The above dance number from ‘Party Girl’ (1958, directed by Nicholas Ray) may be the most stunning display of the inimitable Cyd’s virtuosic grace mixed with astonishing athleticism–a combo that I don’t think I’ve ever seen surpassed–captured on film. As you can see from this weeks obsessive postings I’ve been
I had no idea the above existed. It’s a dropped number from ‘The Bandwagon’ called ‘Two Faced Woman’ featuring Cyd. This is especially surprising given the fact that ‘The Bandwagon’ is far and away my favorite movie musical (I can’t remember who said this but I heartily concur: “Singing In
What better way to start a week then with a robust dose of Cyd Charisse dancing up a storm in a clip from ‘It’s Always Fair Weather’. The less said about the actual song, a pugilistic-inspired piece of silliness called ‘Baby You Knock Me Out’, the better. It’s Cyd’s powerful
” ‘Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl’. Or ‘Love will find a way, love never loses, put your money on love!’ “ For no particular reason I awoke this AM with the above snappy, oft-repeated refrain from 1938’s ‘Boy Meets Girl’ stuck in my head. It serves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oicmvvec4q8 Last night I attended a screening at the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood of a 1932 pre-code William Powell/Kay Francis movie that I’d never heard of, the somewhat generically named ‘Jewel Robbery’. What an unexpected delight this perfectly preserved antique was. Smart, surprising, filled with the usual saucy pre-code
Above is a four minute short made by Mel Brooks and Ernest Pintoff in 1964 called ‘The Critic’. It will explain itself, and very amusingly at that. Inspired by the work of Canadian animator Norman McClaren it features a series of curious visuals accompanied by the grumblings of an aging
Here’s a five minute snippet of a longer, quite interesting looking documentary about the great film and theater director Rouben Mamoulian. There are so many things to praise YouTube for but not requiring people to include basic information about the obscure things that they’re posting is hugely unacceptable. The only
‘Murder Inc.’, a semi-low-budget New York production shot in 1960, would likely not even be a cinematic footnote today had it not been for the presence of the young, then-unknown Peter Falk playing vicious psychopathic gangster Abe Reles (a real guy–‘Kid Twist’ they called him, for some reason). Falk’s off-kilter
Here’s a French documentary about John Cassavetes shot in two parts–in Hollywood in 1966 and in France in 1969. In the first section we see Cassavetes driving along Mulholland Drive to his house on Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills. (The house will of course be familiar to any
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0Nu93kB-Y0 Here’s a very well-done tribute-doc to my favorite Hitchcock film ‘Notorious’ (I know I’m far from alone in this opinion–it’s the one that, in my opinion, is much more emotional, better scripted and capable of being revisited than many others). Misleadingly titled ‘The Making Of…’ it’s more of a