When Ted Turner began to colorize black and white classics in the 1980s the entire film buff/film history/old Hollywood community rose in a uproar. How dare he desecrate the gorgeous and historic black and white films of the past! Who was this heathen who couldn’t appreciate the true cinematic art
Color film began much earlier than most people think–it was in 1908 that Kinecolor process was first introduced. But I’m only one sentence into today’s post and already I’m getting lost in the weeds. The purpose of today’s viewing is to demonstrate a later (but still early) process called MultiColor.
Yesterday I posted a reel of trailers of a number of Marx Brothers movies. The reel failed to include trailers for their first four films and, in an uncharacteristically lazy moment, I theorized that perhaps they’d been lost. Wrong! Above is the trailer for their third film ‘Monkey Business’ (1931)
Here’s a nice little compendium reel of some Marx Brothers movie trailers. It’s by no means complete–the first four films are represented by sloppily assembled half-trailer/half-clip reels instead of proper trailers. (Possibly the original trailers were lost?) And perhaps ‘The Cocoanuts’, which dates from 1929, never had a proper trailer
Though by no means a bad movie, The Marx Brothers 1938 “Room Service” is not a particularly good one–it’s a curio at best. Originally a Broadway play which they had nothing to do with, it was adapted for the movies with them being wedged into it, filling roles that for
‘Idle Roomers’ (1944) is the 80th comedy short-subject made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Wednesday, November 17th to Saturday, November 20th, 1943 and was released on Saturday, July 15th, 1944 (the 197th day of the Gregorian calendar). It’s a good solid early-later era Curly
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
The generally accepted word on the Marx Brothers films is that they constitute a clear case of downhillism, with the first five Paramount films being their supreme achievements, the first MGM (‘A Night At The Opera’) being the most successful yet also signifying the beginning of the end, and a