https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA8wvbu8E0Qhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWawpf67rz4 It’s a little known fact that air passenger travel owes much of its origins and popularity to the legendary anti-semite Henry Ford, who developed and introduced the Ford Tri-Motor Passanger Plane in 1926. Between that time and 1933, about two-hundred of these tin beauties were produced and they were
Last month my son and I made a visit to McMinnville Oregon specifically to visit Howard Hughes’ ‘Spruce Goose’ in a museum constructed specifically to house and display that magnificent aviation folly. My interest in vintage aviation continues to grow. I’ve been collecting old New Yorker Magazines for years but
Here’s a curious piece of footage shot in the old Penn Station circa 1945. It appears to have been photographed as background footage for a very forgotten Jane Russell vehicle called ‘Young Widow’. Like so many other bits of motion picture ephemera, its real value isn’t for the reasons that
Between 2018 and 2022 (or so) I hosted my podcast, ‘Movies Til Dawn’, which consisted of me and veteran directors having conversations about…well…lots of different stuff. There was no specific formula to these conversations–I usually told the subject beforehand that we could talk about anything they felt like. Thus my
We move from the previous two posts featuring Marilyn’s delightfully polished and alluring musical numbers in ‘Some Like It Hot’ and ‘Let’s Make Love’, to her nadir. It too is from ‘Lets Make Love’, but there are multiple issues with it that frankly make it something of an embarrassment to
Last Friday I posted the terrific ‘Running Wild’ sequence from ‘Some Like It Hot’, featuring a wildly sensuous vocal/dance performance by Marilyn and way too many cutaways to Jack Lemmon. In spite of the great praise she received in that incredibly successful film, there appear to have been those who
All week we’ve been looking at some of the extraordinary all-female orchestras of the 20s/30/40s. Let’s finish thing off with a band that never existed, ‘Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters’, from Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamonds masterful comedy ‘Some Like It Hot’. Clearly Wilder and Diamond were inspired by
Without a doubt the most famous of the 1930s/40s all girl orchestras was ‘Phil Spitalni’s Hour Of Charm All-Girl Orchestra.’ Typically, though, the most famous is somehow the least interesting. It’s not that the players aren’t terrific. It’s the choice of material–much more conservative and a silly combination of mickey-mouse
This week we’ve been taking a look at all-girl jazz bands of the 1930s and 1940s. Today we’re going to back to the 1920s where we will meet ‘The Ingenues’, a most adventurous and impressive ‘girl group’ that toured the United States and other countries from 1925 to 1937. They
Yesterday I posted about the hard-kicking all-female big band Francis Carroll and Her Coquettes. Today we take a look at ‘The International Sweethearts of Rhythm’, who were believed to be the first racially-integrated all-female big band in the United States. Though they’ve been more or less lost to history–and that’s