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.
In 1960 a filmmaker named Stewart Wilensky spent the summer shooting footage of New York’s Greenwich Village which he turned into a twelve minute doc called ‘Village Sunday’ which was completed in 1961. If you were watching the film back then then you’d likely see it as a sort of
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
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
'Fright Night', Shemp's first appearance with the Three Stooges (not really but that's a long story) awaits your viewing on our Saturday Morning Stoogefest. #Comedy #FilmTwitter https://raymonddefelitta.org/saturday-morning-stoogefest-2/
Check out the best dance number from a musical nobody really wants to see--Bob Fosse and Tommy Rall's amazing duet from 'My Sister Eileen' (1955). #FilmTwitter #Dance #TCM #musical https://raymonddefelitta.org/fosse-v-rall-a-duel-in-dance/
Dig this short but deeply period drive through the Greenwich Village of the 1970s, an era you simply can't make up. #NewYork #NewYorkCity #NewYorkForever #Documentary https://raymonddefelitta.org/the-village-in-the-bell-bottom-era/
Color footage of Greenwich Village in the 1940s is today's offering on our madcap journey through the history of that venerable neighborhood. #NewYork #NewYorkCity #NewYorkForever #Documentary
https://raymonddefelitta.org/greenwich-village-1940s-edition/
Some fab footage of Greenwich Village in the late 60s--back when the FBI raided Village clubs and not Florida bed-and-breakfasts--awaits your avid viewing. #NewYork #NewYorkCity #NewYorkForever #Documentary https://raymonddefelitta.org/a-village-called-greenwich-a-view-from-the-late-60s/
