWO FOR THE SEESAW’

Behold this gorgeous title sequence for ‘Two For The Seesaw’ (1962), starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley McLaine. We’re are in prime, early 60s New York City watching Robert Mitchum do pretty much nothing but walk around, staring impassively at various views and things and somehow conveying everything you can’t write

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