From the moment the camera was invented, the desire to photograph erotica of any and all sorts came into being. Pornography in cinema goes back to the turn of the century and while much of the film is lost (but documented orally, so to speak) certain specimens survive that cannot
One of the biggest hits of the 1927 Broadway season was ‘Good News’, a musical that was the quintessential 20s rah-rah football celebration. As an artifact, the 1930 film adaptation is priceless due largely to the poor quality of the filmmaking. As you’ll see above in the show’s most famous
Behold some fascinating looks at football of the 1920s and 30s and note how incredibly similar this ancient reel of highlights is to a Sunday morning Fox NFL Pre-Game show. Indeed, the entire game seems largely not to have changed much at all from the game we know now, except
On August 18th and 19th, 1941, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Salzburg, Austia, to discuss the progress of the war which the US had yet to officially enter. Hitler’s personal pilot, one Hans Baur, was also an amateur movie photography buff and shot color footage of that Monday
Welcome back to Fascism Week on this blog. Today we present a short reel of color footage of Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s. The city looks beautiful but the preponderance of Nazi flags of course reminds us that things were what they were. The big takeaway here is that
Yesterday I posted a Fox Movietone newsreel depicting Hitlers inaugural event in 1932. Is it possible to continue the theme of Fascist takeovers (which for some reason seems to be on a least a few people’s minds) but on a less somber note? The answer is yes–sort of. Behold the
If the timing of my posting of this fascinating Fox Movietone newsreel seems heavy-handed, well, we live in awfully heavy-handed times. Watch as Adolf Hitler comes to power, addresses his crowds, cordially greets his new fellow government wonks and listen as the assumption is made that he seems willing ‘to
There are certain movie sets of the past that I yearn to be a visitor on. ‘Kane’, of course. ‘Casablanca’, most definitely. But if I were to choose a silent film to watch being filmed it would without a doubt be ‘Big Business’. The film is probably L&H’s most famous
“Hats Off”, a silent 1927 Laurel and Hardy comedy, is a lost film. It was last seen in Germany in 1930, where it presumably retired itself to the countryside and hopefully didn’t wind up a victim of the coming war. Why the film vanished is a mystery–there are no other
Yesterday I posted five hours of radio programming of a local Washington DC station in 1939. I find these non-dramatic radio broadcasts particularly evocative of the era and the above is no exception. It’s a broadcast from 1943 that aired on Christmas Eve as a Christmas special for those home