Dig Buddy Ebsen dancing up a storm in two clips from the 1930s. As promised last week, Friday will be graced with dance only videos henceforth, in an effort (hopefully not in vain) to drown out the dreadful noise generated around the world during the week prior. Swing it, sister!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6korx4cE1KUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGBaU0msiKA&t=569s Yesterday I posted a video showing director Mark Robson on the set of ‘Valley Of The Dolls’. Today we hear the audio of a half hour interview with director John Sturges (‘Bad Day At Black Rock’, ‘Magnificent Seven’, ‘The Great Escape’ etc.) The two men have quite a few
Bobbie Wygant was a semi-legendary local Fort Worth celebrity interviewer for a local station, KXAS. Despite her local status, she was able to get a remarkable amount of celebrities to agree to be interviewed by her, sometimes in quite sophisticated settings (she traveled to them, not they to her). In
Last week I posted several versions of talking front titles, courtesy of the Hal Roach Studios. Both movies were made in 1930 (the year Roach tried this experiment) and I confidently contended that the only Roach players that didn’t get this treatment were Laurel&Hardy. A reader wrote in to tell
Every week should end with a spirited, delightful dance number. That’s my new resolution. Which brings us to the fabulous, criminally-underrated Gene Nelson. Nelson is as athletic as Gene Kelly (and also a lot taller) and his light-hearted spirit adds an infectious quality that the often overwrought Kelly sometimes doesn’t
If you ever watched ‘Skidoo’, Otto Premingers 1968 fiasco, and made it all the way to the end then you’d have been treated to what is clearly the film’s highlight–the singing end credits, courtesy of Harry Nillson. Otto’s richly Viennese voice is heard at the beginning of the sequence (‘Before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8JKEso5a3Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LELTZmD3gWY In 1930, Hal Roach experimented with having the opening credits of some of his comedies spoken by two young women who appear to be identical twins, posed on a very nice quasi-Egyptian themed deco stage. Much like the soundtrack of the trailer I posted yesterday, this was likely another
‘The Painted Angel’ (1929) starring Billie Dove is a lost film–for the most part. Like many Vitaphone releases of those early talking pictures years, the discs of the soundtrack have survived (Vitaphone’s early sound system involved the sound on separate discs, linked to a projector which showed the mute film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0N290zPrbAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbNJHQoFxls Here’s how weirdly tuned-in to each other YouTube and I are. Yesterday I posted a short musical variety film featuring a young Jack Benny as the emcee. It got me to thinking about how different Benny’sl later persona was from the brash, unfunny young man in the film. That
Behold a very rare and significant MGM short film from 1929 called ‘The Song Writer’s Revue’. The film features a half-dozen songwriting legends–including Gus Edwards, Fred Fisher, Arthur Freed, Fred Ahlert and Nacio Herb Brown–sitting glumly at a clutch of grand pianos. Before playing examples of their own work, they’re