‘Fox Movietone Follies of 1929’–sometimes referred to as ” Movietone Follies of 1929 and The William Fox Movietone Follies of 1929–is a lost film. Or is it? Wildly successful upon its release in the spring of 1929–a year of true American madness, peaking that summer and soon to collapse in the fall–the film
Above I’ve posted actual footage of the premiere of Howard Hughe’s 1930 World War 1 aviation epic ‘Hells Angels’. And below I’ve posted a recreation of the event in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant Hughes biopic ‘The Aviator’ (2004–ish). The real event is shockingly huge in scope—just the lit-up sign advertising the
Here’s an astonishing four minute reel of outtakes from ‘Hells Angels’, saved apparently by accident and carefully preserved and lovingly restored. I can’t begin to tell you how rare it is to see outtakes from a film this early–movie outtakes began to be saved in the mid-thirties as a result
Yesterday we began a weeklong look at Howard Hughes’ landmark 1930 World War 1 aerial epic ‘Hells Angels’ by viewing the film’s brilliantly achieved air-born climax. Today we hit the ground with a resounding thud and move from the astoundingly impressive to the astoundingly awful, with a two-part scene set
The saga of Howard Hughes epic World War 1 film ‘Hells Angels’ (1930) has been well documented–if you don’t know it then this Wikipedia entry does a good enough job of giving you the basics. Essentially, the young Texas millionaire/aviator was infatuated with the movies from a young age and
Clearly I’m having a hard time with this being the NFL off-season. So I began today with the above compilation of disastrous football plays of yore and I must admit to feeling much better as a result. (Since it’s the NFL that compiled the clips, they make it unnecessarily hard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNnDaNSAog Apropos of Monday and Tuesday’s posts, which showed fights breaking out during baseball games as well as at the end of a boxing match, I was going to post a reel of NFL football fights. But isn’t that redundant? After all, the whole point of NFL football is to
Athlete’s are athletic types, as we know. And athletic types often express themselves athletically. Hence the occasional meltdown in professional sports, wherein an organized game of athletic endeavor devolves into a street brawl that can’t be contained. Witness the above 1960 boxing match as captured by British Pathe, featuring a
Early talking films are invaluable relics of a dead civilization–namely the 1920s. The acting, pacing, diction, style and behavior are as incomprehensible and different from anything we now consider normal as sitting around a cave might be with its cro-magnin inhabitants. The movies aren’t really useful anymore to us in
Okay, so it’s not more bondage-from-old-movies footage. But the named ‘Django’ and the word ‘Unchained’ actually do belong with each other thanks to a repulsive Quentin Tarantino film called ‘Django Unchained.’ Thus my excuse for moving from chained women to Django Reinhardt. Above is a remarkable short film of the