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
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
Did you know that there were no regulations in place for flying airplanes until 1926? And that pilot’s liscences, control towers, flight plans, flights schools and the FAA didn’t exist? You did? I don’t believe you. I didn’t know this until watching the above very nice short doc on what
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA8wvbu8E0Qhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWawpf67rz4 It’s a little known fact that air passenger travel owes much of its origins and popularity to the legendary anti-semite Henry Ford, who developed and introduced the Ford Tri-Motor Passanger Plane in 1926. Between that time and 1933, about two-hundred of these tin beauties were produced and they were
Last month my son and I made a visit to McMinnville Oregon specifically to visit Howard Hughes’ ‘Spruce Goose’ in a museum constructed specifically to house and display that magnificent aviation folly. My interest in vintage aviation continues to grow. I’ve been collecting old New Yorker Magazines for years but
Here’s a curious piece of footage shot in the old Penn Station circa 1945. It appears to have been photographed as background footage for a very forgotten Jane Russell vehicle called ‘Young Widow’. Like so many other bits of motion picture ephemera, its real value isn’t for the reasons that
Between 2018 and 2022 (or so) I hosted my podcast, ‘Movies Til Dawn’, which consisted of me and veteran directors having conversations about…well…lots of different stuff. There was no specific formula to these conversations–I usually told the subject beforehand that we could talk about anything they felt like. Thus my
Yesterday I posted about the hard-kicking all-female big band Francis Carroll and Her Coquettes. Today we take a look at ‘The International Sweethearts of Rhythm’, who were believed to be the first racially-integrated all-female big band in the United States. Though they’ve been more or less lost to history–and that’s
.By 1958, Howard Hughes had become a recluse. His drug addictions resulting from his disastrous air crash in 1946 which I posted about yesterday were undoing him mentally, physically and emotionally. This once very public figure now cowered in a penthouse hotel suite in Las Vegas, hiding from the world, doing business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhhZqKlO6wEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1aKNy7hBV4 Airplane pilots are always quick to tell you that 99 percent of all aviation accidents are due to pilot error. This is almost a religious incantation with them–they believe firmly in ‘trusting the machine’, which I imagine is the only way to get over the insane fact that they’re