Yesterday I posted about the Steve McQueen 1971 race car epic ‘LeMans’. But before that film was made there was John Frankenheimer’s ‘Grand Prix’ (1966), a movie that from the looks of the trailer is better than the McQueen movie. Having said that, I should know better to base an
I began last week by confidently stating in the first of several posts about race-car driving that I found Motorsports the silliest sport next to tractor-pulls known to man. I’ve never done a 180 on a subject as quickly as I have on race-car driving over the past week. I
I hereby nominate the above rendition of “Ol’ Man River” as performed by Frank Sinatra as the single most wince-inducing racist musical number ever filmed–and that’s saying a lot given the unfortunate preponderance of blackface minstral numbers on view throughout 1930s and 40s movie musicals. This is the climax to
It’s hard for me to think of the 1990s as ‘period’. That was the decade in which I turned 30 and began having a professional life (of sorts) and feels to me relatively recent, not that far in my past. Of course that was thirty years ago–THIRTY YEARS AGO–and the
Here’s a reel of alternately funny, scary, disgusting or disturbing TV ads from the golden 80s. Lots of Cocaine and AIDS nostalgia, of course, and Brenda Vaccaro shilling for Tampons while inhaling through an iron lung in between sentences is pretty messed up. Cosby makes an appearance, natch, and a
A mere five years before portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt in the network mini-series ‘Eleanor and Franklin’, Edward Hermann portrayed “one of the country’s leading bachelors” in the very amusing Panasonic Stereo commercial posted above. We are deep in the early 70s groove here and Hermann’s portrait of the era’s swinging
The above 1973 commercial for a Pioneer home stereo system plays more like a current day SNL parody of a 1973 Pioneer home stereo system commercial than the real thing. Yet it’s the real thing. Did we really look, act and talk like that? The early 70s are becoming as
In the mid-to-late 1920s Jack Benny was a star monologist in Vaudeville, big enough to be tapped to be the ’emcee’ of the MGM musical ‘Hollywood Revue of 1929’. But as the above short film ‘A Broadway Romeo’ (1931) will make clear, this is not the Jack Benny that we
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmD7jeIEkfg (NOTE: HIT ABOVE ‘PLAY ON YOUTUBE’ BUTTON TO WATCH VIDEO. THE GUY WHO POSTED IT APPARENTLY THINKS HE OWNS IT). When I was a kid in the early 70s getting into jazz and old movies, two great revivals were taking place. One was The Marx Brothers revival, which began
What kind of crap foods were people eating half a century ago? Consult the nifty little reel of commercials posted above to find out. Pizza rolls? Rice a Roni? Jello cheesecake anyone? Don’t mind if I do! The weird inclusion of a shaving cream ad at the end of the