In ‘I Love Lucy’ Fred Mertz–played by the inimitable William Frawley–protrayed an ex-vaudevillian turned East Side landlord. The backstory was that he and his wife Ethel (Vivian Vance) were once a husband/wife act who wised-up when vaudeville died in the mid-thirties and invested their hard-earned savings in a brownstone that
If you’ve never seen the duo dance act of The Nicholas Brothers, you’re in for an astonishing surprise. And if you have seen them, you’re once again in for an astonishing surprise. Nothing about their style of dancing had ever been seen before or has since been replicated. The brothers–Fayard
Did you know Raymond Chandler has a cameo of sorts in ‘Double Indemnity’? Well, he does and the above clip proves it. Much has been made over the years of Chandler and co-writer/director Billy Wilder’s antipathy toward each other, but I wonder. If they were as uncomfortable with each other
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-negj5-410https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nnOtXHWPqI I don’t usually post on the weekends but this is no ordinary weekend. It’s Labor Day weekend. And that means it was once the weekend of the MDA Telethon hosted by Jerry Lewis, which began Sunday early evening and continued through Monday afternoon. I never missed a telethon from
Dig Buddy Ebsen dancing up a storm in two clips from the 1930s. As promised last week, Friday will be graced with dance only videos henceforth, in an effort (hopefully not in vain) to drown out the dreadful noise generated around the world during the week prior. Swing it, sister!
Bobbie Wygant was a semi-legendary local Fort Worth celebrity interviewer for a local station, KXAS. Despite her local status, she was able to get a remarkable amount of celebrities to agree to be interviewed by her, sometimes in quite sophisticated settings (she traveled to them, not they to her). In
Last week I posted several versions of talking front titles, courtesy of the Hal Roach Studios. Both movies were made in 1930 (the year Roach tried this experiment) and I confidently contended that the only Roach players that didn’t get this treatment were Laurel&Hardy. A reader wrote in to tell
Every week should end with a spirited, delightful dance number. That’s my new resolution. Which brings us to the fabulous, criminally-underrated Gene Nelson. Nelson is as athletic as Gene Kelly (and also a lot taller) and his light-hearted spirit adds an infectious quality that the often overwrought Kelly sometimes doesn’t
If you ever watched ‘Skidoo’, Otto Premingers 1968 fiasco, and made it all the way to the end then you’d have been treated to what is clearly the film’s highlight–the singing end credits, courtesy of Harry Nillson. Otto’s richly Viennese voice is heard at the beginning of the sequence (‘Before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8JKEso5a3Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LELTZmD3gWY In 1930, Hal Roach experimented with having the opening credits of some of his comedies spoken by two young women who appear to be identical twins, posed on a very nice quasi-Egyptian themed deco stage. Much like the soundtrack of the trailer I posted yesterday, this was likely another