It’s been said that MGM was where comedy went to die. Certainly that was the case with the Marx Brothers, whose final three MGM films were all abject unfunny failures. ‘Our Gang’ also suffered an ignominious end, morphing into a group of do-gooder kids who were eager to put on
Here’s another brilliant SCTV sketch from their early 80s network show, featuring a production of ‘Death of A Salesman’ starring Ricardo Montalban, Margaret Hamilton, George Carlin and DeForrest Kelly, with a special appearance by John Belushi. Rick Moranis’s wonderfully cruel spoof of Carlin in this period reminds us that Carlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idw8JLe_r_8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOG_8JZy_g Carole Lombard died tragically in an air accident on January 16, 1942, just over one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was returning from an enormously successful war bonds tour– she was in the vanguard of Hollywood stars helping to raise money for the war effort–and the
This little mini-doc appears to be a 1965 travelogue of the Austran city Salzburg, birthplace and home of Mozart. In fact, they bury the lead and about three minutes in it’s revealed to be a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of ‘The Sound Of Music.’ Charmian Carr, who played Liesl
Lets wrap up the week with the best five minutes of your day (or perhaps week). Here’s a compendium of Buster Keaton’s most extraordinary stunts, all of which are done practically (i.e.no special effects), all of them by him (i.e. no stunt doubles) and some of them truly death-defying. That
Here’s a most enjoyable pre-code item that I’d never heard of called ‘Air Hostess’ (1933), starring Evalyn Knapp and James Murray. Knapp was a popular actress of the day with two deficits; she couldn’t act, and she didn’t know how to spell her first name. But the real stars of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBn8cuks8s4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyA__0GJqhs&t=23s Here are two different short documentaries on the making of ‘Breakfast Of Tiffany’s’ that, when taken together, add up to a larger story of what making movies is (or can be) like. In the top one, the female A.I. voice tells us in no uncertain terms that the making
The excellent cinematographer John Bailey (click here for credits too numerous to mention) was also a fine film theorist. Witness this unusually perceptive break-down of the shooting style that John Huston and his cinematographer Harold Rossen (click here for credits too numerous to mention, although I will offer-up ‘Wizard Of
Here’s a one-hour doc about the making of John Huston’s 1984 adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under The Volcano’. Actually it’s less a doc than it is a collection of footage gathered on the set and put it into a semblance of order, as if it were the initial assembly of
During John Huston’s ‘Lord Of The Manor’ Ireland years (mid-1950s to mid-1970s roughly) he was known locally as John Huston, MFH. Those letters stood for ‘Master of the Fox Hunt’, a loathsome tradition that he was happy to help perpetrate. Above is a short (five minute) doc showing the great