calvinnme2's channel

It's funny how they get into everything when they first come home. You find out by following them around just how unkitten-proof your home really is!

@raider8sox

Adding sound imposed more discipline on Hollywood and added range to what movies could do. To me, the speed and lowered cost of computing power that enables so much computer graphics in film has made movies worse. Why bother with a plot when you can just sell tickets for a visual spe...

@paperboxcutter

I assume you mean Singin in the Rain? That was just a "hindsight is 20-20" view of the transition to sound. Many of the songs in that film were actually written in the mid 1930's not the 20's. One thing they don't mention in Singin in the Rain is the sad fate of the musical stars...

I fear that this one might not survive in its entirety. Such was the case with so many British pre WWII films. The fact that nobody has reviewed it on imdb is a bad sign. Usually if a film exists only in an archive someone with access to that archive will post something about it there.

This one episode out of 13 does a more detailed and artistic job of explaining the transition to sound than any one documentary that I've ever seen dedicated to the subject. Perhaps this is because so many of the people that it impacted were still alive to tell the tale. What a travesty the righ...

I fondly remember this promo and much more about TV in 1971. A summer replacement show that same year on CBS was "The Six Wives of Henry VIII", a great English-made drama with an episode per wife. What is on TV in the 2010's? People eating bugs on a dare AKA Fear Factor, young women preparing th...

Why doesn't this ever air anywhere and why isn't it on DVD? It is really great creepy campy fun. You'd think just the well known stars and William Castle name would keep it around in some form.

I wish someone would post the very first film intro Robert Osborne did when TCM premiered in 1994.

@acfons

Mayer was indeed unique in the industry as a guy who put petty resentments over profit. He wrecked the career of several MGM stars including Anita Page, John Gilbert, and Buster Keaton. It's funny, but when you look at the people who had the best long term success at MGM under Mayer, it ...

@TheMoviefan1996

This is from the 1930 film "Bright Lights" also known as "Adventures in Africa".

The announcer is John Miljan. He played slimy villain types in the very early days of talking pictures. The trailer probably does not have any of the talking parts of the Jazz Singer in it because it was impossible to splice together different Vitaphone films. All they could do in this Vitaphone ...

For you TCM fans out there, this reminds me of all of those guest hosts they've had while Robert Osborne was on sick leave. The job is harder than it first appears. It also has given me a new appreciation for Ben Mankiewicz.

Another great film by director Mervyn LeRoy, a director with no identifyable style other than his films had great style. I have a real fondness for his precodes.

@xxmoviemakerxxx Yes, there were many prints in circulation, but after their runs they went back to the studio. Prints that were all Technicolor often belonged to the Technicolor Corporation and many of those films were intentionally destroyed in the late 1940's by that company. This might have ...

Ah...remnants of that ill fated "Hollywood Revue of 1930". Parts of it were cut into shorts, and some parts were being inserted by MGM into movies as late as 1933 to get something - anything - out of the money lost in making this film that was never released.

Ordinarily I'm not that huge a fan of Demille, but I found his first foray into sound, "Dynamite", a very good and innovative film. The actors don't speechify endlessly, the camera moves, and the story moves with it. Unlike many films from 1929 it's worth a repeat viewing for the entertainment va...

@Davidalp1 - You have a corrupted version of this film. The Warner Archive made a bad batch of the Show of Shows that runs almost an hour short, and this is part of the missing footage. Many people complained only to receive ANOTHER wrong hour long version! This is the shoddy quality (and overp...

I had two ferrets. One died at six and the other at five. Nothing that cute should have an average life expectancy of only about five years.

@michaelpshipley1

You wrote:

"Think about this. Government = communism. They both promote the same beliefs: worker rights, fairness, contempt for capitalism. No wonder it destroys everything it touches."

I assume you'll not be collecting Social Security or participating in Medicare???

Oh, tha...

@Chronos127

That's true. Jack and Zeppo remained good friends, though, and Jack's wife Mary was actually a distant cousin of the Marx Brothers. Also interesting is that when Jack first went into show business he was sued by someone with the same name as Jack - Benjamin Kubelsky - claiming that h...

Check out Robert Osborne starting at 4:55 discussing Star Trek 4. He looks like he was in his mid to late 30's yet he was 54 at the time. Hard to believe this was almost 25 years ago.

From the 1930 film "Bright Lights" also starring Dorothy MacKaill.

From the 1935 George Raft film "Stolen Harmony".

All that's on DVD is the black and white public domain 50's TV print that has quite a bit of the Ziegfeld show part extracted due to nudity. I'd love to see the whole thing in its restored form.

So many of the early musicals were all Technicolor and only remain in black and white. After seeing this eye-popping number it makes me wonder how much better remembered these early films would be if the Technicolor still existed.

This is "Free and Easy", Buster Keaton's first talkie from 1930. If you think what MGM is doing to Robert Montgomery here is ridiculous, you should see what they did to Keaton!

Normally these talking cat things are just silly but this one is special. If Cheech and Chong were cats they would behave like this.

This is the best reproduction of this film I've seen. Could you please post the rest of it?

Of all of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar promos this one from 2008 remains my favorite.

@LadyGenevieveStG

The Warner Archive has this film on DVD-R. It's a good restoration and the entire film is intact, but it's still black and white.

A great story well told and acted. The good old days when a film was art and not a video game.

I got what seems to be a complete print of this at an estate sale. I thought it had been taped off of TV, but at no point is there any station identification. Does anybody know if this film has ever been on TV? Specifically, has it ever been on TCM? It's an RKO film so TCM should be able to play...

Interesting to compare this to the 1930 number with Penny Singleton from the movie of the same name.