https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiWpmprZDrAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufop72Q74fA Here are two deleted scenes from ‘Cafe Metropole’, a 1937 20th Century Fox musical (sort of) starring Tyrone Power, Loretta Young and Adolphe Menjou. Both feature tap-dancing legend Bill Bojangles Robinson, who already had made screen history by dancing with Shirley Temple in another Fox movie ‘The Little Colonel’
This fascinating footage appears to be Jerry Lewis rehearsing a bit for his nightclub act in front of a live crowd–though they’re not the regular audience but rather a ‘test’ audience. Jerry was known to shoot footage of himself in order to play it back and see what things were
Yesterday in my post about New York City’s Elevated Trains, I mistakenly added 10th Avenue to the many streets that once hosted El trains. Actually, 10th (and 11th) Avenue hosted something much more interesting (and grim) than an El train. For many years before the construction of the High Line
Our ‘transportation series’ (see Tuesday’s post) continues with this marvelous ten-minute short film about the history and vanishing of New York City’s elevated trains. In the first half of the twentieth century the city was jammed with El trains–2nd Ave, 3rd Ave, 6th Ave, 9th Ave, 10th Ave all had
After a year-long hiatus my podcast ‘Movies Til Dawn’ has returned to the ether-waves, with none other than Orson Welles as my first post-reboot guest. How did I make contact with Orson, you ask? Via Ouija Board perhaps? No. I won’t even pretend that I interviewed the man (the way
The YouTube artist known as NASS has posted another of he/she/they’s wonderful updated urban history videos in which, by use of colorization, frame rate adjustment and an added soundbed, an old piece of documentary film becomes a most convincing and seductive new journey through the past. This is New York
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nFupfJk4T8 Yesterday we visited Vienna in 1896. (And on Monday we visited London in 1931. It’s been that kind of week.) Today we’ll watch an AI colorization of a few mintues of ‘Berlin–Symphony Of A Metropolis’, a documentary film by Walter Ruttman shot in 1927. Click here for an excellent
In June of 1896 (127 years ago this month!) the Lumière brothers recorded this footage of simple street life in Vienna when they travelled to that city to demonstrate their invention, the Cinématographe. No other information is needed to enjoy this transportive photographic record of a world that comes thrillingly
Above is a fascinating British Pathe newsreel covering a gala event of some sort (a charity ball perhaps?) held at the Cafe De Paris in London in 1931. The impossibly elegant crowd are clothed in white tie and gowns. The dance floor is so overcrowded as to make one squirm
The YouTube artist known as NASS–who specializes in taking old footage of urban centers and colorizing and updating them–has posted a splendid eight-plus minutes of various places in London in the 1930s. His/Her/They’s work with color is beyond impressive–it never feels colorized, only real and lush. This is the London