Though by no means a bad movie, The Marx Brothers 1938 “Room Service” is not a particularly good one–it’s a curio at best. Originally a Broadway play which they had nothing to do with, it was adapted for the movies with them being wedged into it, filling roles that for
It’s Friday which is Ernie Kovacs time as far as we are concerned. Today I offer up his ‘kitchen symphony’, a fascinating and somewhat disturbing exercise in joining the movements of inanimate kitchen objects with the space-pop music of the master Esquival. The video looks amazing–the actual texture of it,
It’s always exciting for me to find glimpses of old New York captured on film at unexpected moments and I’ve got a real find to share with you today. The Florenz Ziegfeld produced 1929 musical movie ‘Glorifying The American Girl’ was filmed at the Astoria Studios in Long Island and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irSFb-DTeIs Yesterday I posted a lovely video mash-up of images (still and live) reconstructing the 1927 Ziegfeld Follies, accompanied by a twin piano arrangement of some 20s tunes taken from an Ampico piano roll. I mentioned that the twin piano act was a popular featured act in Vaudeville of the
Here’s a very well done made-for-YouTube concoction in which the style/feel/materials of Ziegfeld’s 1927 edition of his legendary ‘Follies’ show is reproduced, using stills, footage culled from various Vitaphone shorts of the era (and other musical films which I can’t identify), all set to a recording of an Ampico Piano
Here’s a remarkable piece of film. It’s the surviving five minutes from an otherwise lost 1933 film called ‘Mr. Broadway’, featuring a very young Ed Sullivan (you can see him in a couple of cutaways sitting at a table with Bert Lahr). The film is essential viewing for any devotee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bBG3R_ex60https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2nPoSWtv-k Though the weekend wouldn’t be complete without some Three Stooges action, I thought I’d mix things up a bit today and, instead of offering a short comedy, offer a fascinating short reel of home movies featuring the boys. These were shot at some point in the early-to- mid 30s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdNDRDsFdk0 Let’s tie together this weeks poker on film theme with our now regular Friday’s-with-Ernie Kovacs feature with this little poker-themed nugget from a 1961 Kovacs special. Let me be honest; it’s not very good. But its important to remember that visionaries like Kovacs often are more process-oriented than result-driven
There is simply no more entertaining poker scene ever filmed than the above match-up between Paul Newman and Robert Shaw in ‘The Sting’ (1973). Newman commands the scene from the moment before he enters the room–he takes a beat, exhales and preps himself to go on stage like any good
Yesterday I posted a poker game featuring a cheating W.C. Fields. Today it’s the Three Stooges turn. This is from ‘Goofs and Saddles’ (1937) and features Curly singing that inane little soprano humming song (the lyrics are: ‘lo-lee-lo…la lee la…lo-lee-lo…la lee la…) that always indicates his faux innocence or distractedness.