Movies Til Dawn

In honor of the 119th birthday of the greatest American composer of the 20th Century Duke Ellington (yes you heard me right--who the hell would you nominate anyway?) I'll be posting various Duke clips all week. The above is from the 1930 Amos and Andy movie 'Check And Double Check' and features a young Duke with a superbly tight orchestra that had already climbed its way into jazz greatness. You'll note that the trumpet section at the end uses Derby hats as a device to make that sound which...oh, Christ, what do you call it when they put hats in front of the horn and move them back and forth? Anyway, the Derby's appear to be painted gold. According to film and jazz historian Ford Sester-Neff, this is because it was feared that the black Derby's would obscure the black faces of the musicians and make everything simply look...black. So, in an uncomfortably racist act, the hats were painted gold which led Bill Cosby to eventually insist that the scene be excised ...

Here's an early 'dash cam' view of New York City Streets, shot in 1945. First we journey north on 8th Avenue between 42nd and 50th (camera on the dash looking forward). At 1:33 there's a nice glimpse of the old Madison Square Garden on the left. Next we head south on Fifth Avenue, starting at the bottom of Central Park and heading toward 47th Street (camera on the rear looking behind). The streets are weirdly smooth and well-paved, the driving careful, non-jerky and patient and the city overall has a clean, well-maintained and pleased with itself vibe. Note that the streets were still two-way, a fact that I find unbelievable when driving around Manhattan now. Where did the extra-space come from on the sides? When did they convert to one-way traffic? These questions aren't complex to answer but I don't have the time today to research them and besides lunch needs to be ordered...   Subscribe in a reader

Edward T. Stotesbury was a rich guy who worked for/with investment houses such as Drexel, JP Morgan, etc. There. That's all I know about Edward T. Stotesbury and it's a hell of a lot more than I knew twenty-five minutes ago when I first came upon the marvelous video posted above. It's raw footage of a party given at Stotesbury's Palm Beach estate in 1930, shot on a Fox Movietone camera which featured sound-on-film technology. Thus the orchestra you hear occasionally playing in the background is, in fact, a live orchestra playing at the party. We get whispers of 'What Is This Thing Called Love' and moments of the Gershwin's 'Mine', both new songs at the time. Lots of nice clothing. Some good smoking. Lovely flapper get-ups. (We don't, unfortunately, get to see any dancing or the orchestra itself but why carp?) This footage is a true time-machine back to a genuine 'society party' of the day, something akin to the party and setting of the ...

The late (as of last week), great Chuck McCann emerged as a comic force when he began hosting his own after-school hours comedy/variety/TV puppet shows in the New York area. They had names like 'The Puppet Hotel' (WNTA-TV, Channel 13), 'Laurel and Hardy and Chuck' (where he intro'd L&H shorts), 'Let's Have Fun' (great title, don't you agree?), 'The Great Bombo's Magic Cartoon Circus Lunchtime Show' and (finally) 'The Chuck McCann Show'. Most of these aired locally on WPIX, Channel 11. Chuck's love of show-biz, which dated from his youth when his father was a musician in Vaudeville pit orchestras, encompassed not only a love of the great ones, but a delight in the seedy and failed show-biz fringe element. The two sketches posted above are celebrations of the indomitability of die-hard show-biz types who, even without talent, continue to attempt to entertain--albeit with a certain defeated air. The first is his famous ...

As I mentioned in my last post, my friend Chuck McCann (who passed away last week at 83) was, among many other things, one of the worlds great proponents of Laurel and Hardy. He was an original founding member of their fan club, the 'Sons Of The Desert', and had a lengthy phone relationship with Stan Laurel beginning when Chuck was apparently still a teen. Given his size and general demeanor, Chuck was a natural Oliver Hardy impersonator and he did a marvelous Ollie as is evidenced in the above clip (as well as in the commercial I posted yesterday). In the above clip Stan Laurel is played by Dick Van Dyke (another later life friend of Stan's) and the two do a 'Hoover Vaccum Salesman' sketch on the Garry Moore show (which was sponsored by--you guessed it--Hoover Vacuum). Once it's done, they do effectively the same sketch except this time with Chuck doing his Jackie Gleason and Van Dyke his Art Carney. Both are masterful. Perhaps my warmest memory of Chuck ha...

