Here’s a remarkable piece of film. It’s the surviving five minutes from an otherwise lost 1933 film called ‘Mr. Broadway’, featuring a very young Ed Sullivan (you can see him in a couple of cutaways sitting at a table with Bert Lahr). The film is essential viewing for any devotee
There is simply no more entertaining poker scene ever filmed than the above match-up between Paul Newman and Robert Shaw in ‘The Sting’ (1973). Newman commands the scene from the moment before he enters the room–he takes a beat, exhales and preps himself to go on stage like any good
Yesterday I posted a poker game featuring a cheating W.C. Fields. Today it’s the Three Stooges turn. This is from ‘Goofs and Saddles’ (1937) and features Curly singing that inane little soprano humming song (the lyrics are: ‘lo-lee-lo…la lee la…lo-lee-lo…la lee la…) that always indicates his faux innocence or distractedness.
I must admit to a complete lack of interest in the annoyingly retro-cool game of Poker. For me Poker belongs to the same crowd that reads Cigar Aficionado, professes to like small-batch Bourbon and Scotch and makes a big deal about betting on the Kentucky Derby. Having gotten that off
Here’s the rather original first trailer of ‘The Thin Man’ (1934) starring…well, if you read this blog I’m pretty sure you know who played Nick and Nora Charles. It uses a rather striking ‘book-end’ gimmick–William Powell doubles himself and Nick Charles in a split screen in which Nick stands within
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwk0kwETsYIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlMxXrRCMAI Above are two clips depicting Hollywood premieres of the late 1920s. The first is the ‘real thing’–some marvelous, restored black&white newsreel footage of two different premieres, ‘Broadway Melody’ and ‘The Divine Lady’ (both 1929). The second clip is the opening sequence of ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ (1952), which is
See yesterday’s post for some excellent home movie coverage of the Times Square of the 1960s. And see today’s for basically the same thing but colorized. Actually the above home movies focus more on buildings than people–and while the buildings were more interesting to tourists then, it’s the people that
Behold this delightful reel of home movies shot in Times Square on the above date. Theaters are showing Dean Martin as Matt Helm in ‘The Silencers’, Paul Newman as ‘Harper’ and the supposedly worst movie ever made (it isn’t but it’s pretty lousy) ‘The Oscar’ is proudly in its first–and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTM9TkQ9VAUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLJOROSMxHQ&list=PLKjjIa7cwTkLmfGjn2u46IPYY0onPWUII&index=4 I have a great affinity for 1920s culture–the music and early sound films in particular. Not that the ‘talkies’ (as they were then referred too) are easy to watch anymore–at least not in the way they were intended to be. Early sound film is pre-historic, with acting so unbelievably
In the late 1940s both Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx were in their slump years–the Marx Brothers were essentially over and Groucho’s attempts at movie-star solo work were met mostly with a shrug. He made two movies–‘Copacabana’ and ‘A Girl In Every Port’–that were disappointments and the final Marx Brothers