https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhhZqKlO6wEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1aKNy7hBV4 Airplane pilots are always quick to tell you that 99 percent of all aviation accidents are due to pilot error. This is almost a religious incantation with them–they believe firmly in ‘trusting the machine’, which I imagine is the only way to get over the insane fact that they’re
Apropos of this weeks posts on non-French, non-Greek director Jules Dassin, here’s a lovely scene from his 1960 hit “Never On Sunday’, starring his wife Melina Mercouri. In an act of immense chutzpah, Dassin–who was essentially a non-actor–cast himself as the co-lead–an American who’s visiting Greece. He’s the gray haired
Apropos of yesterday’s post about the great non-French non-Greek but somehow French and Greek American director Jules Dassin, I though I’d post the legendary twenty-five (or so) minutes silent sequence of the heist scene in ‘Rififi’. Imagine my surprise when it failed to turn up on YouTube. Instead only tidbits
It took three days to shoot the scene in which Judy Garland performs Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s haunting and highly unusual (in form) torch song ‘The Man That Got Away’, for the 1954 version of ‘A Star Is Born’. Above is a nifty split screen demonstrating two of the
The famous (in her day) nightclub hostess/chanteuse Texas Guinan was captured on film on several occasions, the most elaborate of which was a feature she starred in called ‘Queen Of The Nightclubs’. Shot in 1928, it was likely the best and most detailed view of the true look, tone and
Yesterday I posted Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s screen tests for ‘The Godfather’, in which we also got a view of the young, then-fatso Francis Coppola directing. Today we move backwards thirty-five or so years for a glimpse of Paulette Goddard’s test for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in…oh,
This is a fascinating little fragment of footage showing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s screen tests for ‘The Godfather’. Pacino got the role of Sonny–we see Coppola giving him some direction as well–and De Niro was passed up for Sonny in favor of James Caan. In my not so
“The April Fools” (1969) may not have left any mark on cinema history but it did bring to life two of Burt Bacharach’s best songs, one of which is the title song. The film stars a very Jack Lemmony Jack Lemmon and an absurdly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve as two people
Yesterday I posted about the Steve McQueen 1971 race car epic ‘LeMans’. But before that film was made there was John Frankenheimer’s ‘Grand Prix’ (1966), a movie that from the looks of the trailer is better than the McQueen movie. Having said that, I should know better to base an
I began last week by confidently stating in the first of several posts about race-car driving that I found Motorsports the silliest sport next to tractor-pulls known to man. I’ve never done a 180 on a subject as quickly as I have on race-car driving over the past week. I