Chuck McCann, the heavyset, baby-faced kids-show friendly, slapstick-loving, TV commercial-regular/voice-over specialist/all around comic spirit died last week at 83. If you want to know more about this wonderfully talented man of comedy, click here. The highlights are too numerous to mention and that's not the way I want to take up time and space today. Instead, I want to share a personal reminiscence about Chuck. He and his wife Betty lived down the block from my parents in the Hollywood Hills, in a round house that I always thought (and believe I was correct in thinking) he'd purchased as a kind of comment on his signature rotund appearance. As a young-un I knew him slightly--enough to say hello while walking past his house while on my way to the school bus stop. But over the years the McCann's and my parents got to know each other better and I was pleased to be part of that new friendship. Once, in my teen years, my parents gave a party and one of the guests got lo...

In early 1962, Groucho Marx--having given up 'You Bet Your Life'--launched a new quiz show called 'Tell It To Groucho'. It only lasted a short four months and no wonder--the format was one of the dopiest in quiz show history (they flash a picture of a person or object on a screen for a quarter of a second and the contestant must guess what it is for a whopping five-hundred dollar payoff). But the real purpose, as with 'You Bet Your Life', was to give Groucho a few minutes of banter with each guest. At some point during the show's short run, the distinguished writer and oddly short Rod Serling (see yesterday's post) was a guest. Above is that rare, short segment.   Subscribe in a reader

I was watching a Jack Benny TV episode the other morning (at 4:30 AM, to be close to exact) in which Rod Serling was the special guest. The show was from 1962, the peak of Serling and 'The Twilight Zone's' fame and I was struck by a very odd thing. Serling was a little guy. I don't mean just diminutive but really small. Certainly Benny, no hulking giant himself, towered over him by what seemed to be almost a foot. I was genuinely perplexed by this as my image of Serling has always been of an authoritatively tall, suave and commanding presence. But then I realized that most of the TZ intros have him either seated (as above) or walking toward camera, emerging from  an indeterminate background space. There is nothing wrong with being 5 foot 2 inches (Serling's incredibly short height--Benny, it turns out was a relatively weedy 5 foot 9)--Serling apparently boosted himself up to 5 foot 4 with the help of lifts. I am not attempting to body shame or mock the dead. I...

Enjoy a ridiculously touching Heathrow Bears advert for England's Heathrow Airport from 1987. Petula Clark's song is accompanied by a cameo by Petula herself, though I confess I had to read the Youtube commentary to decipher where she was. This beautifully done piece of anthropomorphia is, unfortunately, undone at the last second by having the bears turn human. This was certainly the work of the insecure clients rather than the advertising agency (you can hear them, silly English accents and all: 'But the audience might think that bears are our only customers...what if they're frightened to travel as a result of the all the bears ..." etc.) If you haven't worked with Movie/TV producers, you might not believe such stupidity is possible. But let me assure you...   Subscribe in a reader

Before you read any further (assuming you've read this far) let me quickly give you fair warning that the above posted videos are a complete and total waste of time, lacking in anything remotely akin to cultural interest, intellectual rigor or even pop-culture delight. Still, I find the mid-show plugs that aired in the middle of 'Tattletales', a 1970s afternoon game show hosted by Burt Convy, so relentlessly worthless that I've been enjoying watching them for the past half hour or so. The products (forgotten alarm clocks, astro turf welcome mats, 'Stay Puf' fabric softener, cheap chocolate and Franco American sauce) are as defunct as the show. The announcers name, for the record is Jack Clark (nee Yakov Klarkinsky, if I know anything) and the whole ball of cheese is so deeply representative for me of getting home from 6th grade at 3PM and beginning my long slog of afternoon TV that I find it wonderfully charming, while offensively dopey. Apologies extended.....

