When I was a kid I had a two-disc LP comprised of the audio of ‘Tonight Show’ segments. The Johnny Carson album was a big flop for some reason–Carson liked to joke about it–and I can’t remember quite why we had it since neither I nor my parents watched Carson.
Yesterday I posted about the Steve McQueen 1971 race car epic ‘LeMans’. But before that film was made there was John Frankenheimer’s ‘Grand Prix’ (1966), a movie that from the looks of the trailer is better than the McQueen movie. Having said that, I should know better to base an
I began last week by confidently stating in the first of several posts about race-car driving that I found Motorsports the silliest sport next to tractor-pulls known to man. I’ve never done a 180 on a subject as quickly as I have on race-car driving over the past week. I
I hereby nominate the above rendition of “Ol’ Man River” as performed by Frank Sinatra as the single most wince-inducing racist musical number ever filmed–and that’s saying a lot given the unfortunate preponderance of blackface minstral numbers on view throughout 1930s and 40s movie musicals. This is the climax to
In the mid-to-late 1920s Jack Benny was a star monologist in Vaudeville, big enough to be tapped to be the ’emcee’ of the MGM musical ‘Hollywood Revue of 1929’. But as the above short film ‘A Broadway Romeo’ (1931) will make clear, this is not the Jack Benny that we
Tonight there’s a screening of my 2010 movie ‘City Island’ at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, New York. I’ll be there with co-star Julianna Marguilies to do a Q&A after the screening. Since you’re receiving this at roughly the same time the screening is taking place–and since I doubt many of
I’m not usually one for YouTube music/film mash-ups but I stumbled across this one and found it so evocative and lovely that I’ve decided to share it with you. It consists of clips from the 1934 version of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage”, starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis,
We tend to think of the evolution of the title sequence as moving from a simple series of cards with actors names on them (sometimes splashed up a little with caricaturist representations of the actors), gradually becoming more dramatic, exotic or even story-heavy as the years progressed. But back in
Behold this gorgeous title sequence for ‘Two For The Seesaw’ (1962), starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley McLaine. We’re are in prime, early 60s New York City watching Robert Mitchum do pretty much nothing but walk around, staring impassively at various views and things and somehow conveying everything you can’t write
‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (1975) is on my short–very short–list of movies I can watch at any time. The credit sequence, setting up a hot New York city summer, is masterfully realized and uses very simple footage, much of which I’m guessing was culled from stock. The flavor of the various