To finish up our week of Gloria Swanson immersion, here’s Gloria’s appearance on Ralph Edwards ‘This Is Your Life’ from 1957. If you’ve never heard of the program the format takes some explaining. The subject was invariably a celebrity of the past and people from the persons distant life were
Today I offer two views of this week’s subject Gloria Swanson in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Above is a little reel that jams together a few obscure but interesting snippets of film–it’s a bit of a hodgepodge but I thought worth including in our loose and free-wheeling survey of La
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_XcR8noJZk The real Gloria Swanson is so different from Norma Desmond, the character she famously portrayed in ‘Sunset Blvd.’, that I’ve constructed an alternate universe explaining the discrepancy. In my alt-reality, Norma Desmond and her younger sister Gloria Desmond were a sister act in Vaudeville and came to Hollywood in
Apropos of yesterday’s post featuring a 1965 interview with Gloria Swanson, here’s a nifty little 22 minute doc about the making of Billy Wilder’s masterpiece. I’ll let the film speak for itself. The only thing missing is a discussion of the film’s original opening, shot but cut after a bad
I just found this interview with the then 66 year old Gloria Swanson, made for French television in 1965. In many ways its real value is to show what a truly deep character actress she was. I say this because the real Swanson could not be less like Norma Desmond,
Compare and contrast the animated Ann-Margaret as shown in yesterday’s Flinstone’s clip with the real deal. Above is the opening pre-credit A-M number from ‘The Swinger’ (1966), a film that delivers so much less than its title (and title sequence) promises that, if it were a vaudeville show, it would
Continuing our little remembrance of the world’s first official crooner, above is a nice profile of Rudy Vallee done for the Today Show by Boyd Matson in the early 80s. Bryant Gumble was then the host and appears—pre-face lift–at the end of the segment. There’s nothing terribly fresh in this
A couple of days ago I posted an interview with Rudy Vallee from 1984 on Skip E. Lowe’s local Los Angeles public access television show. It was the 83 year old Vallee’s last televised appearance–he died two years later after a long illness. Let’s do a little comparing and contrasting
If you’ve ever wondered where Martin Short got his inspiration for his great talk-show host character Jiminy Glick, look no further than Skip E. Lowe, a public-access legend for years in Los Angeles. Lowe was a cut-rate comic, impressionist and MC who loved Hollywood lore and entertainers. His interview show
Let’s close our reconstruction of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon with the ever popular Jerry anthem, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. Above are two videos–one of Jerry singing it on the 1987 telethon and one of Jerry rehearsing it two years later. Jerry in rehearsal is