Happy 115th birthday to the late, great James Cagney!
Tag: classic films
In Their Words: Buster Keaton
Cladrite Classics: As Time Goes By…
We first shared this post a year ago today, and you can expect to see it a year from now, too, and a year after that…
Seventy-one years ago today, at the Hollywood Theater—at the corner of 51st and Broadway in New York City—the greatest (well, in any case, our favorite) motion picture ever filmed made its debut.
We’ve seen Casablanca countless times, and, God willing, we’ll see it many more times before we depart this mortal coil. It’s well nigh perfect. The world’s been a better place for the past seven decades for it being around.
The Hollywood was eventually renamed the Mark Hellinger Theatre, playing host for decades to live Broadway productions.
Today, the building, its interior largely unchanged from its days as a movie palace, is home to Times Square Church. If you find yourself in Manhattan and wish to make a pilgrimage to the spot where this great picture was first screened for the public, now you know where to go.
Happy Birthday, Ed Wood Jr.!
Today marks the 89th birthday of cult director Edward D. Wood Jr., a man who has been tagged by some as the worst director of all time. Bad he may be, though, he remains one of our favorite filmmakers, so he did something right.
If you’re not familiar with Wood’s oeuvre, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but most of his classic cinematic offerings are readily available on DVD, so we’ll leave you to track those down on your own. We wanted to share something less often seen, a television pilot from 1951 called “The Sun Was Setting” that was Wood’s first paid gig as a director (he wrote the script, too, which will be readily apparent to those who familiar with his work).
Happy birthday, Ed, wherever you may be.
Jimmy Conlin’s Timeless Comedy
Jimmy Conlin is a face (if not a name) familiar to most movie buffs, thanks to his appearances in more than 150 features and shorts in movie career that spanned three decades.
Conlin, born October 14, 1884, in Camden, New Jersey, is perhaps best remembered today as a key member of Preston Sturges‘ stock company; he can be seen in nine of that director’s pictures, among them classics such as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.
His scrawny physique and odd countenance made him well-suited to comedy, but it wasn’t just his appearance that got laughs. He and his first wife, Myrtle Glass, toured extensively in vaudeville, honing their comedic chops in a rough-and-tumble song-and-dance act called, appropriately enough, Conlin and Glass.
And what an act it was! The diminutive Conlin definitely got the worst of it from the more imposing Glass (she’s no taller than he is, but you’d swear she was).
The duo appeared in two Vitaphone shorts, Zip! Boom! Bang! (1929), that seems to be a lost film (though Vitaphone shorts are being recovered and restored with some frequency nowadays, so keep your fingers crossed) and Sharps and Flats (1928), which, fortunately, still exists.
I’ve been on hand for several different screenings of “Sharps and Flats” at NYC’s Film Forum during evenings devoted entirely to Vitaphone shorts, and the response has always been overwhelmingly positive. The uproarious comedy stylings of Conlin and Glass don’t seem remotely dated; they get huge laughs from the Film Forum crowds.
Ideally, you’ll one day have the opportunity to see this short in a theatre as part of an appreciative audience, but we’re confident you’ll enjoy it from the privacy of your home or office, too. Enjoy!
P.S. If you enjoyed this Conlin and Glass short, consider supporting The Vitaphone Project, a truly worthy organization devoted to the preservation of these wonderful shorts.