For our end of the week musical enjoyment we have a lovely video of Count Basie and Oscar Peterson sitting at duel Bousendorfers and conversing about piano playing. Basie is as sly and monosyllabic as his playing, while Oscar is as voluble and hyper-articulate as his playing. There are any
Yesterday I posted a clip of a pissed-off Burt Lancaster at a press conference. Today we’ll temper that a bit by looking at a much more cordial Burt in a 1963 interview, done shortly after the release of ‘The Leopard’. He talks about directors, a species he was notably hard
Boy, did Burt Lancaster not want to be in the room with the reporters asking him questions as seen in the above video. What was the occasion? I’m not sure but the year is 1989, which is when “Field of Dreams’ was released and Lancaster had a bit of a
Here’s a ten-ish or so minute clip of John Huston being interviewed by Dick Cavett sometime in the early 70s. It’s always a pleasure to listen to Huston’s mellifluous baritone and marvel at his magnetism. And Dick, as usual, is erudite, goofy and quick in a very Ivy-League sort of
All week I’ve been posting the dance/vocal stylings of William Frawley aka Fred Mertz. Monday’s post was from the mid-1930s. Today’s is a little over twenty years later but Frawley’s style remains impeccably his own. I don’t recall the story of this particular ‘I Love Lucy’ episode but judging by
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1peQ5iagq7shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoBVNmZS9wI During the early days of World War 2, the phrase ‘Keep ‘Em Flyin’” was used on propoganda posters to encourage voluntary enlistment in the Army Air Corps. So popular was the phrase that it became the title of a 1941 Abbott and Costello vehicle. Above is a strange hybrid
In 1941 my father was an Army Air Corps grunt who was enlisted for flight training in the event a war were to occur (it was still several months prior to December 7, but as he used to tell me ‘the war was in the air’). There were three training
Apropos of yesterday’s killer Bugs Bunny musical number from ‘Hillbilly Hare’, here is Bugs dancing up a storm in ‘Slick Hare’ (1947). Watch as Bugs morphs into Carmen Miranda only to shed his new identity upon getting a taste of audience adulation. That and Elmer Fudd’s cleaver keeps him dancing.
Here is one of my go-to remedies when feeling dismayed or depressed or just crappy in general–the square dance scene in Bugs Bunny’s ‘Hillbilly Hare’. The cartoon provoked both controversy–cuts for violent content were required when it first appeared on television– and rapturous responses like the one below. Enjoy the
I’ve been reading Scott Berg’s mammoth biography of Charles Lindbergh, a man whose life was truly a dramatic whirlwind in multiple acts. Yesterday I took the plunge and dove into the dreadful story of the kidnapping and murder of his twenty-month old son, Charles Jr. in 1932 and the ensuing