Behold some fascinating looks at football of the 1920s and 30s and note how incredibly similar this ancient reel of highlights is to a Sunday morning Fox NFL Pre-Game show. Indeed, the entire game seems largely not to have changed much at all from the game we know now, except
Wouldn’t it be lovely if the Marx Brothers were next Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime entertainment instead of…whoever the hell it is? Well, the next best thing is watching them play a little old-school football and what better way to begin than with the climax of ‘Horsefeathers’ , which depicts a
On August 18th and 19th, 1941, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Salzburg, Austia, to discuss the progress of the war which the US had yet to officially enter. Hitler’s personal pilot, one Hans Baur, was also an amateur movie photography buff and shot color footage of that Monday
Welcome back to Fascism Week on this blog. Today we present a short reel of color footage of Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s. The city looks beautiful but the preponderance of Nazi flags of course reminds us that things were what they were. The big takeaway here is that
If the timing of my posting of this fascinating Fox Movietone newsreel seems heavy-handed, well, we live in awfully heavy-handed times. Watch as Adolf Hitler comes to power, addresses his crowds, cordially greets his new fellow government wonks and listen as the assumption is made that he seems willing ‘to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Godu_t3BUjwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHRwrF8DniI Apropos of yesterdays post about Kay Francis, I did some snooping around on YT for early pre-code Kay moments and ran across a couple of clips from a 1931 comedy called ‘Girls About Town‘, directed by a young George Cukor. I’ve known the title over the years but have
Today is Kay Francis’ 120th birthday–or would have been had she not died in 1968 at the age of 63. When I was a kid in the early 1970s, the Marx Brothers revival was in full swing and theaters around L.A. often did all-day showings of the Paramount Marx output
Here is one of the most delightful time-travel videos provided by YouTube artist and film-restoration expert NASS, who finds black and white documentary footage of old urban areas, colorizes them, adds a period sound bed of traffic and pedestrian noises and slows the frame rate down slightly, thus giving it
It may seem odd that by far my favorite of Fred Astaire’s dance partners is, in fact, not a dancer at all. But the above clip of Paulette Goddard and Astaire performing “I Ain’t Hep To That Step But I’ll Dig It” from “Second Chorus” (1940) rocks me every time
On Monday I promised to post only Fred Astaire items this week, featuring dancing partners who he only worked with once or twice. Yesterday I broke that promise by not posting anything. (It was a travel day so I’m allowed). Here’s another Fred/Rita number, ‘I’m Old Fashioned’, from ‘You Were