Behold a rare few moments in two-strip technicolor of Mae Murray singing/dancing/impersonating a bullfighter in the 1930 movie ‘Peacock Alley’. Murray was a former Ziegfield Follies star who achieved major movie stardom in the 1920s, known as ‘the girl with the bee-stung lips’. Her career climaxed in 1925 when she
Though director Edward Buzzell was never a household name, it is nonetheless a name that is known to send shudders down the spines of Marx Brothers aficionados. Buzzell was the director of the Marx’s two worst films, ‘At The Circus’ (1939) and ‘Go West’ (1940). Far from being a workman/hack
Above is a reel containing all the various iterations of the RKO Studios logo over the years, including not only the opening logo but the different styles of the words ‘The End’ which naturally appeared at the finish of the films. Of all the studios in the heyday of Hollywood,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2J4YHuJ9Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujZP6UfkFe0 In 1928, composer Louis Alter created ‘Manhattan Serenade’, an art-deco orchestral piece designed to be recorded on what was then a long-playing Victor 78rpm disc (four minutes and forty-five seconds–almost two minutes longer than standard 78 RPM records). The piece is very much of its era–a 20s ode to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X9UEu1qJRo To my intense frustration, some self-important copyright upholder has removed all traces of the musical numbers from The Marx Brothers maiden cinematic effort ‘The Cocoanuts’ (1929) from the wilds of YouTube. Why? Why why why? Is it an Irving Berlin estate kind of thing? (Possibly). A DVD reissue kind
Yesterday I posted a wonderful and somewhat mysterious clip of Dean Martin and Don Knotts from a Dino TV special that aired on November 1, 1960. Today I’m sharing another clip from this rather obscure show featuring Frank Sinatra. It’s a parody of ‘This Is Your Life’ with Dino in
To those of us who remember the Johnny Carson incarnation of ‘The Tonight Show’, the band (or the ‘NBC Orchestra’ as they were formally known) looms as an important piece of the magical synthesis of talents that produced the greatest talk show in TV history. (If you haven’t delved into
Given that TCM is showing all the ‘That’s Entertainment’ movies today, I thought I’d post the L&H magician sequence from MGM’s all-star ‘Hollywood Revue of 1929’. The movie is as creaky and wonderful as its title and while this particular L&H routine isn’t one of their high points, it was
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDZAzkUL5B0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DunNsrvr51A&t=278s Probably the most famous of L&H’s silent films, ‘Liberty’ is an entry into the ‘thrill comedy’ genre as exemplified by the stuntwork of Harold Lloyd’s famous comedy ‘The Freshman’ as well as any number of death-defying stunts performed by Buster Keaton. Part of the machismo of the knockabout comedian
Over the past week or two I’ve been posting the amazing ‘home movie’ footage shot by eccentric dancer and enthusiastic amateur photographer George Mann of various stars he worked with on Broadway (click here for the great W.C. Fields footage from 1928). Apparently Mr. Mann went to Hollywood in 1928