Black Oxen

The Alice in Wonderland movie made me think about silent movies which are available online, a fair number of films are out of copyright now and so are freely available on Youtube or on DVD-Rs. Here is an example, 1924's Black Oxen which includes my favourite silent movie actress Clara Bow in one of her early roles.

More information about the movie can be seen here. Quite a few other silent movies are available online, of course the majority of films are lost forever. An art form quite different in some ways from the "talkies" that were to follow and with many stars who never managed to jump across the sound divide (as the wonderful film The Artist portrays). A great history of silent movies is Peter Kobel's "Silent Movies" which i recommend.

Greta Garbo's record collection?

There are millions of blogs out there and many of them cover rather strange and wonderfully obscure topics (i have a few myself), but one of the strangest recently that i have come across is Greta's Records by Allison Anders. Its a brilliant blog written by someone who bought the record collection of the late screen legend Greta Garbo in auction and now writes about the records they have found in the collection.

At first glance this might seem an odd thing to do, especially as Garbo's last movie was in 1941 so the records covered might seen rather old and obscure, but Garbo lived until 1990 and lived a private life refusing many offers to make a comeback after retiring at the age of 35.

Garbo is therefore a rather interesting character and her record collection is a lot more contemporary then you might think including the likes of the Beatles and The Byrd's Gene Clark as well as world music. The delightful blog discusses the records in the collection and what they might have meant to Garbo as she listened to them.

Movie serial fun

Years ago the Christmas TV schedules were a lot more innovative and fun (of course by law everything in the past was better than it is today, except for equal rights for women and internet speeds of course, everything else nowadays is rubbish) and usually the BBC showed something like Flash Gordon (as in the 1930s movie serial) every morning in the run-up to Christmas. Not nowadays of course, basically the same pap is shown as is the rest of the year. It just shows a lack of imagination and edge by the schedulers. What would you rather see in the morning? Homes Under The Hammer or Buster Crabbe battling a man in a rubber monster suit?

Well i do have the latter on DVD... so i have begun watching the serial, an episode a day, in the run up to Christmas. Watching the evil Emperor Ming, rooms full of crackling electrical equipment and men in unconvincing armour puts me in the Christmas mood unlike anything else!

Happily a number of other serials are in the public domain and are available to download off the internet so i might just do that over the break...

"What can you see Flash?"
"Rip Off Britain? What's that all about?"

They don't make them like this anymore

Last night i chanced upon a showing of the Cannonball Run on one of the digital TV channels, a film i love but have not seen for a few years. What struck me as i was watching the early 80s road race antics was how amazing the cast was. You had Burt Reynolds as the lead of course but supported by Dom DeLuise for humour and Farrah Fawcett for sex appeal but then look at some of the other supporting cast : Roger Moore, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Jackie Chan! It is difficult to think of a film these days which would have such a star strewn but also varied cast as this. Of course when they made the sequel most of the cast returned and they added Frank Sinatra to the mix!

Films from this era, the early 1980s, are very nostalgic for me as i was a tweenager at the time and just starting to develop my own tastes and fandoms. Burt Reynolds was an early hero of mine thanks to films like Cannonball Run and Smokey & the Bandit films which maybe did not trouble the brain too much and were often a little self-indulgent but they were definitely fun and thats what entertainment is all about at the end of the day.

The American road movie of course is the stuff of many dreams, even now the wide open spaces accompanied only by the roar of a Dodge or Chevy has a romantic appeal though i suspect the reality isn't quite as fun as the dream especially in these more pragmatic times.