Movies Til Dawn

For years Laurel & Hardy's 1930 short comedy "Brats" has been a source of utter fascination and wonderment to me. This four character film is enacted by two actors only--Stan and Ollie, natch--playing themselves and their sons. Without the aid of trick photography (which didn't exist yet), the film devises ingenious ways to show the boys and their little boys together and seperately in a variety of scenes, all of which take place in a house (presumably Ollie's though I don't know why I presume this) one night while the wives are presumably out for the evening. (Again, I don't know why I presume this--perhaps L&H's wives both deserted them and the children, leaving the boys to be early single-parent householders). Clearly the film required two sets: one of the house in which the adult scenes take place, and a reproduction of parts of that house suitably overscaled so that Stan and Ollie can appear to be a third of their actual size. The cunning ...

Herewith the second half hour or so of "Emergency Ward", a 1962 Dupont Show Of the Week. Dig the final shot of the film. Dig the crazy doctor/nurse cocktail party. Dig Dr. Mulnar saving a life. I know the networks are currently all competing to reproduce the success of "Mad Men" with 60's era shows--"Pan Am" and "Playboy Club" are the ones that got picked up. (Neither pilot is very good, by the way--"Pan Am" is beautifully shot but the characters uninteresting and "Playboy" just plain crappy). Why not do an "E.R." in period? This film could serve as a template for such a show. Unfortunately the above mentioned shows will almost certainly fail leaving the networks with zero interest whatsoever in ever doing a period show again. Until somebody else does and it's a success...   Subscribe in a reader

Welcome to a hot summer's evening in New York City in 1962. The setting: Bellevue Hosptial. It don't get more glamorous. We are in the "EMERGENCY WARD"--which is the name of the documentary film that my father, Frank De Felitta, shot during that sweltering summer of '62 and which is posted, in part, below. The film is a fascinating look at a single intern and a typical night in his life. Of course it wasn't shot in a single night but over a course of weeks. The reason, according to my father, is that the mandate from NBC--the network who commissioned the show--was to show an intern losing one patient and saving another. This didn't happen every night. It barely happened that summer. But after weeks of arduous shooting and waiting and becoming a serious annoyance to the staff, my father and his crew delivered. Dr. Martin Mulnar--the young, blonde Tab Hunter-ish intern who they chose to follow--first lost and then finally saved a patients life. The film wrap...