Movies Til Dawn

The below is one of the saddest stories I've ever run across in the annals of show-biz. Actually it's pretty fucking sad even without the show-biz angle. First, behold the below video, a wonderful 1963 "Hollywood Backstage" newsreel that covers a party thrown by Jerry Lewis and his then-wife Patti. The theme, "Think Pink", was chosen because Mrs. Lewis was pregnant. Having previously birthed four boys (the Lewis' also adopted a fifth), Jerry was determined to have a little girl. A man who clearly sets out to get what he wants, he designed a splashy Hollywood party that would collectively, I suppose, drum up enough karma to insure that what was inside Patti Lewis's tummy was, indeed, of the feminine persuasion. Or so I suppose the thought process went. Not too much pressure for the wife, right? Jerry even served pink cake and ice cream--topped with caricatures of Jerry, natch. Present at this very groovy event are Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante, Rory...

"You've just had a train wreck, son" intones Jerry Lewis (channeling J.J. Hunsecker?) to a young imitator in a manner so chilling, so deadly, so filled with a cobra's poisonous bile (if cobra's have bile) that I'm not sure the young man has yet to recover. Certainly I haven't. And I'm only watching the video. This lovely video--homemade and probably from about ten years ago--shows a teenager named Ed who volunteers to jump on stage with Jerry and do an imitation of him. Jerry is game. The kid clearly has moxie. But his choice of material--the MDA anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone"--doesn't sit well with Buddy Love. I think the crappiest part of this moment is the gratuitous insult after the teen is dismissed from the stage. And if you listen to his imitation (he gets the first three notes out) he's actually really good. At the tag end of this brief moment of shame, I think I hear the kid in the audience throwing out a Jerry sc...

The critic and historian, Martin Gottfried, in his excellent biography of the demonic Broadway producer Jed Harris, notes that the 1920's were "times of floridity, of vamps with panthers on leashes, of Rudolph Valentino and Bela Lugosi...in the 1920's it was not so odd to view and even live life in purple." This is one of the finest--and spookiest--evocations of any era that I know of, in large part because it looks beyond the usual "gin some and sin some" party-time, Wall Street-booming, Charleston-dancing image that we generally assign to the period--the "Ain't We Got Fun" racoon coats at the Harvard/Yale game bit. Indeed there was much about the 1920's, as reflected in its popular culture, that was exceedingly dark, strangely perverse, masochistic and sadistic to a degree that it may be hard for us to understand today. For in the twenties, the lines between sex and death, booze-fueled fun and booze-fueled collapse, living life on ...

Question: Name the movie director who began his career as a bacteriologist, became a set designer for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, and directed two groundbreaking end of the silent era/beginning of the sound era works before abandoning his film career to take up anthropology, becoming one of the world's most respected figures in that fascinating field? If you guessed Paul Fejos, you're correct (and something of a geek as well). This fascinating figure's life is worth more than a cursory glance    In addition to his varied and always distinguished careers, Fejos married journalist Inga Arvad, whose sexual resume is fascinating--she "appeared" with Hitler at the Summer Olympics in 1936, then slept with John F. Kennedy in 1941, leading the FBI to begin their file on him. She later married the actor Tim McCoy, if that's your idea of a good time. Below I've posted two clips from Fejos' groundbreaking (and long thought to be lost) film of the gr...