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
It’s Friday so guess who you get to have a visit with!.Click above and have a fab weekend. And think of me on Sunday as I celebrate my 60th trip around the sun. I’d do the same for you, you know…
Though by no means a bad movie, The Marx Brothers 1938 “Room Service” is not a particularly good one–it’s a curio at best. Originally a Broadway play which they had nothing to do with, it was adapted for the movies with them being wedged into it, filling roles that for
It’s Friday which is Ernie Kovacs time as far as we are concerned. Today I offer up his ‘kitchen symphony’, a fascinating and somewhat disturbing exercise in joining the movements of inanimate kitchen objects with the space-pop music of the master Esquival. The video looks amazing–the actual texture of it,
There is simply no more entertaining poker scene ever filmed than the above match-up between Paul Newman and Robert Shaw in ‘The Sting’ (1973). Newman commands the scene from the moment before he enters the room–he takes a beat, exhales and preps himself to go on stage like any good
Yesterday I posted a poker game featuring a cheating W.C. Fields. Today it’s the Three Stooges turn. This is from ‘Goofs and Saddles’ (1937) and features Curly singing that inane little soprano humming song (the lyrics are: ‘lo-lee-lo…la lee la…lo-lee-lo…la lee la…) that always indicates his faux innocence or distractedness.
I must admit to a complete lack of interest in the annoyingly retro-cool game of Poker. For me Poker belongs to the same crowd that reads Cigar Aficionado, professes to like small-batch Bourbon and Scotch and makes a big deal about betting on the Kentucky Derby. Having gotten that off
Continuing our Friday Ernie Kovacs posts, here’s Kovacs most famous routine–The Nairobi Trio performing ‘Solfeggio’. Even if you’ve seen this before–and chances are that you have–it remains weirdly delightful and beyond definition. As always with Kovacs, the ‘meta’ of it all is also fascinating–how did he describe this routine to
Here’s the rather original first trailer of ‘The Thin Man’ (1934) starring…well, if you read this blog I’m pretty sure you know who played Nick and Nora Charles. It uses a rather striking ‘book-end’ gimmick–William Powell doubles himself and Nick Charles in a split screen in which Nick stands within
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