Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, ‘Blackmail’ (1929) was shot in both silent and sound versions, a typical one-foot-in one-foot-out practice at the time. Above is a sound test made, it would seem, to see if the voice of the lead actress Anna Ondra would be suitable for recording. As you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJQViP16lAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU6fY1wMTd4 Robert Florey is the supreme instance of a professional filmmaker whose dissatisfaction with commercial assignments led him into parallel work as an avant-garde independent. He began his career as a film critic and journalist in the early 1920s and came to some small prominence by making a very cheap
It’s always exciting for me to find glimpses of old New York captured on film at unexpected moments and I’ve got a real find to share with you today. The Florenz Ziegfeld produced 1929 musical movie ‘Glorifying The American Girl’ was filmed at the Astoria Studios in Long Island and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irSFb-DTeIs Yesterday I posted a lovely video mash-up of images (still and live) reconstructing the 1927 Ziegfeld Follies, accompanied by a twin piano arrangement of some 20s tunes taken from an Ampico piano roll. I mentioned that the twin piano act was a popular featured act in Vaudeville of the
Here’s a very well done made-for-YouTube concoction in which the style/feel/materials of Ziegfeld’s 1927 edition of his legendary ‘Follies’ show is reproduced, using stills, footage culled from various Vitaphone shorts of the era (and other musical films which I can’t identify), all set to a recording of an Ampico Piano
Here’s a remarkable piece of film. It’s the surviving five minutes from an otherwise lost 1933 film called ‘Mr. Broadway’, featuring a very young Ed Sullivan (you can see him in a couple of cutaways sitting at a table with Bert Lahr). The film is essential viewing for any devotee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwk0kwETsYIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlMxXrRCMAI Above are two clips depicting Hollywood premieres of the late 1920s. The first is the ‘real thing’–some marvelous, restored black&white newsreel footage of two different premieres, ‘Broadway Melody’ and ‘The Divine Lady’ (both 1929). The second clip is the opening sequence of ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ (1952), which is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5SbtV6zGpI Apropos of last week’s post about the legendary Hollywood hotel/lodge/bungalow village ‘The Garden Of Allah’, here’s a look at the beautiful model of the place that resided in the Lytton Savings Bank on the site where the GOA stood before being demolished in 1959. I remember seeing this model
The famous West Hollywood bungalow court ‘The Garden Of Allah’ was on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights in West Hollywood and was host to all kinds of east coast Hollywood transplants for well over thirty years (specializing in alcoholic self-loathing Broadway playwrights and their ilk). Click here
See yesterday’s post for some excellent home movie coverage of the Times Square of the 1960s. And see today’s for basically the same thing but colorized. Actually the above home movies focus more on buildings than people–and while the buildings were more interesting to tourists then, it’s the people that