We move from the previous two posts featuring Marilyn’s delightfully polished and alluring musical numbers in ‘Some Like It Hot’ and ‘Let’s Make Love’, to her nadir. It too is from ‘Lets Make Love’, but there are multiple issues with it that frankly make it something of an embarrassment to
Last Friday I posted the terrific ‘Running Wild’ sequence from ‘Some Like It Hot’, featuring a wildly sensuous vocal/dance performance by Marilyn and way too many cutaways to Jack Lemmon. In spite of the great praise she received in that incredibly successful film, there appear to have been those who
All week we’ve been looking at some of the extraordinary all-female orchestras of the 20s/30/40s. Let’s finish thing off with a band that never existed, ‘Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters’, from Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamonds masterful comedy ‘Some Like It Hot’. Clearly Wilder and Diamond were inspired by
.By 1958, Howard Hughes had become a recluse. His drug addictions resulting from his disastrous air crash in 1946 which I posted about yesterday were undoing him mentally, physically and emotionally. This once very public figure now cowered in a penthouse hotel suite in Las Vegas, hiding from the world, doing business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhhZqKlO6wEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1aKNy7hBV4 Airplane pilots are always quick to tell you that 99 percent of all aviation accidents are due to pilot error. This is almost a religious incantation with them–they believe firmly in ‘trusting the machine’, which I imagine is the only way to get over the insane fact that they’re
This past weekend my son and I journeyed to the little town of McMinnville, Oregon, to see what is arguably the ninth wonder of the world; the biggest plane ever built and never flown. Howard Hughes ‘Spruce Goose’ is a flying boat that was intended to be used during the
Apropos of this weeks posts on non-French, non-Greek director Jules Dassin, here’s a lovely scene from his 1960 hit “Never On Sunday’, starring his wife Melina Mercouri. In an act of immense chutzpah, Dassin–who was essentially a non-actor–cast himself as the co-lead–an American who’s visiting Greece. He’s the gray haired
Apropos of yesterday’s post about the great non-French non-Greek but somehow French and Greek American director Jules Dassin, I though I’d post the legendary twenty-five (or so) minutes silent sequence of the heist scene in ‘Rififi’. Imagine my surprise when it failed to turn up on YouTube. Instead only tidbits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk_qX2VXycEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk_qX2VXycE. This weekend TCM showed Jules Dassin’s masterful ‘Rififi’ (1955) and I began a deep-ish dive into the enigmatic man behind the name. For years he was thought by many to be French–he did, after all, direct the premiere French noir crime-drama of the 1950s. But Dassin, in fact, was
It took three days to shoot the scene in which Judy Garland performs Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s haunting and highly unusual (in form) torch song ‘The Man That Got Away’, for the 1954 version of ‘A Star Is Born’. Above is a nifty split screen demonstrating two of the