Lets wrap up the week with the best five minutes of your day (or perhaps week). Here’s a compendium of Buster Keaton’s most extraordinary stunts, all of which are done practically (i.e.no special effects), all of them by him (i.e. no stunt doubles) and some of them truly death-defying. That
Filmed in February 1929, when sound was well on its way in, ‘Double Whoopee’ was a defiantly silent entry and one of the best of all Stan and Ollie non-talkies. The hotel setting, characters and costumes are wonderfully evocative of the 20s, complete with ‘The Prince’, a Von Stroheim-esque character
By the late 1920s, Hal Roach had struck a lucrative distribution deal with MGM, resulting in expanded theatrical exposure, better music soundtracks and a lion roaring silently in the opening credit sequence. (Actually this version of the MGM lion is a rather sullen one, who seems to be grumbling about
I’ve always loved this blessed last week of the year. It’s a week free of the calendar–no day has any significance since almost everything but basic services is closed, nobody’s at work and it’s not even a holiday. Truly a lost week–a wonderful, liberating and rare occurrence. For several years
‘Angora Love’ (1929) was Laurel and Hardy’s last silent film and, was, in fact, the last silent film released by MGM. (Garbo’s ‘The Kiss’ was the last silent feature the studio released, one month prior to this film). Shot in March of 1929, the release was inexplicably delayed until all
The Finishing Touch was filmed in November and December 1927 in an area undergoing real estate development ; its wide open spaces provide a sense of a more pastoral Los Angeles that would soon vanish as more structures filled it in. We are on location in the neighborhood of Cheviot Hills, Los
There are certain movie sets of the past that I yearn to be a visitor on. ‘Kane’, of course. ‘Casablanca’, most definitely. But if I were to choose a silent film to watch being filmed it would without a doubt be ‘Big Business’. The film is probably L&H’s most famous
How I love ‘lost films’. Especially when they resurface! There’s something so ghostly, so other-worldly, about a vanished movie that is, in fact, waiting patiently somewhere bizarre to be rediscovered. Many lost films turn up in New Zealand of all places. That’s because that was the last stop for prints
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgGhc2PglO0 ‘Habeus Ciorpus’ co-directed by Leo McCarey and James Parrott was filmed on July 16–24 and 30–31, 1928. Since the jerk-offf who posted the film disabled the sharing of it on other websites you’ll have to click the above ‘watch on Youtube’ link to see it. It’s worth the not
“Two Tars” (1928) is, for my money, the teams greatest silent film and requires two viewings. To that end, I’ve posted two different versions of ‘Two Tars’. The above is of lesser picture quality but uses the original synchronized score/effects track which is far superior to the re-do on the