Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

HITCHCOCK TALKS ‘ROPE’

Continuing this week’s Leopold and Loeb theme, here’s a clip of Alfred Hitchcock on The Dick Cavett Show’ discussing, among other things, the long-take method of the movie that I described in yesterday’s post. Far from the forbidding figure we sometimes think of him as, Hitch is amusing, droll and

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‘ROPE’–THE CLIMAX!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggnZ-2Ns54 Welcome bac;k to Leopold and Loeb week. On Monday I posted Henry Fonda’s tour de force performance as Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who successfully kept Leopold and Loeb from being executed. Yesterday we watched the trailer of the L&L inspired movie ‘Compulsion’. Today lets watch a very impressive long-take

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‘COMPULSION’–THE TRAILER!

Yesterday I posted about Meyer Levin’s novel ‘Compulsion’, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case that rocked the world in 1924. The novel was turned into a play by Levin and then into a movie produced by Darryl Zanuck and directed by Richard Fleisher. Now I’m impatiently waiting for

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DARROW/FONDA/WELLES &…ELLROY?

What do Clarence Darrow, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and James Ellroy have in common?The answer is ‘Compulsion’, the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin based on the infamous murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 killed a 14 year old boy named Bobby Franks simply for the

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WEEKEND STOOGEFEST

‘Crash Goes The Hash’ (1944) was the 77th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures Corporation. It was photographed from Monday, October 11th through Wednesday, October 13th, 1943 and was released on Friday, February 4th, 1944 (the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar). This

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COMMERCIALS IN THE 70s

What do Ann Miller, Roy Scheider and Bing Crosby all have in common? The answer: commercials in the 70s! While Ann and Bing were very much known and recognizable, Scheider appears to have been just an everyday lucky actor who got a much sought-after gig doing a Folger’s Coffee commercial–I

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DEAN & JERRY UNPLUGGED

I’ve never made it through an entire Martin & Lewis movie but their nightclub-style routines are precious to me. They usually closed their ‘Colgate Comedy Hour’ shows with a free-wheeling, mostly unscripted rampage like the above which was performed on a local Los Angeles telethon in 1952. Their untethered energy

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WEEKEND STOOGEFEST

‘I Can Hardly Wait’ (1943) is the 73rd short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Monday, March 15 through Thursday, March 18, 1943 and was released on Friday, August 13th of that year (the 225th day in the Gregorian calendar). I think the

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‘THE LETTER’–1929

Above I’ve posted the Jeanne Eagels starring vehicle ‘The Letter’ from 1929. Click here to read my post from earlier this week about Eagels tragic life and brilliant career. The movie is well worth watching and only runs 60 minutes. In my collection of antique New Yorker Magazines I found

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KIM NOVAK MEETS JEANNE EAGELS?

Yesterday I posted the excellent final scene of legendary stage star Jeanne Eagels’ only surviving film ‘The Letter’ (1929). Today lets watch a very good breakdown scene from the 1957 Kim Novak-starring biopic ‘Jeanne Eagels’. The movie is largely fictionalized which is a shame–Eagels real life was filled with so

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