It’s been said that MGM was where comedy went to die. Certainly that was the case with the Marx Brothers, whose final three MGM films were all abject unfunny failures. ‘Our Gang’ also suffered an ignominious end, morphing into a group of do-gooder kids who were eager to put on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idw8JLe_r_8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOG_8JZy_g Carole Lombard died tragically in an air accident on January 16, 1942, just over one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was returning from an enormously successful war bonds tour– she was in the vanguard of Hollywood stars helping to raise money for the war effort–and the
This little mini-doc appears to be a 1965 travelogue of the Austran city Salzburg, birthplace and home of Mozart. In fact, they bury the lead and about three minutes in it’s revealed to be a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of ‘The Sound Of Music.’ Charmian Carr, who played Liesl
Lets wrap up the week with the best five minutes of your day (or perhaps week). Here’s a compendium of Buster Keaton’s most extraordinary stunts, all of which are done practically (i.e.no special effects), all of them by him (i.e. no stunt doubles) and some of them truly death-defying. That
Here’s a most enjoyable pre-code item that I’d never heard of called ‘Air Hostess’ (1933), starring Evalyn Knapp and James Murray. Knapp was a popular actress of the day with two deficits; she couldn’t act, and she didn’t know how to spell her first name. But the real stars of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBn8cuks8s4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyA__0GJqhs&t=23s Here are two different short documentaries on the making of ‘Breakfast Of Tiffany’s’ that, when taken together, add up to a larger story of what making movies is (or can be) like. In the top one, the female A.I. voice tells us in no uncertain terms that the making
Here’s a short and very lovely reel of Paris in the 1930s. The colorization is quite good and serves, as always when married to old verite footage, to remind us that people and places looked an awful lot like they do now–with colors, skin tones and all the stuff that
Enjoy this beautifully restored footage of New York City in 1937. Everything was more beautiful then including the wonderfully dressed men and women whose faces you can see since they’re not walking around staring at that vertical black instrument thing in their palms…
Meet the extraordinary female British aviation pioneer Pauline Gower. A writer as well as a pilot, Gower first flew with another British aviation pioneer Alan Cobham and was fascinated by flying. In 1931 she met Dorothy Spicer, with whom she established an air taxi service in Kent. She was one of
As a vintage aviation geek (actually I prefer the term ‘propellerhead’) I’m fascinated by the stray bits of old film that turn up featuring the then dashingly modern craft of flying and what was considered cutting edge stuff. The concept of the passenger plane was astonishing and terrifying to people