Here’s a nifty little doc about Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 semi-masterwork ‘Suspicion’ starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine who won an Oscar for her role as the deeply suspicious wife who suspects her husband of planning on murdering her. Much has been made over the years about the ending of this
For a good part of the 1930s and the first part of the 1940s Jack Benny’s radio show sponsor was Jello. Of course, the single-sponsor years required that the name of the program was the product and so the unlikely title became ‘The Jello Program Starring Jack Benny’. What an
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Gh7zs2RGI Here’s a Jello commercial from 1979. Plot: a family reunion briefly turns sour when the hostess says she hasn’t made dessert. But things change when she adds that she made Jello! Out comes a frightening round mass of red goo molded into the shape of a pie. People are
Johnny Carson’s longtime comedy hero was Jack Benny. And while their styles were entirely different, they did share one very specific thing. Jello was Benny’s signature advertiser through the 1930s and early 1940s and somehow Carson wound up doing a Jello commercial on a 1957 program he hosted. Here, Johnny
Here’s 50 seconds of black and white footage of the ‘Cleopatra’ set, specifically the moment where Liz Taylor is carried down from the Sphinx thingy. It looks awfully scary and shaky but Liz seems sanguine, posed regally and most likely heavily sedated. I have no clue as to how this
I knew that the beginnings of the 1963 Burton and Taylor ‘Cleopatra’ were a bit more murky than the famously catastrophic shoot itself (the making of the ill-fated behemoth has been well documented over the years in any of a number of books about Burton/Taylor/Mankiewicz/Zanuck/Fox etc.) It’s common knowledge (in
Behold a four minute clip of the restored Technicolor ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ sequence from 1930s ‘King Of Jazz’, a gigantic musical revue (they were all the rage in Hollywood at the time) featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. This immaculate restoration shows us for the first time what audiences saw
Here’s a truly precious piece of footage. It’s a Technicolor screen test featuring Katherine Hepburn playing Joan of Arc. We know from the slate that it was photographed on May 22nd, 1934 on Stage 5 at RKO. The cameraman was Ray Rennahan. No director is listed–did Hepburn self-direct? Evern more
After yesterday’s post on the 3-Strip Technicolor process as demonstrated in the ‘before and after’ reel of scenes from ‘Becky Sharp’, I’ve begun a slow and pleasant dive into a rabbit hole of Technicolor history. Above is a series of ‘color tests’ from 1933-1936 made for Pioneer Pictures, a subsidiary
This past weekend we watched the restored version of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1935 ‘Becky Sharp’ which was the first feature shot and released in the beautiful and sadly long-gone Three-Strip Technicolor process. Old Three-Strip Technicolor films without restoration tend to look like bowls of multi-flavored bowl melted sherbet. If one didn’t