Continental Airlines, of blessed memory, was always the hippest of the big bird carriers. Beginning with it's iconic 'Jet Stream' logo from the 1960s (designed by none other than Saul Bass) and continuing through its luxe and sexy planes of the 70s and 80s, Continental always struck me as the airline that would never go away, the one that would set the standard for all generations to come--a la Rolls Royce, Steinway, Viking, Bang and Olufsen etc. It was especially apparent in the truly inventive and quite hilarious commercials of the late 70s and early 80s. Above I've posted a reel containing about a dozen of the best Continental ads. Alas, Continental wasn't fated to go the distance--it merged with United Airlines in 2010 due to increased financial insecurity and lost it's name, status and brand. Instead we got the humorless American Airlines, the personality-free Delta Airlines, the erratic Jet Blue Airlines, the low-rent Southwest Airlines and the horribl...

In the years prior to the delightfully comedic Peter Sellers TWA ads of the mid 1970s that I posted yesterday (scroll down, Coprenicus), TWA had a different vision of how to present itself to the public. Above is a one-minute 'informercial' ad from 1961 featuring Miss Mary Ann Lynch in a 'day in the life of a stewardess' number. It turns out that the ad is as much for the airline as for Coca-Cola, as Miss Lynch is shown to be brazenly addicted to the soft drink. The narrator sounds like Joe Friday (could it be Jack Webb?) and the grimness of the endeavor is the exact opposite in tone than the Sellers ads. But things can always get worse and below I've posted proof of that maxim. Here is a flat-out sinister ad from 1971 that could have only sent shudders through prospective TWA flyers. Clearly the ad agency responsible was canned at some point and a new and much hipper group came in with the idea of hiring Sellers. And a good thing too. Even though he was certifi...

The great Peter Sellers picked up a little bread and butter cash doing a series of ads for TWA in the mid-seventies and the first of the above posted ads, where he plays an Italian 'Via Veneto or Bust' swinger, was one of my favorite ads of my childhood. This was around the time of the re-emeregence of the 'Pink Panther' as a movie series beginning with 1975s 'Return Of The Pink Panther'--hard to understand why the series had lay dormant for a decade. Also at this time Sellers, who'd been in increasingly strange Euro items over the previous few years and had developed a rep for seriously bizarre behavior, started appearing more frequently on talk shows and in public. Perhaps he surfaced from a depression of some sort. Or perhaps a good manager had his ear and convinced him to make himself a little more accessible, more user-friendly. I don't know. But this was the Sellers that delighted me as a kid, though he was apparently just as mystifyingly stran...

Yesterday's post featured a TWA commercial from 1974. It whet my appetite for more detailed looks at planes of the 1970s and lo--Youtube as usual came through! Above I've posted a very nice few minutes of individual shots of different cabin designs on the one-of-a-kind Boeing 747. I also found the below commercial for TWA featuring the L-1011. This is the plane that had seats that swiveled and turned into a round-table lunch/dinner set-up. I remember this from my childhood and believe the meal served was Roast Beef with Yorkshire pudding. Tonight I'm hopping on a Jet Blue flight. Don't even get me started...   Subscribe in a reader

Here's a nice little time-travel moment back to 1974. We start with CBS (or in LA KNXT) Thursday Night Movies station break (the movie we're taking a two minute commercial break from is 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'). There's a grooving commercial for TWA with good interior views of those nice big old planes that had spiral staircases leading up to the private club room (why did they discontinue those planes?) There's also a commercial for a pen. The pitchman is Jean-Claude Killy who I just learned was a World Cup Alpine Ski Racer and who can barely be understood. A Batman and Robin car commercial also makes an appearance. Covfefe!   Subscribe in a reader