A few days ago I posted a terrific clip of Jerry Lewis dancing to ‘Rock-Rock-Rock-A Bye Baby’ and doing an intentionally bad job of it. The brilliance of the routine is that Lewis is, in fact, an excellent dancer and keeps giving you hints of his actual dexterity and skill
My longtime love/hate affair with Jerry Lewis has entered a new phase; the one in which I’m discovering talents of his that were–ready for this?–subtle and skillful. These are not words often associated with Joey Levitch but check out his dancing in the above clip from ‘Rock-A-Bye Baby’, a 1958
I would bet that most people reading this blog know that W.C. Fields was a Broadway headliner prior to his emergence as a Hollywood superstar. Furthermore, many readers might also know that he had a long career in Vaudeville before that. What one might possibly not be aware of, though,
‘Dizzy Pilots’ (1943) is the seventy-fourth two-reel comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Tuesday, April 6th through Friday, April 9th 1943 and released on Friday, September 24th of that year. The central gag of the film–one of their strangest and most inventive–involves Moe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjX16FwJezM Here’s another of the George Mann home movie items, this one of W.C. Fields clowning around in front of his house in Great Neck, Long Island. The year is 1928. Though Fields is a Broadway star, his move to California and his eventual international stardom from his movies is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A11EWc2_WJQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qYmFXWtdo8 Yesterday I posted about the amazing George Mann home movie footage of Broadway in the late 1920s. Mann performed in a number of Earl Carroll reviews during that decade and in 1928 he was part of the seventh edition of ‘Earl Carroll’s Vanities’ along with W.C. Fields. Although Fields
Here is some extraordinarily rare and truly one-of-a-kind footage shot from the backstage wings of the 44th Street Theater in January, 1930. It shows us a few moments of a variety show in-progress called ‘Earl Carroll’s Sketchbook’, which starred Eddie Cantor, Patsy Kelly, William Demerest and a dance team called
Here’s a real deep YouTube discovery. It’s a twenty minute chunk of mostly raw footage from a 1970 television doc called ‘Billy Wilder’ showing Wilder in the process of directing a movie. The making of the doc coincided with Wilder’s presence in Europe shooting ‘The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes’,
Filmmakers appear to be at their best when being interviewed by Europeans. Yesterday I offered up Orson Welles on Michael Parkinson’s show. Today, dig this one-hour doc made for French television titled ‘Billy Wilder; Portrait Of A 60% Perfect Man’. Ciment, a noted French cineaste, shot this material in Los
Seeing how it appears to be ‘George Cukor Day’ on TCM (‘The Philadelphia Story’ is playing as I write this and I’m about to give ‘Her Cardboard Lover’, which I’ve never seen, a try) I thought I’d post this 1973 doc about him. It was made as part of an