CLICK HERE TO WATCH the three-and-a-half minute screen test that Marlene Dietrich made for ‘The Blue Angel’ in 1929. This is presumably the first time a camera fully captured the multi-faceted genius of this ground-breaking performer. The film’s director, Josef Von Sternberg, also directed the test and used two angles;
Behold Anita Berber, a dancer/actress/performer/scandalous provocateuer of the late teens/1920s German cultural landscape. Berber was daring, mad, wildly admired and reviled and died young in 1929 of multiple drug addictions and a general exhaustion of excessive existence. Little of her film work is extant but the above video features two
Yesterday I posted about my friend and collaborator actor Burt Young who passed away last week but whose death was only announced yesterday. I’ve been working on a doc about Burt for a helluva long time–here’s a link to the trailer. Burt was a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside
Above, witness the still horrific climactic carousel-out-of-control scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers On A Train’. The previous two days I’ve posted on Raymond Chandler, including a fine mini-doc on the corruption filled Los Angeles of the 1930s that inspired his early writing as well as a cameo appearance by the
I’ve seen ‘Double Indemnity’ (screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler based on James M. Cain’s novel) about a thousand times over the past fifty years and never knew–or frankly cared about– the identity of a man sitting outside Barton Keyes’s (Edward G. Robinson) office. Sixteen or so minutes into
See that top video of New York City in 1956? See the video below it of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 2? Roll them both simultaneously (the NYC footage has no sound) and spend a few minutes of your Friday taking a poignant time travel trip to a New York
I don’t know what the hell this little clip is but I think it’s fabulous. It appears to simply be footage of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin dancing in a smoky nightclub to their recording of Gainsbourg’s song ‘La Decadance’, intercut with footage of people speaking French with no subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqfd5xZZ30Ehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Dyxq2kw-c In 1969 Serge Gainsbourg starred in a French film called ‘Slogan’. It was the story of a film director played by Gainsbourg named Serge Fabergé who leaves his pregnant wife Françoise to attend an advertising award festival in Venice. There, he meets Evelyne, a young British woman played by Jane
Here is a most peculiar piece of footage (and short–only 28 seconds) showing a garden party at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Vally home sometime in the mid 1970s. We see Francis quaffing white wine in a plastic cup, George Lucas picking his teeth, Dennis Hopper bedecked in cowboy duds and
To finish off this weeks Marilyn M. expedition, let’s view this very short but very interesting clip of film from the abortive ‘Somethings Got To Give’ shoot. It’s a brief moment just after the shot’s been slated but before Cukor has said ‘action’ (or ‘camera’ as was his habit) in