August 3, 2022
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Here’s the one where one persons jacket gets filled with two arms, each belonging to a different person (one of whom is a stooge) creating an unstoppable rotation of physical abuse. As you’ll see this gag served Curly, Shemp and Moe well for at least twenty-five years and is considerably
The Three Stooges made 190 two-reel comedies between 1934 and 1959. With numbers like that they were forced to find routines they could recycle and reuse over time. Indeed the word ‘recycle’ figures heavily into the filmmaking world of the Stooges. Plots were constantly recycled (detectives, haunted houses, fixing things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2L9bOGx4Z8&t=24s Here’s ‘Gents In A Jam’ from 1952, written and directed by Edward Bernds. The best of the Shemp shorts were for the most part Bernds-helmed–his scripts were tighter and the jokes and sight gags better planned and delivered than the increasingly mechanical Jules White films of the period. I
There are plenty of Scopitone music videos (actually 16mm) on Youtube so it was hard finding the best one to present. Actually the reason it was hard was because there really isn’t a conventional ‘best’ one. All of them are lousy. The choreography is amateurish, the photography garish and the
Now this is going to take a little explaining. Yesterday I posted one of Robert Altman’s mid-60s Color-Sonics music ‘videos’ (check it out if you haven’t already–you’ll be glad you did). Here’s another one that he did with the famous ecdysiast Lily St. Cyr called ‘Don’t Call Me’. Except the
In the mid-sixties a company called Color-Sonics developed a visual jukebox that provided what were, in essence, the first music videos. Mini-films were made to accompany pop songs of the day and people could watch as well as listen to their favorite new tunes. The machine was loaded with 16mm
Here’s the trailer for Robert Altman’s first film, the independently produced 1955 teen hoodlum flick ‘The Delinquents’ (released in 1957). It was shot in Kansas City where Altman was then based, making industrial films and directing semi-amateur theatrical productions. The film apparently starred Tom ‘Billy Jack’ Laughlin (he’s not credited
Without reservation I can say that I find ‘A Plumbing We Will Go’ easily the best Three Stooges short ever made. But I’ll go further. I’ll go on record right now (yes, on record) and say that this is on par with Laurel & Hardy’s ‘Helpmates’ and ‘The Music Box’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbAx6oznWKw Why, you may ask, are we watching a women’s prison musical number called ‘The Lockstep’ featuring an act known as ‘The Dodge Twins’ photographed in two-strip Technicolor on a lavishly vertical set (if one can refer to a prison as ‘lavish’) accompanied by dozens of imprisoned chorus girls all