It’s been said that MGM was where comedy went to die. Certainly that was the case with the Marx Brothers, whose final three MGM films were all abject unfunny failures. ‘Our Gang’ also suffered an ignominious end, morphing into a group of do-gooder kids who were eager to put on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idw8JLe_r_8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOG_8JZy_g Carole Lombard died tragically in an air accident on January 16, 1942, just over one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was returning from an enormously successful war bonds tour– she was in the vanguard of Hollywood stars helping to raise money for the war effort–and the
Here’s a short and very lovely reel of Paris in the 1930s. The colorization is quite good and serves, as always when married to old verite footage, to remind us that people and places looked an awful lot like they do now–with colors, skin tones and all the stuff that
Enjoy this beautifully restored footage of New York City in 1937. Everything was more beautiful then including the wonderfully dressed men and women whose faces you can see since they’re not walking around staring at that vertical black instrument thing in their palms…
Meet the extraordinary female British aviation pioneer Pauline Gower. A writer as well as a pilot, Gower first flew with another British aviation pioneer Alan Cobham and was fascinated by flying. In 1931 she met Dorothy Spicer, with whom she established an air taxi service in Kent. She was one of
As a vintage aviation geek (actually I prefer the term ‘propellerhead’) I’m fascinated by the stray bits of old film that turn up featuring the then dashingly modern craft of flying and what was considered cutting edge stuff. The concept of the passenger plane was astonishing and terrifying to people
There are very few Sidney Lumet movies I haven’t seen–and that’s saying a lot since he made so many movies. One is something called ‘Lovin’ Molly’ which he squeezed in between ‘Serpico’ and “Murder On The Orient Express’. (In his book ‘Making Movies’ he mentions in passing that he did
I always enjoy discovering period industrial films explaining then cutting-edge technologies–how to process Technicolor film, how to record and press 78 RPM records etc. Above I’ve posted a 1937 mini-doc explaining the process by which a radio show transmits from the studio to homes across the country. It’s quite niftily
The LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, one of the most magnificent non-rigid airships (aka ‘Dirigible’ or ‘blimps’) ever produced, made an appearance over New York City at the completion of its twenty-one day round-the-world flight (which was sponsored by William Randolph Hearst) on August 29, 1929. The city stopped in its tracks,
When I was a kid I taught myself to play piano by using the odd, ancient first-digital-music-delivery-system- ever thing known as a piano roll. Simply put, piano rolls are a rolled sheet of paper with cuts in it representing individual notes which, when run through what is known as a