Let’s keep this short (work-wise) and lovely (in every other way) week simple. I’m going to post only Fred Astaire dance numbers all week, specifically ones that might be a bit more obscure to those who mostly know the Ginger Rogers-era Fred. He made two movies with Rita Hayworth–”You’ll Never
When the Singer Sewing Machine factory decided to build their own office tower in 1907, they chose to do so with a bang. It was the tallest office building ever constructed and the technology involved in running the place was state-of-the-art early 20th century stuff. Alas, it’s life span was
In queasy acceptance of the fact that the most noxious week in American history has now officially begun, I’ve decided to post the most noxious musical numbers ever filmed. What better way to kick things off than with this stinker from ‘The Goldwyn Follies’ (1938) featuring the wildly unfunny Ritz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG0rnd-m3CU Here is a fascinating travelogue reel showing Hollywood and environs in 1928 (not 1929 as the YouTube poster has labeled it). I date it as late summer/early winter ’28 as the two movies we see advertised, ‘Four Rooms’ and ‘The Man Who Laughs’, were released in August and November
When Ted Turner began to colorize black and white classics in the 1980s the entire film buff/film history/old Hollywood community rose in a uproar. How dare he desecrate the gorgeous and historic black and white films of the past! Who was this heathen who couldn’t appreciate the true cinematic art
Color film began much earlier than most people think–it was in 1908 that Kinecolor process was first introduced. But I’m only one sentence into today’s post and already I’m getting lost in the weeds. The purpose of today’s viewing is to demonstrate a later (but still early) process called MultiColor.
Yesterday I posted a reel of trailers of a number of Marx Brothers movies. The reel failed to include trailers for their first four films and, in an uncharacteristically lazy moment, I theorized that perhaps they’d been lost. Wrong! Above is the trailer for their third film ‘Monkey Business’ (1931)
Here’s a nice little compendium reel of some Marx Brothers movie trailers. It’s by no means complete–the first four films are represented by sloppily assembled half-trailer/half-clip reels instead of proper trailers. (Possibly the original trailers were lost?) And perhaps ‘The Cocoanuts’, which dates from 1929, never had a proper trailer
When America banished Charlie Chaplin in the early 1950s during the height of the ‘The Commie’s Are Coming’ era, Chaplin fled with his wife Oona and their two young children Michael and Geraldine to Vevey, Switzerland where, by all accounts, he led a tranquil life of semi-retirement. Above is a
Let’s close this autumnal week with some madcap 1920s dancing featuring Joan Crawford. Above and below I’ve posted a few minutes from ‘Our Dancing Daughters’, the 1928 silent vehicle that officially launched Crawford’s career and world wide fame. Actually, calling the film ‘silent’ isn’t quite accurate as it was released