Movies Til Dawn

  Subscribe in a reader What on earth was the above video made for? It's a short film in the style of a tourist-lure travelogue promoting New York. Only its point is how lousy New York is. The Youtube poster is at least ten years off in his estimation of when it was shot--he says early sixties but the cars (among other things) show it to be the notorious New York of the early 70s. The funk music helps solidify this as well as the cabbie who uses the word 'kooks' to describe the crazy people he encounters in his job. Now dig: 'kooks' was a 50s/60s word so one could be forgiven for thinking that the use of the word places the film in the early 60s. But the cabbie is at least fifty-something years old, meaning that his use of the word 'kooks' was new and fresh ten years earlier and--as is often the case with us older ones--is a stale leftover of the hip world that he remembers from his fast-receding youth. Do you buy it? Well if not, here's the ultimate ...

The toweringly talented writer-director Preston Sturges (no, I will not give credits since you must be crazy to be reading this blog if you don't know who Sturges is) appeared on screen as an actor four times. Twice were cameos in his own films ("Christmas In July" and "Sullivan's Travels"--damn, I just gave credits) and once as himself in a Paramount war-time musical ("Go over there boys and knock 'em dead for us dames!") called "Star Spangled Rhythm." The fourth appearance came in 1958 (the year before he died) in a Bob Hope movie called "Paris Holiday." As Sturges appears to have left behind no filmed (or recorded) interviews, this is our only chance to see the great man in the filmic flesh, to watch how he handled himself, what that magnificent head of hair really did when he walked around (it flounces a little) and to take in the strange sort of late 19th/early 20th century Boulevardier manner with which Sturges walke...