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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIiZuAVZH4whttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SkYdsvgOpw Here are two videos demonstrating Bob Fosse’s stratospheric performance talent, which was largely ignored or forgotten once his stratospheric choreographing and directing talent erupted for all to see. Though he began as a performer, Fosse, always super show-biz savvy, must have seen that he was never going to be
This is pure YouTube at its best. Apparently knowing of my admiration for the opening sequence of ‘All That Jazz’ which I posted yesterday, YT dredged up this extraordinary seven minute reel of raw footage of Fosse directing that very sequence and greeted me with it this morning. It must
Here’s an outstanding reel of home movie footage shot by Ira Gershwin featuring a veritable who’s who of 1930s cultural heroes. Much of it was filmed at the house that Ira and George shared at 1019 N. Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. (It was later occupied by Rosemary Clooney and
Here’s an extraordinary piece of film. Apparently in December 1929, footage was captured of George Gershwin at rehearsals of his show ‘Strike Up The Band’, complete with chorus girls and a pre-rehearsed patter with star comedians Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough. We see George playing the piano as well as