VP19
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Posts posted by VP19
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Intriguing film, with a fascinating blend of directors ad stars.
For more on the film, including info on a segment that was often (but not always) cut for TV for many years because it was deemed too racy, go to http://community.livejournal.com/carole_and_co/26161.html.
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> {quote:title=Shempetta wrote:}{quote}
> My favorite Mercer song is "And the Angels Sing", and I love the version done by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My second favorite version of that song is on the carousel at Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh!
The melody to "And The Angels Sing" was written by Ziggy Elman of Benny Goodman's orchestra, and on his "Camel Caravan" show of Jan. 17, 1939, Goodman challenged Mercer - who regularly appeared on the show -- to write lyrics for it. He did, and they were unveiled to the public on Jan. 31, sung by band vocalist Martha Tilton. It became one of Goodman's biggest hits.
I know this because I heard this last night on a centennial tribute to Mercer done on "Hot Jazz Saturday Night" from WAMU radio in Washington. The good news is that this three-hour broadcast will be available online for a week or two, though it probably won't be up until Monday. To check, go to http://wamu.org/programs/hjsn/; look for the Nov. 14 broadcast.
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I personally wouldn't be surprised to see sales go slowly, thus resulting in some sort of a la carte sales to individual films or days. That often happens with any new endeavor -- and while TCM's audience includes people familiar with film festivals, it's likely an audience not familiar with actually attending them (and I'm in that group). $500 for four days may work fine for Telluride, but not for the TCM crowd..
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In honor of Johnny Mercer, here he is with Nat Cole on "Save The Bones For Henry Jones" ('cause Henry don't eat no meat):
Johnny wasn't just a superlative songwriter, but a wonderful singer, too. Here's his version of "I Lost My Sugar In Salt Lake City," recorded on Mercer's own Capitol label in its early days:
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Just signed up for info!
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I'm a fan of Constance Bennett; she's certainly one of the great beauties of the '30s, and a pretty solid actress. Off-screen, I understand she could be a bit of a pain to work with (stories about her are legion).
The pre-Code Constance was one of the industry's highestpaid actresses and was big box office. I hope TCM shows more of those films of hers, especially from her peak era of popularity, 1930-31. Post-Code Constance fizzled for a bit, then had a brief revival in the late '30s thanks to "Topper" and "Topper Takes A Trip," in which she played sexy ghost Marion Kerby (and was a fine subject for Hal Roach's special effects whiz, Roy Seawright). To learn more about those special effects, go to http://community.livejournal.com/carole_and_co/160350.html.
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One of the more overlooked Beach Boys songs, "Let Him Run Wild"...
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I interviewed William Schallert in 2002, when he appeared in a play in New Jersey. We talked for well over an hour, and I got a splendid interview for my local newspaper. Here's a link to it:
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I recall seeing "If I Had A Million" in 1964, when I was 8 or 9, in my hometown of Syracuse, N.Y.; one of the stations showed it on a Friday night. I tuned in because W.C. Fields was in it, and I liked him. However, the station aired the full, uncut version of this pre=Code -- including an episode where Wynne Gibson portrays a prostitute who is among those inheriting a million. She uses her newfound wealth to check into a fancy hotel and sleep...alone, and we see her undressing to lingerie and stockings before going to bed. My mother, who was watching with me, hurriedly changed the channel, and I don't recall whether I got to see the Fields segment.Here's what my youthful eyes saw::
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She made quite a few of them in 1927 and '28 (and even one in early '20); in several of them she's a principal player, in others merely part of the ensemble. I've seen a few of them, but not all.
My queston regards the status of these films. Are they all in the public domain? Do all still exist? A few of them may only have copies at film archives such as UCLA's.
I'm a bit surprised that these haven't been assembled into some sort of compilation -- it would have made sense in 2008, to coincide with the centennial of Carole's birth. True, much of the humor is dated, particularly those involving black and Jewish characters, but there still are some nice gags and it's an opportunity to see Lombard evolve as an actress, training that would pay off several years later.
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I enjoy them all (as singers) -- as actors all had their ups and downs.
Where musical quality is concerned, Sinatra probably had the most sustained career of the three. His forties Columbia recordings are brilliant (and have thankfully been rediscovered over the past 20 or so years, thanks to reissues), and at Capitol, he evolved into a more multifaceted artist and defined the album as an art form (from "In The Wee Small Hours" at one end to "Songs For Swingin' Lovers" at the other). It wasn't until the 1960s that his music declined a bit, though he still had his moments.
Crosby was hugely influential in establishing modern American pop singing, a more informal style compared to the stiffer vocalists of the 1920s. Bing's early 1930s records are adventurous, innovative (at times he worked with the Mills Brothers and Duke Ellington's orchestra; Crosby was quite popular with blacks in the '30s) and worth looking for. After signing with Decca in the mid-1930s, some of the edge to his voice disappeared and he became a more all-around singer with less interesting material . But when challenged, he could still deliver the goods (take his 1956 "Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings," where he successfully invades Sinatra's turf. (It's been said Frank was inspired to become a singer after seeing Bing perform at a Jersey City theater in 1932, although Sinatra approached his singing from a slightly different direction.)
