This is a movie I love but I’m hesitant to recommend it to friends because it would be so disappointing if they didn’t like it. (A Canterbury Tale and Dogfight are in the same category.) Your rating is sound. Is there a system that covers a 3-star movie with some 5-star scenes and performances?
Various staging ideas for this Safe In Hell (1931) publicity portrait of Dorothy Mackaill #BOTD, from the film’s pressbook (Wednesday mood calls for all five versions):
ALIEN logo being build and the E has no middle line
The ALIEN logo
Every time I watch ALIEN I am transfixed thinking to myself "there's no way they've left themselves enough room to get the third horizontal line in that E without it looking like a squashed-in mess!" but no, every single time there it is, and it's beautiful. Most tense part of the movie tbh.
WE HAVE A TRAILER!
Wow! You have met all kinds of great movie stars.
Happy Kurt Weill's birthday!
Oof. I just read your post in the most uncharitable, pedantic way possible, and I gotta tell ya: it's not looking good for you.
Ok what are your personal favourite folk releases this Feb and Jan? It's probably time I did some more reviewing.
A plum tree covered in white blossoms.
Spring is almost sprung. These plum blossoms were alive with bees. The plums will be delicious but if the squirrels have their way, and they usually do, I’ll only get a few.
Band leader Ted Lewis holding his clarinet and wearing his famously battered top hat.
The face is bad enough but cleaning up his top hat is extra unforgivable. Nobody’s happy, Ted. Nobody.
Betty Hutton #BOTD live at the London Palladium, 1948 (This is my favorite picture of her and I will always post it. She was punk rock.)
"The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot"
HELL. YES.
Great 1945 ad for a Devil's Harvest-themed burlesque show I just found in a San Francisco newspaper.
Zeppo Marx holding up his hands as if he is playing an invisible piano, or perhaps it’s an invisible harp.
Happy Zeppo Marx’s Birthday! How are you going to celebrate! I’m going to watch some Threes Stooges shorts featuring Shemp.
#botd
I was unaware that young twentysomething Red Foxx washed dishes alongside young twentysomething Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X), and that Foxx was described as "the funniest dishwasher on this earth" in Malcolm X's autobiography.
We need a movie or play or *something* showing them together.
@andrewhickey.500songs.com I can’t wait to see how you work Tallulah into The Who’s story.
[things found while looking for other things]
the famous busts of Oscar Levant and Judd Hirsch at the Vatican
iambic tetrameter ass stick
A cartoon by Sidney Harris. Astronauts looking out of a spaceship see a series of small asteroids with signs planted on them: SPACE IS BIG SPACE IS DARK IT'S HARD TO FIND A PLACE TO PARK BURMA SHAVE.
Large orange cat sleeping in a guitar case.
Thank you. She was a special cat.
An orange cat curled up in a cat bed.
An orange cat staring at the camera.
Four cats sitting in a row.
I’m sad to report that our Lillibea has passed away. She was a lovely, sweet, weird orange cat. We got her as a kitten 15 years ago and she was immediately adopted by our three sisters, who have all crossed the rainbow bridge. We miss her so much.
Title: "Literary ecologists celebrate the successful reintroduction of rare species to the Yorkshire moors." Image: The sun is going down on a bleak windswept moor, various figures and trees are each labelled as one of the following: 1. Classic literary Cathy and Heathcliff 2. Young, carefree Cathy and heathcliff 3. Sexy Hollywood Cathy and Heathcliff 5. Ghost Cathy, tormented Heathcliff 5. Spooky tree
My books cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com
This week for Silent Sundays, a look back at five lost films made by Bluebird Photoplays with a little history lesson about the filmmakers and stars who made them.
Read: oldfilmsflicker.substack.com/p/favorite-p...
Ann Sheridan #BOTD reads an issue of Variety while her hair dries. Photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt on the WB lot, 1938.
Wow! This one is really good. Nice score!
Publicity portrait of "The Step Brothers," Maceo Anderson, Al Williams, Red Walker, and Sherman Robertson, dated 1930. (Photo: John Kisch)
Dubbed "The Eight Feet of Rhythm," The Four Step Brothers (founded by Maceo Anderson) were a Black dance group that started as a trio in 1925 with Maceo, Al Williams, and Red Walker, later adding Sherman Robinson to the trio to form “The Four Step Brothers.”
WUTHERING HEIGHTS The 1847 edition of the only novel Emily Bronte published was released under the male alias Ellis Bell as a three-volume set less than two years before she died in 1848, aged just 30. Rarer and more poignant than any #WutheringHeightsMovie - only 250 copies were ever printed.
I don’t know. After Kes and Ring of Bright Water I’m not sure I’d could watch a British movie about a child and an animal without a feeling of dread.
I watch that clip, and this one with Dick Van Dyke, when I need reminding that there are good things in the world.
