https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMI4WAZnn24 Above is a ten-minute ‘doc’ about director William Dieterle, whose film ‘Jewel Robbery’ I posted about yesterday. Actually the above isn’t a doc so much as it is Dieterle’s Wikipedia entry as recited by a robot-voice. (The giveaway is when Mr. Robot says ‘David O. Selznick’ but puts a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oicmvvec4q8 Last night I attended a screening at the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood of a 1932 pre-code William Powell/Kay Francis movie that I’d never heard of, the somewhat generically named ‘Jewel Robbery’. What an unexpected delight this perfectly preserved antique was. Smart, surprising, filled with the usual saucy pre-code
‘When they met they way they smiled I knew that I was through…oh, you crazy moon, what did you do?’ With that opening line the stage is set for a song that depicts a nauseating moment for anyone who’s experienced it; the moment when the one you love suddenly fixes
The great songs of the 20s/30s/40s/50s mostly have as their subject love. True love, unrequited love, past loves etc. It’s very sweet that this was what the ‘music of the street’ focused on and, if you’re a deep fan of the so-called ‘Great American Songbook’, you’ll know the really great
On April 21st, 1954, Garry Moore–host of the TV game show ‘I’ve Got A Secret’–welcomed one of the Marx Brothers as a special guest. The gimmick was that it was Chico but that he was dressed up as Harpo, with wig, trench coat, horn, the whole number. The panelists had
Mel Brooks has a number of set-piece story/anecdotes/routines that he’s perfected the telling and performing of over the years. (His marvelous one-man show, recorded at the Geffen Theater a few years ago, is essentially a compendium of a bunch of them). But for my money the greatest of them all
Above is a four minute short made by Mel Brooks and Ernest Pintoff in 1964 called ‘The Critic’. It will explain itself, and very amusingly at that. Inspired by the work of Canadian animator Norman McClaren it features a series of curious visuals accompanied by the grumblings of an aging
Here’s a five minute snippet of a longer, quite interesting looking documentary about the great film and theater director Rouben Mamoulian. There are so many things to praise YouTube for but not requiring people to include basic information about the obscure things that they’re posting is hugely unacceptable. The only
Peter Falk’s acceptance speech for his 1972 win for ‘Columbo’ is a delight. Did he write it? I don’t know. I do know that he lived next door to Jack Benny and two doors down from Lucille Ball. And across the street from Ira Gershwin and Rosemary Clooney. And what
‘Murder Inc.’, a semi-low-budget New York production shot in 1960, would likely not even be a cinematic footnote today had it not been for the presence of the young, then-unknown Peter Falk playing vicious psychopathic gangster Abe Reles (a real guy–‘Kid Twist’ they called him, for some reason). Falk’s off-kilter