Movies Til Dawn

Long thought to be lost (and in some quarters even thought to have never existed),  "The Stolen Jools"  was an all-star short comedy shot in 1931 by the National Vaudeville Artists (NVA) as part of their "relief work" for the American Tuberculosis Society. It stars...everybody, more or less, in a sincerely puzzling tale of Norma Shearer's jewels having been stolen and the quasi-investigation that follows--though that makes it sound like there is something resembling a plot line which I assure you there isn't. Really it is just an excuse to get all of the big Hollywood stars of the day on screen--sometimes for mere seconds--in blackout sketches designed to aid a good cause. The film was then shown in theaters across the country, accompanied by a live speaker from the NVA asking for donations to help cure tuberculosis. Since the film has nothing to do with anything medical, it's hard to compute quite how this convinced audience members--at the pit of the...

For years,  Tuesday Weld  was a major pain in the ass pussycat of the Sunset Strip, pissing off directors, gossip columnists, movie executives, turning down Warren Beatty's offer to star in "Bonnie and Clyde", having nervous breakdowns, drinking heavily, and claiming that she finally felt free because her mother died--when her mother was, in fact, alive and making an iffy living as a baby sitter to newlyweds John Astin and Patty Duke. (Mom was understandably annoyed when she heard that her famous daughter had declared her dead. At least she could have stood her the cost of the burial). By then, though, nobody thought it odd that Tuesday Weld had made up such a thing. By the early seventies, nutty Tuesday was already an old story. Back in 1959, Danny Kaye, with whom she appeared in "The Five Pennies" said, "Tuesday Weld is fifteen going on twenty-seven". God knows what prompted this assertion but one can only imagine. This was after she had sh...

Below I've posted an extraordinary piece of filmmaking from 1935. It runs just under ten minutes but is well worth your time. "Symphony In Black" is a short film featuring Duke Ellington and his band, with guest appeareances by Billie Holiday and Scatman Crothers, believe it or not. (Holiday sounds like herself but is otherwise unrecognizable from her later self--here she's young, plump and healthy looking. Crothers, later to become famous for his recurring role on "Chico And The Man" is twenty-five years old here and quite the dude. He's not credited, but he plays Billie's two-timing boyfriend.) There is no dialogue--it is a purely visual representation of an early extended work by Ellington which is in five short parts. If you run out of patience (which I hope wont be the case) or have to abort due to a previously scheduled event, skip to the last two minutes, the section called "Harlem Rhythm." The specialty dancer in this sequ...

The other day, while watching Orson Welles astoundingly good "Fountain Of Youth" television pilot, I became fixated on the female lead, the mysterious Joi Lansing. Looking her up on the internet I found that I'd written about her when this blog first came into existence. So impressed was I with my own piece that I've decided to re-post it. Joi deserves no less. Supposedly, when Welles was interviewing actresses for the pilot, he came out into the reception room, got a look at Lansing and said to his assistant: "Where did she come from? Send the other girls away." But "The Fountain Of Youth" was, alas, her only truly notable credit. Indeed her filmography is distinguished by the sheer volume of undistinguished films she appeared in. Nonetheless, nobody who has seen Joi Lansing in any of the number of execrable movies she was consigned by fate to have appeared in can quite forget her. The va-voom factor, of course, is inescapable. But there wa...

Here's a very early Vitaphone short --1927--of popular bandleader Gus Arnheim and his Ambassador Hotel Orchestra. As with the short I posted the other day, you again are simply in the environment of the 1920s, as all cinematic technique is eschewed and the band is captured, impassively, as it would be seen in a hotel ballroom. I find this stuff mesmerizing and I must not be the only one since a great organization called The Vitaphone Project has made it their mission to restore these one-of-a-kind short films, which are virtually a visual history of vaudeville and popular live entertainment of the period. Click here for a history of Vitaphone and how their early sound/film system worked. It's quite unbelievable as the sound existed on a disc separate from the film. The recording playback device was attached to the projector, which somehow synced up the mute film with the record. Oy. For many years the films, thought to be worthless, were scattered to the wind and it's ...

Having grown truly ill of seeing Arnold riding a chariot through Manhattan whenever my blog (which is my homepage) comes up...(well, it has to be somebody's homepage...) I've decided to end my self-imposed week long blogging and tweeting silence. I wish I could say that the silence was a self-enforced experiment in living off-line for awhile but it wouldn't be true. I was consumed with work--a rare enough event to be taken seriously. Also I was bored. I've always dug the Vitaphone shorts which were mostly shot in New York (Brooklyn to be exact) at the dawn of the sound era--1928 are the earliest I believe--and moving into the mid-thirties or so. They are nothing but recordings of popular stage acts of the time--shot primitively with two or three cameras which were enclosed in enormous, immovable sound-proof booths. (This leads to some hilarious early camerawork which you'll see in the short I posted below). But its this very rawness that makes the shorts so me...

Arnold Schwarzenegger's much reviled motion picture debut, "Hercules In New York", was filmed on location in 'Fun City' (as it was then being touted in an ill-fated civic-pride campaign) in 1969. Ludicrous and amateurish on all counts, the film was directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman who somehow managed to survive its wreckage (it was apparently his debut as well) to go onto a prolific career as a director in television. There are many articles out there detailing the absurdities of this cinematic treasure so I wont go into the gory detail. (To be honest, I've never made it through the whole thing.) But the part of the film that anyone who loves seeing New York City on film will truly savior is, without a doubt. the chariot chase that progresses from midtown, heading north on Sixth Avenue (past Radio City) and into Central Park. The park is decimated by the stunt car a work, which digs deep holes into what appears to be the Sheep's Meadow. I say 'a...