‘Gents Without Cents’ (1944) is the 81st short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Wednesday, June 14 through Friday, June 16, 1944 and was released on Friday, September 22nd of that year (the 266th day in the Gregorian calendar). The abbreviated shooting schedule
The Marx Brothers were of German Jewish orgin and thus grew up steeped in German culture and language. One of Groucho’s true delights in life (and I don’t think there were many of them) was performing a German novelty song called ‘Schnitzel Bank’ and above we see him do so
Here’s another marvelous view of a now very vanished New York City, courtesy of the YouTube artist known as NASS. The city is seen in color (via colorization–it was originally shot in black and white) with an added soundbed of city noise, which somehow works wonder in terms of bringing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS7YIC8F2Ec Yes I know, Labor Day is over so let’s be done with Jerry Lewis. Not so fast–because I’ve found a clip that I never knew existed, a rare Jerry Telethon clip in which he’s the least offensive person on stage. It’s 1968 and Joan Crawford makes an appearance, reading
One of the great pleasures of watching the Labor Day weekend MDA telethon was waiting for the inevitable mistakes,. bloopers, screw-ups etc. that were par for the course during a forty-eight hour marathon broadcast. Indeed, as the years went on and the featured acts got worse (Joey Heatherton began to
From Liberace (see yesterday’s post) to Jerry Lewis, this blog continues to circle the drain of mid-century entertainment. But with good reason; not a Labor Day weekend of my youth passed without hours spent staring glassily at the MDA Telethon, starring Jerry Lewis. So we will eschew The Three Stooges
There’s nothing really to say about the 20th Century show-biz phenomenon known as Liberace (birth name: ‘Wladziu Valentina Liberace’). Perhaps best to quote the opening of ‘The Song Of Bernadette’: “To those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who don’t believe, no explanation is possible.” Below are three
In keeping with this weeks exploration of the easy listening pianists of yore, today I’ve posted three delightful (if you’re in that kind of mood) videos featuring the twin-piano act Ferrante and Teicher, a duo of American pianists known for their clever arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOtgigQp_nshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PJ4KUFynlk Yesterday I posted two clips of Roger Williams, the most successful of the so-called ‘easy listening’ pianists of the 1950, 60s and beyond. But before Williams came several other influential and ground-breaking pianists in this highly specialized and often unfairly derided field of music. Chief among them was Carmen
As a jazz pianist–in other words as a decrepit hipster wallowing in a musical genre that few people care about anymore–I should find it easy to mock the ‘easy listening’ pianists of the 1950s and 60s as total squares who sold-out for big money, playing unbelievably sappy and simple arpeggio-ridden