A couple of days ago I posted a reel of 1970s TV commercials. My sense was that the 70s saw an upturn in the humor and style of commercials as opposed to the style of the 50s ads which were largely straight and often painfully earnest and the 60s which
What do Ann Miller, Roy Scheider and Bing Crosby all have in common? The answer: commercials in the 70s! While Ann and Bing were very much known and recognizable, Scheider appears to have been just an everyday lucky actor who got a much sought-after gig doing a Folger’s Coffee commercial–I
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
‘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
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
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
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
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
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
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