Here’s a lovely look at Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona (nee O’Neil as in Eugene O’Neil’s daughter who her dad disowned for marrying Chaplin one month after her eighteenth birthday) at their luscious home in Vevey, Switzerland in 1975. Chaplin is 86, two years away from his passing and
I was wrong about Ernest Borgnine’s age while driving his RV in the previously posted clip. He wasn’t 95 when this footage was shot. He was eighty. Well, that makes me feel a hell of a lot better. Not really. I’m still rather stunned that Borgnine piloted this behemoth (while
It’s impossible for me to trace the perambulations of my mind which somehow wound up with me landing on a video of Ernest Borgnine giving a tour of his luxury RV Bus. But here it is and it’s pretty goofy/cool. In this video, Borgnine is 95 and still ‘piloting’ (his
Philip Roth, one of my ten favorite Jewish humorists, died yesterday. Since none of Roth’s books translated particularly well to the screen there isn’t much point in posting a clip of one the movies based on his work. And his interviews were few and far between (and I imagine the
Above is the audio only of a talk Jack Benny gave at UCLA in March of 1973, the year before he died. It’s a monologue (as you might expect) in which he rambles through various subjects–humor, cheapness, Bob Hope, how he got started etc. His manner is affable and very
Or so Lawrence Welk supposedly once called it while announcing Billy Strayhorn’s immortal ‘Take The A Train’. The above is Duke’s 1943 band playing the band’s theme (as of 1941 when it was written) on a train apparently–it’s a scene from a wartime contraption called ‘Reville With Beverly” (har). The
The fine director Milos Foreman went to his reward this past April 13th in his home state of Connecticut, aged 86. Much has been written about Forman and his meticulous body of work–both during his life and in the weeks after its termination. So who needs more text about his
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3AuRaJ86dkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoNdQxkI-0w Above are two of Katherine Hepburn’s no-shows for her Oscar wins (there were four). The first is for ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’–the award is accepted by her long-time director, pal and landlord George Cukor. It’s not nearly as interesting an event as the second clip, though. In this
I have to assume that the upcoming Harvey Weinstein/Kevin Spacey/James Franco-free Academy Awards ceremony will be packed with well-meaning but uncomfortable to watch speeches about the events of the past four months and perhaps even beyond, stretching back to the day the worlds largest audience ever watched the Presidential Inauguration.
Just as watching ‘Star’ led to visiting Alexander Woolcott’s island retreat (see below), so has that detour led to today’s detour. George S. Kaufman, Broadway craftsman playright/director/theater critic/Algonquin Round Table wit, was one of Woolcott’s regular visitors, cronies, pals, co-sophisticates. In the fifties he took to appearing on network game