I was listening to a Gilbert Gottfiried podcast while driving today in which he and his guests began extolling the remarkably varied talents of Jerry Lewis. Not only was he a comic, a director, a writer, a philanthropist but he was also…an excellent dancer? Well, sort of. It’s true that
Athlete’s are athletic types, as we know. And athletic types often express themselves athletically. Hence the occasional meltdown in professional sports, wherein an organized game of athletic endeavor devolves into a street brawl that can’t be contained. Witness the above 1960 boxing match as captured by British Pathe, featuring a
Early talking films are invaluable relics of a dead civilization–namely the 1920s. The acting, pacing, diction, style and behavior are as incomprehensible and different from anything we now consider normal as sitting around a cave might be with its cro-magnin inhabitants. The movies aren’t really useful anymore to us in
Here’s a marvelous compilation of behind-the-scenes miscellany and interviews about and with The Three Stooges, spanning the late 1920s well into the 1970s. We see home movies of them as young chaps goofing around in the water at Coney Island; an odd promotional reel for a home movie camera that
Continuing this weeks uncanny resemblance between Julius ‘Groucho’ Marx’s character Rufus T. Firefly in ‘Duck Soup’ and the current President of the United State, we come to the movie’s brilliant opening song in which Firefly lays out the rules of his administration. Given that our current Presidents early goals included
Continuing our comparison begun yesterday between the current Presidential Administration and Rufus T. Firefly’s rule of Freedonia in ‘Duck Soup’ (1933), here is a rather terrifying example of a ninety year old piece of comedic art predicting the future of American politics all too accurately. Among the many mad appointees
I try to keep this blog as apolitical as possible, steeped as I am in popular culture of another era–which may be seen by some as a method by which I avoid the present day. (By the way, if that’s what somebody thinks, they’re right). But the extraordinarily ugly events
Okay, so it’s not more bondage-from-old-movies footage. But the named ‘Django’ and the word ‘Unchained’ actually do belong with each other thanks to a repulsive Quentin Tarantino film called ‘Django Unchained.’ Thus my excuse for moving from chained women to Django Reinhardt. Above is a remarkable short film of the
This extraordinary clip from ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ (1933) shows that kink in Hollywood was alive and well years before one might think. (I’m discounting so-called ‘adult’ films of the era). Here we see Claudette Colbert shackled up in a pillory and forced to submit to unasked for kisses. Of
Yesterday we watched a deeply strange BDSM musical number from a 1933 Eddie Cantor vehicle, staged by Busby Berkeley. Twenty-years later, the same mind that brought us slavegirls-on-parade came up with a fascinating, nightmarish concept for an Ann Miller number in ‘Small Town Girl’ (1953) called ‘I Gotta Hear That