Movies 'Til Dawn Blog

SKYSCRAPER SYMPHONY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJQViP16lAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU6fY1wMTd4 Robert Florey is the supreme instance of a professional filmmaker whose dissatisfaction with commercial assignments led him into parallel work as an avant-garde independent. He began his career as a film critic and journalist in the early 1920s and came to some small prominence by making a very cheap

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DRIVING AROUND GRAND CENTRAL IN 1929

It’s always exciting for me to find glimpses of old New York captured on film at unexpected moments and I’ve got a real find to share with you today. The Florenz Ziegfeld produced 1929 musical movie ‘Glorifying The American Girl’ was filmed at the Astoria Studios in Long Island and

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ZIEGFELD FOLLIES OF 1927 (SORT OF)

Here’s a very well done made-for-YouTube concoction in which the style/feel/materials of Ziegfeld’s 1927 edition of his legendary ‘Follies’ show is reproduced, using stills, footage culled from various Vitaphone shorts of the era (and other musical films which I can’t identify), all set to a recording of an Ampico Piano

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‘MR. BROADWAY’–AN ED SULLIVAN JOINT

Here’s a remarkable piece of film. It’s the surviving five minutes from an otherwise lost 1933 film called ‘Mr. Broadway’, featuring a very young Ed Sullivan (you can see him in a couple of cutaways sitting at a table with Bert Lahr). The film is essential viewing for any devotee

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TIMES SQUARE–THE COLORED 60s

See yesterday’s post for some excellent home movie coverage of the Times Square of the 1960s. And see today’s for basically the same thing but colorized. Actually the above home movies focus more on buildings than people–and while the buildings were more interesting to tourists then, it’s the people that

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TIMES SQUARE, 4/8/66

Behold this delightful reel of home movies shot in Times Square on the above date. Theaters are showing Dean Martin as Matt Helm in ‘The Silencers’, Paul Newman as ‘Harper’ and the supposedly worst movie ever made (it isn’t but it’s pretty lousy) ‘The Oscar’ is proudly in its first–and

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BUMPING DOWN BROADWAY

On a rainy day in 1929, the Fox Movietone people mounted a camera on top of a truck and–with police escort (you can hear the plaintive wail of the siren throughout this video)–took a drive down Broadway. Bumpy though the ride proved to be, it captured a mesmerizing look at

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A PEEK INTO PROHIBITION ERA NYC

Above I’ve posted a real weirdie. It’s stock footage of West 52nd street shot sometime in the early 1930s. It has no discernible point or reason for existence. Unlike normal stock, there is little that is simply caught. Rather it is mostly staged shots of restaurant and speakeasy tasks–a guy

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TIMES SQUARE, SPRING 1931 (?)

Here’s an extraordinary reel of film documenting the sights and sounds of Times Square in 1931. It’s filmed with the then-experimental sound-on-film process as pioneered by Fox Movietone News. Thus the sounds of the streets are what you were really hearing, not added later and not professional mic’d. There are

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HARLEM, 1930s

Here is a British Pathe newsreel excursion to the exotic (to the British anyway) New York City neighborhood called Harlem. I leave it to you to have your own reaction to this footage–it seems to evoke strong responses from YouTube commenters many of whom are conflicted about how beautiful everything

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