Presley had a completely different upbringing than either Crosby or Sinatra, and it showed in his Sun recordings, where country, blues and pop merged into a new kind of music; they are every bit as revolutionary as Louis Armstrong's Hot Five sides. With his contract sold to RCA (if Ahmet Ertegun had a bit more money, Elvis might have gone to Atlantic, and musical history might have been changed), Elvis became more pop-oriented (he had long beena fan of Dean Martin) with an array of hits from 1956 to '58. He never completely abandoned his blues roots (his first post-Army album, "Elvis Is Back!" is proof, but it wasn't until his late '60s comeback that he again became artistically inspired. He found a niche in the early '70s, and rarely ventured out of it until his death. (I don't know if Presley listened to much Crosby, but on Bing's 1931 record "Out Of Nowhere," you can hear a pre-Elvislike passage or two.)
All three brought so much to American music, and their legacies will long remain.
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You can download "Dragnet" radio episodes at http://www.archive.org/details/Dragnet_OTR or http://www.otr.net/?p=drag. They make for good listening
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Just as well, considering what "flickerfan" can be misconstrued as with all-caps, sans serif. (I'll leave it at that.)
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I intersected with Mr. Bret at my site nearly five months ago:
http://community.livejournal.com/carole_and_co/194648.html
There have been reports his next book may be a Carole Lombard bio...draw your own conclusions.
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Mercer also helped found Capitol Records, the first important West Coast-based label, and was a fine singer in his own right.
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The focus on "Dragnet" was always on the procedural work (how the police solved a crime), rather than the characterization. Sgt. Joe Friday was an uber-policeman; we see little of what makes him tick. That's in sharp contrast to, say, Marshal Dillon on "Gunsmoke" -- and this applied to both the radio and TV versions of both of these excellent series.
You can argue "Dragnet" stuck too much to formula, and the minimal production values (aside from the realistic police terminology) hampered the episodes, particularly on television (and I agree the late 1960s TV revival had almost devolved into self-parody). But most of the time, "Dragnet" was a riveting program, and Webb deserves credit for helping millions to better understand the work police officers do as public servants. Listen to some of the heavy-handed pre-"Dragnet" radio series, and you'll more fully appreciate what Webb accomplished.
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A lot of us prefer the radio version to the TV series -- and that's not taking anything away from the latter. But the radio "Gunsmoke" was virtually perfect...excellent writing, superb sound effects and a splendid cast (William Conrad was a magnificent Marshal Dillon, radio stalwarts Parley Baer played Chester and Georgia Ellis did Kitty, and Howard MacNear -- who some of you may know better as Floyd the barber on "The Andy Griffith Show" -- was wonderful as Doc Adams)."Gunsmoke" was a character-driven program, not a shoot-'em-up oater, which is why it worked so well.
I would the people working on this project read -- and listen to -- many of the radio scripts as inspiration. Many of those scripts were adapted for the TV series.
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A three-way tie:
"The Awful Truth"
"Libeled Lady"
"My Man Godfrey"
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I can't speak for the quality of the book, since I've never read it, but this topic -- Goebbels and the German film industry, particularly his relationships with actresses -- would make for a fascinating film, given the right director, script and actors.
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The Everly Brothers, from the mid-1980s, performing "Why Worry" with Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits (who wrote the song for Don and Phil):
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Here's another one of my favorites, Dusty Springfield, doing "Stay Awhile":
No British lady had more soul than Dusty...and I doubt very many on this side of the Atlantic did, either. (Ever heard her version of "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself"? She was a wonderful Bacharach-David interpreter.)
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Jackie DeShannon, "When You Walk In The Room":
Jackie wrote this song, the Searchers had the big hit with it, and while I like their version, I love Jackie's. I think you will too.
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All the suggestions so far are good ones. Another good destination is the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, opened in 1927. On the mezzanine is the room where the first Academy Awards were given out more than eight decades ago. Many stars have ties to the hotel. Carole Lombard frequently saw beau Russ Columbo perform at the Cinegrill; later in the 1930s, she and Clark Gable held trysts in the penthouse suite now named in their honor.
The lobby is gorgeous, and I believe it still has much film-related memorabilia on hand. You don't have to stay at the Roosevelt to appreciate its splendor.
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Hard to answer. Growing up in the 1960s, I can recall a lot of old movies being shown on TV in my hometown of Syracuse, N,Y., and that certainly played a part -- but I suppose that in my youth, I had a major interest in the culture of America between the world wars, because that's when my parents grew up. It helped me understand them a bit better. (And this didn't only apply to movies, but music, radio and so on.)
In ensuing decades, I began reading more about the films of the era and learning more about the actors, directors, writers and executives. I got to see my share of films at places such as Theater 80 in lower Manhattan and also through the original TNT, when it played a lot of old movies, albeit with commercials (at the time, that film library was all Ted Turner had to work with). TNT really wasn't a repertory channel like TCM, but its importance shouldn't be overlooked -- especially in making people aware of pre-Code product (the term really hadn't come into vogue yet), since many of those movies were deemed too racy for '50s and '60s TV audiences and either cut severely or not shown at all.
(In 1964, a Syracuse station showed "If I Had A Million," which I wanted to see because it had W.C. Fields, but for some reason the segment where Wynne Gibson plays a prostitute who inherits $1 million -- and uses it to sleep in a fancy hotel, alone --- was retained. When Gibson was shown in undressing to lingerie and stockings, my mother hurriedly changed the channel. I don't think I ever saw the Fields segment.)
Message was edited by: VP19
How about a new Pre Code photo thread????
in Pre-Code Films
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Try a site named IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/), which allows you note only to resize images, but to adjust them as well. I've used it for years, and it works beautifully.
Of course, you could always make Ann bigger by giving her a weird encounter with an alien...something that almost makes one wish the film "Attack Of The 50-Foot Woman" had been made during pre-Code!