Movies Til Dawn

Happy 90th birthday, Frank De Felitta. I've posted the front cover of the first edition of your best known work, the 1976 occult thriller "Audrey Rose" (pan left) and I've posted the last three parts of "The World Of The Teenager", your undeservedly forgotten 1965 documentary about pre-Vietnam teenage angst in the town of Lexington, Massachusetts. A lifetime of varied, fascinating, paradoxical and always well-crafted work. I do hope somebody one day studies the many facets of your career. Other than me, natch.   Subscribe in a reader

Welcome back to "The Films Of Frank De Felitta", a look at the documentary films made by my father for NBC news in the 1960's. Posting these movies has been a real joy and--it turns out--has cost me quite a bit of money; for after posting "Mississippi: A Self Portrait" a few months ago I wound up--largely due to the internet traffic and its subsequent revelations--beginning my own documentary follow-up to that film. More on that later, however. My father is alive, well and truly happy that these films--which were clearly made with love, care and careful deliberation--are having a second life on the internet. NBC never aired them again and as far as I can tell my fathers cherished sixteen millimeter prints are the only evidence of their existence. So: here comes "The World of the Teenager". Shot in Lexington Massachusetts in 1966, the film is a fascinating and by no means square or dated look at a turning point in our culture which may or may not have b...

Here's a Stooge short from their Art Deco period--"Healthy Wealthy and Dumb". The film feels very "My Man Godfrey"/"Nothing Sacred"-esque both in its subject matter (sudden wealth bestowed upon the hoodlum depression-era trio) and in the symbolic trappings of wealth that suddenly surround them (a hotel suite in the "Costa Plenta"). I love the idea that the screenwriters--Elwood Ullman and Serle Kramer (and with those names shouldn't they really have been Pulitzer Prize winning playwright's?)--had probably just seen and soaked up the aforementioned big studio productions and decided to plug the Stooges into the zeitgest of depression era wish-fulfillment cinema. The boys enter their absurd suite wearing top hats and smoking cigars. When Larry takes a bath, balloons are incongruously floating in the water next to him. Buckets of champagne are consumed and the three golddigers next door (natch) have a pet monkey named Darwin (evolution t...

After further viewings of "Swinging The Alphabet" (yes, I do have better things to do...but what are you doing reading this, anyway?) I think I have a theory as to why Curly's close up is sung at a faster tempo. It was probably a reshoot. Perhaps after viewing the number without the Curly insertion it was determined that the song was a bit monotomous (which it certainly is...albeit in an addictive kind of way). Since there's only piano accompaniment and since the rest of the song is clearly being performed to playback (i.e. a pre-recording of the song being sung which the on-camera talent moves their mouths too) it would figure that a hasty re-take (and everything about the Stooge movies were hasty--the shooting schedules, the scripts etc.) would dispense with the pre-recording step and simply capture Curly singing "live" with a piano accompaniment behind him. Indeed when you look at the close up you can see that his mouth movements and the singing are too a...

Thanks to the fortuitous interest of my six (soon to be seven) year old son, I've been rediscovering the exuberantly crude joys of the Three Stooges, particularly the rich early-middle to middle Curly period. This runs from roughly 1937-1943--the years prior to '37 (from 1934 when they began their Columbia shorts series) are filled with interesting things but on the whole feel sluggish, spotty and present the Stooges as a not quite on their game comedy team. Having said that, there's something curiously archeological in discovering ancient finds such as "Restless Knights" and "Uncivil Warriors"--both poorly paced but interesting sketches of what the Stooges would soon "blossom" into. But truly the boys kick into gear somewhere in late '36 and peak through the end of the decade and into the early forties. Three directors handled the chores in this period more or less. Del Lord--a former Sennett Keystone Kop stuntman (so the legend goes), Ju...

What's with me? I look at the below clip and the fab chick enclosed in glass writhing away her adolescence and can only think: where is she now? Did she have children? How many? And what do they think of mom, now a sixty-something woman somewhere out there in the world?   Subscribe in a reader