Hard to believe, but one-hundred years ago the future of air travel was thought to be found in what was known as the “Airship’, the fancy word for clumsy word ‘Dirigible’. We now know these bizarre aeronautical devices as ‘blimps’ and what we know of them is usually confined to
Here’s part two of the British-Pathe short film that I posted yesterday, showing us London in all its glory in 1950. But is it really showing us the whole story? My friend Marc Myers, Wall Street Journal columnist and author of the excellent, long-running JazzWax blog, pointed out to me
Here’s a lovely look at post-war London–1950 to be exact–as pictured in a British-Pathe travelogue, narrated by Rex Harrison, who I suspect was between divorces at the time and needed the easy money. I was last in London a year ago and was surprised how very much like London it
Here’s a quirky little interview with John Huston shot on (or near?) the Irish location of ‘Casino Royal’, the sort-of James Bond movie which he co-directed with twenty other directors. This is ‘portrait of the artist as bullshit-salesman’ deluxe. Huston is charming, evasive, clearly perplexed by what he’s doing involved
Humphrey Bogart called him ‘the monster’ (with great affection, of course). Women found him wildly attractive (even though he treated them rather dreadfully, being proudly ‘multi-amorous’ long before the New York Times wrote admiring articles about threesomes buying and renovation multi-amorous brownstones in Brooklyn). But I digress. John Huston was
In the late 1940s and early 1950s it was generally accepted that Sir Carol Reed, the British filmmaker responsible for ‘The Third Man’, was Europe’s greatest filmmaker. This wasn’t just based on that beyond-classic noir. (Actually placing ‘The Third Man’ in a genre–like noir–is reductive; it’s many different types of
I’ve always hated everything Disney. Hated Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Hated Snow White and Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. Hated the song ‘It’s A Small World After All’ and especially hated the score to ‘Mary Poppins.’ Worst of all was Disneyland, a theme park I was subjected to several times
One of the distressing things about nerding-out on vintage airplane videos are the soundtracks one has to endure. Either the person who posted the footage of the lovely old planes plasters ‘Top Gun’ style junk-rock over the images or they err in the other direction, maintaining the ‘purity’ of the
On Monday I posted a British Pathe newsreel showing the local side of glamorous Rome in 1967. Although the twitty English announcers narration was a tad on the condescending side (more than a tad actually) the lovely color photography made the whole thing a delight to watch. Today we have
What have we here? It’s a 1967 British Pathe newsreel (really? they were still making newsreels in Britain?) showing us ‘The Real Rome’. The quality of the color photography is excellent and the musical score is quite perfect. And then there’s the narration which is an astonishingly stupid and snide