Radar Men from the Moon is a late entry into the world of movie action serials and suffers heavily from an air of “been there, done that”. Radar Men from the Moon was made in 1952, when many major serial-producing studios had moved on, but Republic was still churning them out. (It was […]
Viewed December 27, 2006
Three Ages is an ambitious comedy from Buster Keaton, where he strives to show how love has changed (but mostly stayed the same) throughout the ages. He does this by illustrating three cases of love: a caveman, a Roman citizen and a modern day man (well, modern for 1923, anyway).
All three […]
Viewed December 26, 2006
Hitler: Dead or Alive is a propoganda film that portrays what would happen if there was a successful attempt to assassinate Hitler in the early days of World War II. That this attempt is put together by gangsters due to a $1 Million bounty tags it as Hollywood through and through.
The […]
Viewed December 5, 2006
My Wife’s Relations is classic short-form Buster Keaton. Buster gets hauled into court by a woman who thinks he broke a courthouse window. Thinking they are an engaged couple (and speaking no English), the judge marries them. While the woman’s family is aghast at the shrimp their sister has […]
Viewed December 4, 2006
Think Bela Lugosi lowered himself by appearing in Ed Wood movies? Maybe so, but if The Gorilla is any indication, he was already willing to hire himself out to anybody back in 1939. To understand the circumstances, you should know that the stars of The Gorilla, the Ritz Brothers, were […]
Viewed December 3, 2006
Now You’re Talking is an instructional short by Max and Dave Fleischer, best known for their later “Betty Boop”, “Popeye” and “Superman” cartoons. Through a combination of live action and animation, it shows the viewer how their telephone works by focusing on a man who dozes off after having a poor […]
Viewed November 26, 2006
Fatty’s Spooning Day aka Mabel, Fatty and the Law is a relatively early entry from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle that displays all his typical character traits. He womanizes. He gets in trouble with the law. Just about the only thing he doesn’t do is the acrobatics that he was […]
Viewed November 9, 2006
One Week is a classic Buster Keaton short that finds him and his new bride (Sybil Seely) given a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. When Buster’s rival changes the numbers on some of the boxes, Buster’s efforts prove to be more comical than effective.
This short is a prime example of […]
Viewed October 29, 2006
The Paleface is a pretty standard entry from Buster Keaton during his pre-feature days. It’s a funny little short about a white man who is taken for a god by a tribe on American Indians on the verge of losing their land to an oil baron.
There are plenty of Buster’s trademark […]
Viewed October 20, 2006
In 1872, a ship called the Mary Celeste was found adrift off the coast of Portugal. The ship was completely abandoned and no trace of the crew was ever found. It was one of the great mysteries of the day and continues to spark the imagination and interest of authors […]
Viewed September 1, 2006
Who Killed Doc Robbin? is an attempt by Hal Roach Studios to capture the feel of the “Our Gang” comedies for a new era. Unfortunately, the story isn’t that strong and the kids just don’t have the personalities to spark the kind of interest that the original kids did.
The kids are […]
Viewed August 17, 2006
Freeze-In is a training movie shot by Sears to help introduce their salesmen to a new sales campaign for the Coldspot Time Bank, a new freezer that Sears introduced in 1968. Apparently, sales had been dropping off, so Sears decided to try and give them a jump start with this new […]
Viewed August 16, 2006
A Is For Atom is a cute little cartoon that explains the nature of nuclear energy and its uses in a post World War II society.
The explanatory sequences are really well done and make the nature of nuclear fission understandable for all. Perhaps understandably, they aren’t too detailed on the negative […]
Viewed August 10, 2006
War Babies is one of a series of short comedy films made by Educational Pictures in the early 30s. The idea behind the series was to parody popular films with small children (about aged 3 - 5) in the roles instead of adults. They are most notable today for being […]
Viewed July 22, 2006
The Balloonatic is a rather trite little entry in Bustern Keaton’s series of shorts. A typical series of sight gags, it lacks the more detailed storyline found in Keaton’s better shorts.
Basically, we follow Buster as he finds himself (after a few initial escapades) trapped on a hot air balloon and then […]
Viewed July 21, 2006
In the 1940s RCM Productions began making a series of very short films for projection in jukebox-like machines. These short films were called “soundies” and were, basically, music videos. They would often have a modest storyline, but the main focus was always on whatever song was being performed throughout the […]
Viewed May 31, 2006
Your Name Here is, like Overs and Outs, a chance for the corporate filmmakers to let their hair down. This one is much more direct: a parody of every corporate history film.
