Here’s a neat little four minute clip reel of 1920s New York City footage, most of it focusing on Times Square at night. The clip selection is random and a bit wonky but anything about 1920s New York City is catnip to me so I’d thought I’d share it. (Apparently
In December, 1929 the above remarkable footage was shot in the Times Square Theater during rehearsals of the Gershwin show ‘Strike Up The Band’. I’ve posted this before but every so often I rewatch it and am freshly amazed at what a rare and peculiar document it is. In it,
Here’s a fabulous colorized reel of various views of Broadway in the early 1930s. The YouTube artist known as NASS is responsible for many of these urban re-boot reels, in which he colorizes the footage (with great skill), slows the frame rate down and adds a quite convincing soundbed 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
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
Yesterday I posted the excellent final scene of legendary stage star Jeanne Eagels’ only surviving film ‘The Letter’ (1929). Today lets watch a very good breakdown scene from the 1957 Kim Novak-starring biopic ‘Jeanne Eagels’. The movie is largely fictionalized which is a shame–Eagels real life was filled with so
Yesterday I posted a short film from 1935 called ‘Broadway Highlights’. The film was part of a series of short subjects produced by Paramount Pictures in 1935 and 1936. They purported to tell the viewer, newsreel-style, what was happening on the so-called Gay White Way. In this installment, we first
‘Broadway Highlights’–subtitled ‘Intimate News Of The Gay White Way’–was a series of several short subjects produced by Paramount Pictures in 1935 and 1936. They purported to tell the viewer, newsreel-style, what was happening on the Gay White Way (as the street was dubbed in the lyric of ‘Broadway Melody’). Much
Here’s some gorgeously colorized footage of lower Broadway and the surrounding environs at the beginning of the last century. Unlike the colorized footage of the city in 1947 that I posted last week, this includes the black and white version of the same footage–it comes after the colorized stuff finishes
This extraordinary piece of film is a new one to me. It shows sections of a trolley ride–the camera mounted in the front of the car–down Broadway, from Herald Square to Union Square sometime in the very early twentieth century. Though the quality of the picture is poor, there is