Articles

Displaying 241 - 260 of 261

  • Animation Craze: A Brief History of UPA - McBoing-Boing, Magoo, and a Rooty-Toot-Toot to You

    In 1941, a number of animators at the Walt Disney studios walked out on the job, effectively going on strike. At issue was the question of unionization, which some employees demanded as a way to guarantee their rights and fair pay. Disney, who had long propagated the notion of his shop as one big, happy family, was infuriated by the strike, and stubbornly held out for more than a month. By the time the strike ended, the Disney studio lost nearly half its workforce. The artists who ...

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  • A Maverick Life: The Jack Kelly Story

    If you say the name, Jack Kelly, many who follow classic entertainment will raise an eyebrow and say, a bit confused, “Who?” While this man’s name isn’t always instantly recognizable, it really should be since Jack was in front of a camera and on the big and small screens since he was a baby, and for most of his life from then on. Jack Kelly began a career as a model at the age of two under the direction of his stage mother, modeling in a soap print ad. He continued to model thro...

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  • The Bowery Boys: Anything But Routine

    One of my treasured childhood television memories involved spending Saturday afternoons watching The Bowery Boys—moviedom’s oldest juvenile delinquents—cavort in their cinematic escapades over Chicago superstition WGN. Leo Gorcey (as Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney) and his sidekick Huntz Hall (as Horace DeBussy “Sach” Jones) would find themselves in various slapstick adventures along the rest of their gang in a series of B-pictures cranked out by Poverty Row king Monogram Studios from 1946 to ...

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  • Film Noir: The Underside of Classic Cinema

    'How can you watch those old movies?' Film buffs get this from family, friends, and co-workers, but we're mesmerized by the entertainment that our grandparents and great-grandparents enjoyed. Happily, there are films from 60, 70, and 80 years ago that have retained their appeal for a mass contemporary audience. Among them, we have Buster Keaton's masterworks, Laurel and Hardy, Frank Capra's populist comedies, Universal's horror classics, and the cycle of stylish crime dramas from the 40s and ...

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  • TV Time: Baseball Players on Primetime

    One national pastime arrives around springtime each year, while another one never goes away. Yes, baseball’s return is a cherished annual ritual, but one might argue the real national pastime is watching television. Baseball and television together is a powerful combination. Here, then, is my All-Star team, by position, of major league players based on their appearances in classic television. We’ll focus on the days before everything was changed by rampant commercialization and ri...

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  • Pre-Code Obsession: Kay Francis

    Kay Francis was Hollywood glamour personified, playing strong, modern women while looking fabulous in the highest fashions of the day. Arriving in Hollywood in the late 1920s, just as talkies took over, Kay by all rights should never have been a star. She was beautiful, but sported a mild speech impediment during the years when studios worried over their stars' voices, and she lacked substantial experience -- she had lied her way on stage almost on whim, and had not formally trained as an actres...

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  • Dick Powell: Crooner and Tough Guy, Actor and Director

    Dick Powell was, in my opinion, one of the smartest men ever in the movie business. He kept his career constantly evolving as he aged and times changed, making wise decisions and excelling in turn as a singer, actor, director, and producer. Powell also seems to have been universally admired by his colleagues, not always an easy feat while maintaining a high-powered career in the entertainment industry. Powell was born in Arkansas in 1904. After graduation from Little Rock Coll...

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  • Classics 101: Classics 101 vs. Sight & Sound

    Every ten years, British Film Institute magazine Sight & Sound polls filmmakers and critics and compiles a list of “greatest films ever made”; it was this poll that installed Citizen Kane as the so-called greatest a few decades ago and then de-throned it in 2012, when it was replaced by Vertigo. Sight & Sound, asked what “greatest” means, responded, “We leave that open to your interpretation. You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent th...

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  • Animation Craze: Strong to the Fin'nich, 'Cause He Eats His Spinach

    By the summer of 1933, the Fleischer brothers’ self-named animation studio was riding high. Based largely on the success of flapper dream girl Betty Boop, whose risqué series of cartoons became immensely popular in the early 30s, Max and Dave’s studio rivaled that of Walt Disney in popularity. And that July, the Fleischers inked the film debut of a character that would go on to effectively challenge Mickey Mouse for the title of the most popular animated figure in the world. Popey...

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  • Robert Taylor and the Studio System

    The Golden Age of Hollywood has always been of great interest to and held enjoyment for me. I love the films that the studio system produced during their glory years. It’s not that they were all great or even good, but they were made by people who loved movies, which is the big difference with the moguls of today. The stars of that era were more mysterious than today. An explanation for this is because the press of the day, particularly the Hollywood columnists, worked hand in hand with the ...

