Movies 'Til Dawn Blog

DEAN & JERRY UNPLUGGED

I’ve never made it through an entire Martin & Lewis movie but their nightclub-style routines are precious to me. They usually closed their ‘Colgate Comedy Hour’ shows with a free-wheeling, mostly unscripted rampage like the above which was performed on a local Los Angeles telethon in 1952. Their untethered energy

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WEEKEND STOOGEFEST

‘I Can Hardly Wait’ (1943) is the 73rd short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Monday, March 15 through Thursday, March 18, 1943 and was released on Friday, August 13th of that year (the 225th day in the Gregorian calendar). I think the

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‘THE LETTER’–1929

Above I’ve posted the Jeanne Eagels starring vehicle ‘The Letter’ from 1929. Click here to read my post from earlier this week about Eagels tragic life and brilliant career. The movie is well worth watching and only runs 60 minutes. In my collection of antique New Yorker Magazines I found

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KIM NOVAK MEETS JEANNE EAGELS?

Yesterday I posted the excellent final scene of legendary stage star Jeanne Eagels’ only surviving film ‘The Letter’ (1929). Today lets watch a very good breakdown scene from the 1957 Kim Novak-starring biopic ‘Jeanne Eagels’. The movie is largely fictionalized which is a shame–Eagels real life was filled with so

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JEANNE EAGLES–‘THE LETTER’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FPJDHpXk_I Jeanne Eagels was a Broadway star of the 1920s whose short and lurid life became the stuff of legend before ultimately being totally forgotten. There was a heavily fictionalized 1957 Kim Novak biopic (appropriately titled ‘Jeanne Eagels’) which delved into some–if not all–of the dark aspects of her life

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‘GIANT’ FIGHT; RIP GEORGE STEVENS

Let’s closed ‘fight week’ with another George Stevens directed fight sequence. Earlier this week we watched his superb fight scene from ‘Shane’ (which took place in a bar). The day before we caught the fight from John Sturges ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (which took place in a diner that

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THE EXORCIST OF FIGHT SCENES

In 1980 (or thereabouts) I saw William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Ninth Configuration’ on the Z Channel, LA’s now legendary first run cable channel which featured lousy prints of new-ish movies. I was perhaps fifteen at the time and was so perplexed and mesmerized by this one-of-a-kind film that I promptly

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BARS ARE FOR FIGHTS: ‘TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE’

If you’re going to get into a fight, why not combine it with some drinking? It will certainly make the idea of fighting seem more rational than if you were sober. Which brings us to ‘fight week’. On Monday we watched a fight in a diner (which more than likely

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‘SHANE’–THE BAR FIGHT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4X24dPPg-8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U_jzOepc8o Yesterday we watched the excellent fight scene from “Bad Day At Black Rock” in which an aging, one-armed Spencer Tracy kicks martial arts ass. Today we’ll watch what I consider to be the Grandaddy of all fight scenes, George Stevens virtuoso bar fight from ‘Shane’. I first saw ‘Shane’

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BIG FIGHT AT BLACK ROCK

Much as I deplore seeing people physically fighting in real life–it’s always such a jarring and disgusting sight–I LOVE a good fight scene in a movie. Let’s watch a few this week. First up is this fabulous sequence from ‘Bad Day At Black Rock’ in which Spencer Tracy (who has

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