Here is an extraordinary find. It’s a forty minute silent doc (no music either–just ghostly silence) detailing the inner workings of the MGM studio lot in 1925. We see images of the lot in its silent heyday, with tours of the exterior, views of the interior stages, lots of groupings
In 1970 James Aubrey, the new and much hated head of MGM, ordered an auction to be held of all of Metro’s old props, costumes and souvenirs of former sets. The event was loudly objected to in Hollywood but in the end the objectors didn’t really make any difference; Debbie
Here’s ‘Fright Night’ (1947), Shemp’s first Stooge short in the Columbia years iteration of the Stooges. It takes a certain kind of low-budget brilliance to make a fight film that doesn’t actually show a boxing match. (Shemp gets batted about the ring a little bit but its inside the gym
Let us close this Greenwich Village obsessed week with a little dancing. This is the magnificent duet between Bob Fosse and the great (and unsung) Tommy Rall from the 1955 musical version of ‘My Sister Eileen’. What has this to do with the Village? Well, the story is set there.
This week we’ve seen views of Greenwich Village in the 1940s, early 60s and late 60s verging on the 70s. Now we have a minute of deep 70s village at hand. In some ways this clip is so period-perfect that it doesn’t feel real–more like an expensively re-produced set (complete
Our Greenwich Village history week continues with this very nice one minute clip of color footage of the Village in the 1940s. We are in three locations–Washington Square North, MacDougal Alley and Eighth Street which, as you’ll see in this footage, was once lined with artists peddling their wares. (It’s
This is a real find–a lovely ten or so minute travelogue style journey around Greenwich Village featuring lots of the fashion of the time and plenty of views of streets and buildings that are all pretty much still there. From the look of things I think we’re in 1968–a close
At the peak (or perhaps the depths) of the 1950s 3-D craze, The Three Stooges made two 3-D shorts. One, ‘Spooks’, took place in a haunted house. The other, ‘Pardon My Backfire’, takes place in a garage. Now, a haunted house movie in 3-D makes perfect (if somewhat predictable) sense.
Did you know that Roberto Benigni played Inspector Clouseau in a Pink Panther movie you most likely never heard of? Or that Roger Moore played Clouseau who, it was explained, had undergone extensive plastic surgery to look like Roger Moore? Or that David Niven was brought back for the first
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Mv9YFkMIo Here’s a quite cool mini-doc (twenty minutes) on the evolution of the ‘Pink Panther’ series. I remember as a kid in the early 70s seeing the second ‘Pink Panther’ movie, ‘A Shot In the Dark’ first and then seeing the first eponymous one and wondering why Inspector Clouseau went