In December, 1929 the above remarkable footage was shot in the Times Square Theater during rehearsals of the Gershwin show ‘Strike Up The Band’. I’ve posted this before but every so often I rewatch it and am freshly amazed at what a rare and peculiar document it is. In it,
In 1931 George and Ira Gershwin went to Hollywood for the first time to compose the score for a Janet Gaynor/Charlie Farrell musical called ‘Delicious’. No popular songs of any particular note came out of this endeavor but, Gershwin being Gershwin, a symphonic masterwork somehow snuck its way into existence.
Last week (or was it the week before?) I posted an experimental 1929 film called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’ by Robert Florey, which was a paeon to art deco New York and the then startling proliferation of the massive and impressive buildings of the era. On a very different note, avant garde
Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, ‘Blackmail’ (1929) was shot in both silent and sound versions, a typical one-foot-in one-foot-out practice at the time. Above is a sound test made, it would seem, to see if the voice of the lead actress Anna Ondra would be suitable for recording. As you
One of my favorite underrated directors of the past is Charles Vidor. Among the top films in his filmography are ‘Cover Girl’ (1944) starring Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth, which is certainly one of the best musicals of its era and the delightfully sensuous and darkly peculiar ‘Gilda’ (1946)–really the
Its Friday so it’s Ernie Kovacs time. Here’s one of his weirdest quasi-music videos–a rendering of a piece of the 1812 Overture which melds the music with some frankly disconcerting images–I’ll let you watch rather than explain them. This is preceded by two of Kovacs beloved blackout sketches one of
Though by no means a bad movie, The Marx Brothers 1938 “Room Service” is not a particularly good one–it’s a curio at best. Originally a Broadway play which they had nothing to do with, it was adapted for the movies with them being wedged into it, filling roles that for
It’s always exciting for me to find glimpses of old New York captured on film at unexpected moments and I’ve got a real find to share with you today. The Florenz Ziegfeld produced 1929 musical movie ‘Glorifying The American Girl’ was filmed at the Astoria Studios in Long Island and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irSFb-DTeIs Yesterday I posted a lovely video mash-up of images (still and live) reconstructing the 1927 Ziegfeld Follies, accompanied by a twin piano arrangement of some 20s tunes taken from an Ampico piano roll. I mentioned that the twin piano act was a popular featured act in Vaudeville of the
Here’s a very well done made-for-YouTube concoction in which the style/feel/materials of Ziegfeld’s 1927 edition of his legendary ‘Follies’ show is reproduced, using stills, footage culled from various Vitaphone shorts of the era (and other musical films which I can’t identify), all set to a recording of an Ampico Piano