https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggnZ-2Ns54 Welcome bac;k to Leopold and Loeb week. On Monday I posted Henry Fonda’s tour de force performance as Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who successfully kept Leopold and Loeb from being executed. Yesterday we watched the trailer of the L&L inspired movie ‘Compulsion’. Today lets watch a very impressive long-take
Yesterday I posted about Meyer Levin’s novel ‘Compulsion’, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case that rocked the world in 1924. The novel was turned into a play by Levin and then into a movie produced by Darryl Zanuck and directed by Richard Fleisher. Now I’m impatiently waiting for
What do Clarence Darrow, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and James Ellroy have in common?The answer is ‘Compulsion’, the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin based on the infamous murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 killed a 14 year old boy named Bobby Franks simply for the
On a rainy day in 1929, the Fox Movietone people mounted a camera on top of a truck and–with police escort (you can hear the plaintive wail of the siren throughout this video)–took a drive down Broadway. Bumpy though the ride proved to be, it captured a mesmerizing look at
Above I’ve posted a real weirdie. It’s stock footage of West 52nd street shot sometime in the early 1930s. It has no discernible point or reason for existence. Unlike normal stock, there is little that is simply caught. Rather it is mostly staged shots of restaurant and speakeasy tasks–a guy
In Hollywood’s somewhat frantic search during the 1950s to find ways to best television’s increasing appeal, various different cinematic visual innovations were introduced–3D and Cinemascope being the most famous. But there were others that were actually superior to those innovations yet not fully utilized to their best advantage. One of
If you’ve never seen a restored Technicolor three-strip movie a real cinematic treat awaits you. The color is by no means realistic–it shimmers, glistens and looks like an especially scrumptious box of colored candies that probably costs a fortune (I’m thinking of a specific designer sweets shop on Madison Avenue).
‘Crash Goes The Hash’ (1944) was the 77th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures Corporation. It was photographed from Monday, October 11th through Wednesday, October 13th, 1943 and was released on Friday, February 4th, 1944 (the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar). This
A couple of days ago I posted a reel of 1970s TV commercials. My sense was that the 70s saw an upturn in the humor and style of commercials as opposed to the style of the 50s ads which were largely straight and often painfully earnest and the 60s which
Here’s an extraordinary reel of film documenting the sights and sounds of Times Square in 1931. It’s filmed with the then-experimental sound-on-film process as pioneered by Fox Movietone News. Thus the sounds of the streets are what you were really hearing, not added later and not professional mic’d. There are