The film starts out with a bold pronouncement from Calvin Productions: they have created the perfect corporate film. It […]
Viewed May 30, 2006
The Butcher, The Baker and the Ice Cream Maker is quite odd, even for a corporate film. It espouses the virtues of boxed ice cream. That’s right, it’s all about how great it is to have your ice cream available in boxes. Obviously, it was aimed at store owners, […]
Viewed May 29, 2006
Peg-Leg Pedro starts out as a straightforward cutesy cartoon. A couple of adorable little kids out sailing are attacked by a pirate. With the help of their friend Nicky Nome, they defeat the pirates and find the treasure. But how can they get all that treasure home, you ask, […]
Viewed May 20, 2006
A couple of years into Buster Keaton’s series of shorts, The Electric House finds Buster in strong form visually and athletically. Something does suffer, though, as the story is particularly weak.
The plot of this one has Buster accidentally given an electrical engineer’s diploma instead of the one he was supposed to […]
Viewed May 13, 2006
Convict 13 is one of Buster Keaton’s earliest solo shorts and it’s a fine one. Knocked unconcious during a golf game, Buster has his clothes taken by an escaped convict and finds himself in jail in the convict’s place. He spends the rest of the film trying to get out again, […]
Viewed May 12, 2006
Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) is a surrealistic short film from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.
The imagry is often disturbing and, honestly, seldom makes any sense at all. Of course, that’s kind of what one expects from a film by Dali. Sliced eyeballs, ants crawling out of a man’s […]
Viewed May 9, 2006
A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor is an early talkie short that basically features Cantor doing his act for the camera.
The real problem is, he obviously is used to interacting with the audience and this is totally lost when recorded in this way. After most of the jokes, he paused for […]
Viewed May 7, 2006
It’s Everybody’s Business is a nice little short from the Department of Commerce that tries to use cartoons and humor to get across fundamental ideas of the free market.
Everything is represented in cartoon terms. The fundamentals of American society are represented as large rocks: the foundation on which the country is […]
Viewed May 6, 2006
Dogs of War is a wonderful entry in the ‘Our Gang’ series of films, this time from the silent era. The ‘Our Gang’ series existed long before Spanky, Alfalfa and the rest who would become more famous as ‘The Little Rascals’ and this one is from their early peak in the […]
Viewed May 5, 2006
Overs and Outs is basically a sketch film, with mostly scripted comedy and the occasional actual blooper or found footage. I’m guessing that this was intended as a purely internal production for the Calvin Company. Calvin specialized in educational and corporate films and most of these sketches seem to have […]
Viewed May 4, 2006
Remarkably Bold Venture of the Rabbit is a strange, psychadelic, stream-of-consciousness animated short by then film student Tim Drage. The visuals are striking and the film pulls you in, but (as Drage admits) there’s no real story here, unless you graft one onto it from your own imagination.
Drage’s style is a […]
Viewed May 3, 2006
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight across the Atlantic. It touched off an aviation frnzy, as the public became insatiable for the latest and greatest flyers. Naturally, this infatuation spilled over into the popular culture, with movies, books and comics devoted to the activity. One of […]
Viewed May 2, 2006
Fresh off the experience of watching Assignment: Venezuela, I thought it would be fun to spend a week watching movies available for free download from the Internet Archive. So I began looking through the archives to find something to watch. When I do this, I usually browse by subject and […]
Viewed May 1, 2006
Okay, I only know about Assignment: Venezuela because it was the subject of a never-aired riffing for Mystery Science Theater 3000. But, since I still haven’t seen that segment (created for a never produced CD-ROM and only available on VHS from Best Brains), I decided to watch it when I spotted […]
Viewed April 21, 2006
The Last Man On Earth has no business being as bad as it is. And for most of its length, it really isn’t. In fact, for the first fifty of it’s eighty-odd minute running time it’s a fairly tense film of isolation and horror. Vincent Price plays Dr. […]
Viewed April 16, 2006
A Trip to the Moon is the oldest movie I have seen so far this year. Made near the dawn of cinema, it is a breakthrough film, utilizing special effects in a way not before seen.
The plot is very simple: scientists decide to built a rocket to visit the […]
Viewed February 16, 2006
Private Snuffy Smith is based on the long running comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and mines some of the same hillbilly territory covered by the more famous Li’l Abner, which had made it’s own leap to the big screen two years earlier.
It’s a fun little movie, from a time when […]
Viewed February 11, 2006
Taking a break from the Arbuckle/Keaton series of films, this week I watched a pre-Oliver Hardy outing from Stan Laurel, Mud and Sand. It is a parody of the classic Rudolph Valentino film Blood and Sand (1922) and follows the plot of that previous film; a tale of the rise and […]
Viewed January 29, 2006
Watching the (so far) mostly disappointing Roscoe Arbuckle / Buster Keaton shorts put me in the mind to see something with a bit more substance. The only Keaton feature that I owned, but had not seen, was his final film before going to work for MGM, Steamboat Bill, Jr., so I […]