Here’s fifteen minutes of different logos–both opening and closing–of RKO movies. I’m sure you’ll be tempted after a few minutes to either turn it off or scrub through them, but I urge you to set aside fifteen minutes and stare, glassy-eyed, at the screen. Something odd happens as they progress–they
If you know me even slightly (and nobody really knows anyone more than slightly, do they?) you’re aware that I love old comedy two-reelers, any movie connected to director Leo McCarey and old airplanes. So you can imagine my delight when I discovered this past weekend that TCM was airing
On June 30th two directors had birthdays. One of them was me. The other was Anthony Mann. I turned 62. Mann turned 120. Or at least he would have if he’d listened to those doctors and quit smoking. I can’t think of a more appropriate director for me to share
I must confess to never having quite ‘gotten’ Palm Springs. I like it a little–the term ‘small doses’ was invented for the place as far as I’m concerned. But the deep and devoted love for the desert that its adherents–er–adhere to strikes me as perverse. The desert is defined by
It was on June 30th, 1964, that I commenced my first journey around the sun. Today marks my sixty-second trip around the damn thing and I can think of few people I’d like to share this day with more than Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard. Here, for my
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1peQ5iagq7shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoBVNmZS9wI During the early days of World War 2, the phrase ‘Keep ‘Em Flyin’” was used on propoganda posters to encourage voluntary enlistment in the Army Air Corps. So popular was the phrase that it became the title of a 1941 Abbott and Costello vehicle. Above is a strange hybrid
Yesterday I provided the mood-enhancing mirror scene from ‘Duck Soup’, explaining that when I’m depressed there are three things that can provide a way out of it; The Marx Brothers, Bugs Bunny and Laurel & Hardy. Today I’m not depressed but why should that stop us from watching a Bugs
It’s a gloomy day in the Connecticut countryside and I’ve been stuck in a low-grade depression for most of it. (It may not help that for some reason I’ve spent much of the day watching YouTube videos of fatal airplane crashes). How to get oneself out of these funks? I
Let’s put a button on this bizarre, embarrassing and absurd week–I speak of events on the world stage–with something that makes absolute, delicious sense. Here’s Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth doing the ‘Shorty George’ from ‘You Were Never Lovelier’ (1942). Watching this perfection is like drinking a long, cold glass
Actor Keith Baxter never achieved the level of respect and stardom that other British actors of his generation–Albert Finney, Robert Shaw, Richard Burton–did. But his superb turn as Prince Hal in Orson Welles ‘Chimes At Midnight’ will forever assure him a place in movie history. Here he is, sitting in