When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s our ginormous Magnavox console living room stereo was the center of my after school universe. In addition to my ever-growing collection of jazz LPs, a great deal of my time was spent listening to comedy records my parents had bought
I can see by the gently declining number of hits on my blog that my obsession with vintage aviation isn’t necessarily shared by my readers. In that case I’ll wrap the subject up (until I unwrap it of course) with one of my favorite Three Stooges shorts ‘Dizzy Pilots’ (1942).
The above video provides a neat little (five minutes) history of the laugh track. I agree with all of the points made by the, er, maker and I’d like to write more than these two sentences, but I can’t. You see, I actually did write more but then my word
Yesterday we looked at a scene from an episode of “Friends’ sans laugh track. It revealed itself to be something entirely different than intended–an innocuous sit-com scene with a few laughs instead turned into a Bergman-esque study of faces, mute interactions, intense but silent emotions etc. Today we’ll see what
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jIeUm2KAqYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlb7WNwcs_I The transition silent stars had to make to sound movies was a treacherous one, the main problem being not that they sounded funny but that their voices didn’t always match their on-screen personas. This could work in two different ways. On the one hand, the voiceless William Powell was
Here’s a wonderful clip of silent screen vamp superstar Theda Bara in 1936, speaking at the end of a Lux Radio Theater presentation of ‘The Thin Man’. Since that movie was directed by W.S. Van Dyke who was known to everyone as ‘Woody’, I assume the person who she’s speaking
Last week I posted about the incredibly strange early silent sex symbol Theda Bara. Since her films are more or less all lost, and her vampiric personality exceptionally strange from the photographs we have of her, it might be something of a surprise to hear that she was, in fact,
Laaving no turn unstoned in our look at various strange cinematic attempts at telling the story of ‘Salome’, here’s a reel of selects from one of the strangest–and most eerily lovely–of all silent films. I speak of the Russian actress Alla Nazimova’s 1923 ‘art’ version of the tale. It isn’t
Yesterday we saw fragments of the lost 1918 version of ‘Salome’ starring Theda Bara. Today we jump ahead thirty-five years (it feels like thirty-five centuries) to the 1953 version starring Rita Hayworth. Above I’ve posted the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ scene which was choreographed by Valerie Bettis, a well
The story of Salome, her father King Herod, her passion for John the Baptist, his rejection of her which somehow leads her to do a suggestive dance that arouses her stepfather (I think) to grant her whatever she wishes which turns out to be John the Baptist’s head on a