I’m finding these old color home movies highly evocative and vivid. Yesterday’s post was a trip from LaGuardia Airport to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Today we’re at the 1939 Worlds Fair in Queens, NY. This footage isn’t about the amazing buildings and exhibits. Instead it documents the Fair’s patrons, the
What are we to make of this delightful little color short film showing the arrival of a person at the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia Airport in the mid 1940s? The film is shot quite deliberately–a moving POV of the person entering the cab is technically adventurous though clearly
Apropos of yesterday’s post on television from the late 1940s, here’s a short and deeply primitive clip of a show from 1947 featuring Jinx Falkenberg and Tex McCreary. Stilted and goofy though it is, it proves my point from yesterday that television programming hasn’t really changed much. I mean, aren’t
Here’s an interesting reel of opening credits and set-up sequences of the shows you were likely to see if you were watching TV in the late 1940s. Television had of course been around in various forms and incarnations for almost twenty years by then, but it was in 1947-48 that
The YouTube artist known as NASS has once again worked his/her/they’s magic on some rare footage of New York City. This time we are on Park Avenue in 1951 (the newest car seen on the street is a ’51 Oldsmobile, which is how the date was arrived at). By slowing
It’s said that there is always time for one of three things: a cup of coffee, a bite of cheese, and a vintage airline commercial. Actually, that’s not really said by anyone. But a vintage airline commercial (or infomercial as is the case with the above) is a refreshing three-minute
Here’s a knockout dance number from the MGM 1947 version of ‘Good News’, featuring the great and mostly now-forgotten dancer/performer/personality/actress Joan McCracken. The original Broadway show, a big hit in the late 1920s, had long been on producer Arthur Freed’s list to adapt as a movie musical at MGM and
It wasn’t easy to become a member of the premium-level all-girl 1920s orchestra ‘The Ingenues’. As you’ll see, you not only had to be a woman who’d mastered one of many instruments that, for various reasons, were not necessarily associated with female players (saxes, trombones, tubas etc.) but you had
Here’s an astoundingly lousy Vitaphone short from 1929 featuring ‘Harry Wayman and His Debutantes’. Yes, it’s an all girl orchestra much like the one in ‘Some Like It Hot’ (‘Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters’). The only differences are 1) The leader is a guy not a woman. 2) There
Here’s an outstanding reel of home movie footage shot by Ira Gershwin featuring a veritable who’s who of 1930s cultural heroes. Much of it was filmed at the house that Ira and George shared at 1019 N. Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. (It was later occupied by Rosemary Clooney and