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  • Silent Cinema: D.W. Griffith and the Development of a Film Language

    The twelve years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) might be the least known years in all of movie history. Yet it was during these years that the idea of what constituted a movie evolved from brief, simplistic snippets viewed through coin-operated 'peep shows' to ambitious, feature-length projects with complex storylines and characters. Any number of early pioneers during this period are worthy of examination—animators Émile Cohl and Winsor Mc...

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  • Julie Newmar: Catwoman & Beyond

    Tell me I'm beautiful, it's nothing. Tell me I'm intellectual - I know it. Tell me I'm funny and it's the greatest compliment in the world anyone could give me. – Julie Newmar Julie Newmar, who turns 80 today, is widely remembered for her role as Cat Woman on the iconic television series, Batman. Film buffs know her as Dorcas, one of the seven beautiful brides in the 1954 classic, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. A brief stint as a gold-painted exotic dancer in Serpent ...

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  • Tears on Demand: Movies that Make Us Cry

    The top American movie experience of the 1970 Christmas season was the communal cry at screenings of Love Story. Few who saw this film in its first run have forgotten the groans, muffled sobs, and the rustling of pack after pack of Kleenex as the film neared its ending. It wasn’t over until audience members acknowledged each other’s reddened eyes as they groped their way to the exits. This was a group experience with roots. Veteran fans in Love Story’s audience remembered the studio era, when...

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  • TV Time: Beat the Clock

    Who do you think had the best job during the Golden Age of Television? Reginald Rose, who got to pour his heart and soul into acclaimed socially relevant teleplays? Betty Furness, who got to dress up and show a national television audience the wonders of Westinghouse products? Or maybe Ozzie Nelson, who...who... Well, nobody's really sure what Ozzie did, of course, but it must have been fulfilling because the guy just looked so darn amiable all the time. I believe the best job may...

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  • Book Review: Patsy Ruth Miller

    My Hollywood: When Both of us were Young by Patsy Ruth Miller. A beautiful, large-format book which has 250 pages, this book was originally published some years ago and has been extremely hard to find in the recent past. BearManor Media has rectified this problem by republishing the book and therefore making it available once again, to the masses. The editor for this edition was BearManor Media author Philip J. Riley who has done a terrific job in making sure the book ha...

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  • Veronica Lake: Hollywood Actress

    I will have one of the cleanest obits of any actress. I never did cheesecake like Ann Sheridan or Betty Grable. I just used my hair. – Veronica Lake Veronica Lake never received her due of sex appeal like her Hollywood competition. Her legs were not insured for million dollars like Betty Grable and her two biggest assets were not being promoted like Jane Russell. When she stood to attention in So Proudly We Hail! (1943), uniformed Veronica Lake stood 4 feet, 11 inches tal...

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  • The Old Corral: The Tenderfoot's Guide to '50s Westerns

    The first motion picture to tell a story, have a plot, use close-ups, have actual cuts, and on and on, was The Great Train Robbery of 1903. The Western is as old as cinema itself. By 1950, the Western had gone through quite an e...

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  • Silent Cinema: Who Invented the Movies?

    Trying to say definitively who invented the movies is a little like trying to say who invented fire—the records are sketchy, everybody who knows for certain is dead, and what evidence that does remain comes largely from the self-serving accounts of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers. And where do you start, which is to say, what was the first indispensable step toward what we now think of as motion pictures? If I knew his name, I'd say it was the first caveman who thought to entertain h...

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  • Animation Craze: The Roots of American Animation - 1900 - 1940

    Animation, as a cinematic medium, does not begin and end with Walt Disney. He did not create the concept; truth be told, on his own merits, he was not even all that great of an artist. Instead, what Disney had was vision—the vision that animated cartoons could be something greater than mere novelty. He was not the only person to have this idea; since the very beginnings of film, there had been men and women intrigued by the possibilities presented by this new innovation. But unlike most of his p...

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  • Tyrone Power: One of the Best

    Tyrone Power was one of the greatest stars of the classic film era. His spectacularly good looks were such that at times it's overlooked that he was also a fine actor whose skills grew more impressive with the passage of time. He was highly effective starring in everything from swashbucklers and Westerns to musicals and romantic comedies to film noir and costume dramas. His early death at the age of 44 was a great loss to all who love the movies. Power has always been my favorite acto...

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