Piccadilly

"With its stunning production design and photography, 'Piccadilly' depicts London through an otherworldly cocktail of influences, blending the debauchery of the rich West End set with the sleazy excitement of a Limehouse dive bar and the city's smoky Chinese quarter.

German émigré E.A. Dupont, who brought an international flair to late-'20s British cinema, also tackles the then risqué subject of inter-racial sex. As Shosho, who works her way from kitchen hand to star attraction at the eponymous nightclub, via a love tryst with its (attached) owner, Chinese-American star Anna May Wong represents the ultimate, and ultimately doomed, Deco diva." (Simon McCallum)

New music score by Neil Brand

Uploaded by BFIfilms

Linda's Film on Menstruation

Mady Heflin (daughter of Frances Heflin and Sol Kaplan and sister of director Jonathan Kaplan) plays a teenage girl riding her first menstrual cycle in Linda's Film on Menstruation (director Linda Feferman is also responsible for Seven Minutes in Heaven); character actor Jonathan Banks (he played the attendant who confiscates Dr. Lizardo's TV in Buckaroo Banzai) is also along for the ride.

This 1974 educational film, missing a few frames in the beginning, features attempts at humor, an unfocused plot, animation, person-on-the-street interviews and the Statue of Liberty — a mess, so yes it's really great.

From the Internet Archive.

Because good design speaks for itself

A clip from Design for Today (1965).
You don't have to be Einstein to figure out from what part of the world this film was made after seeing the Umbrella.

Clip uploaded by BFIfilms

Pink Terror.

[via the Catalog of Visual Interestingness.]

Jim Henson - Time piece (1964)

"Time Piece is an experimental short film produced, directed, and written by Jim Henson, who also played the leading role. Henson began the project in the spring of 1964 and continued to work on it for nearly a year, between commercial projects and various Muppet television appearances. The short film premiered in May 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art and was distributed through Pathe Contemporary films to arthouse theaters and the film festival circuit. It played in New York City along with the French feature A Man and a Woman", originally posted by Billiam J

Thanks to Thiaz Itch and Tracky Birthday for showing this to me.

Shake, Rattle and Rock!

In its entirety courtesy of AMC's B-Movie viewing site.(Haha I'm Bibi again!)

Big Joe Turner! Yeah! Margaret Dumont and Sterling Holloway! uh, yeah!, again....
Lots more there - full sizable, too.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Not usually one to shill new flicks but I'll make an exception in this case...

Nollywood Babylon

Nollywood, Nigeria's booming film industry, is the world's third largest producer of feature films. Unlike Hollywood and Bollywood, however, Nollywood movies are made on shoe-string budgets of time and money. An average production takes just 10 days and costs approximately $15,000.

NollywoodForever's Flickr Stream is full of promo posters like these

Brigitte Bardot Poster Collection

105 Images
At Axon Cozy Smut (link at pic as well)

Friday the 13th Party party turns bloody.

from wenn.com

A party to celebrate the launch of new movie Friday the 13th turned into a real life blood bath last week when one of the franchise's former stars was attacked with an axe.

Warrington Gillette, who played serial killer Jason Vorhees in 1981's Friday the 13th Part 2, was attending an event on Friday honoring the new slasher remake.

The actor arrived in full costume, wearing the character's famous ice hockey mask, and took to the stage to frighten party-goers wielding a real axe.

But his performance ended in disaster when a woman invaded the stage and tried to wrestle his weapon away from him, slashing his hand.

A source tells New York Post gossip column PageSix, "She jumped on stage and tried to grab his axe. It was straight out of a horror movie. Lingerie-clad models were running and screaming, as a blood-soaked Jason ran off the runway to get to a hospital."

The character Vorhees has been played by ten actors over the course of 12 films, with Derek Mears playing the latest incarnation of the mass murderer.

I Love Me Them Shaw Brother Flyers

I AM THE GORILLA MAN!

I AM THE GORILLA MAN!
From the twisted jungles of my psyche shamble the hulking, slavering simians of forgotten popular culture, creatures borne forth from musty funny books and warped frames of scratched and eroded film.
Several years ago COMIC BOOK GORILLARAMA began with a desire to kill a little time and became an obssession to thoroughly gather any comic book cover featuring an ape of any sort.
Exploring a casual whim to find a few photos of cinematic apes for CBG, my simple errand quickly refocused into a zealous quest to learn all that could be known about the enigmatic GORILLA MEN who tromped about the wilds of early cinema. GORILLA MEN continues to be the main focus of my web efforts, where I share all sorts of simian pop culture goodness yet I always gravitate back to the tales and films of the rare men who became beasts.
GORILLA MEN also begat another site that is a work of great pride. Few know the name Charles Gemora, but good ol' Charlie arrived in Hollywood in the throes of an entertainment revolution in the 1920's on a freighter from the Philippines. Over the next 40 years, Charles would carve an impressive path through the effects houses of the Great Studios, all the while terrifying and amusing audiences as the premier Hollywood Gorilla Man. With the cooperation of his surviving daughter (who aided her father in creating the Martian of the classic WAR OF THE WORLDS), Diana and I have jointly contributed to CHARLES GEMORA -HOLLYWOOD GORILLA MAN.
And now, what the Sam Hill am I doing here?
I am more than just a GORILLA MAN.
Though I will inflict my hairy obession upon these pages on a regular basis, I also look forward to having a venue to share some of the other oddities I come across, whether from the confines of my Gorilla Den or from my wanderings....out there...

Post 5000: European Film Cards

Somebody's gotta step up...
Neato collection of film cards from this flickr site: Truus, Bob and Jan too!
Complete with bios!

Sophia Loren



Freddy Quinn

It Makes No Difference

Why?
Don't need a reason for this. It's pure genius.

The Band performing in the "Last Waltz" - 1978

Men in Women-in-Prison movies

" ... In a scene right at the beginning of the film, socialite Terry Rich (Anitra Ford) walks into a nightclub in which Blossom (Pam Grier) is performing. Terry pauses in front of the stage with her (apparently wealthy and/or influential) boyfriend beside her. Blossom grins at the boyfriend (who stands there looking awkward) and then more emphatically at Terry, who, after a second, gives a half-amused, half-appreciative smile in return, and sways two or three times to the beat. ...


"The Big Bird Cage" (1972) Opening Scene
From: iwasateenageshutdown

... In other words, the power and the sexual charge in the scene comes from two women connecting with each other. This isn't all that unusual in male-oriented entertainment; there's lots of lesbian porn for guys, obviously. What is less familiar, though, is the insistence with which the scene deliberately excludes men — whether it be the boyfriend or, by extension, the male sexploitation viewer. Terry doesn't want to be Blossom; rather she is enjoying being with Blossom. In contrast, my investment in the scene is not just a lust for the protagonists, but a lust to be them; to gain access to a power and knowledge specifically inscribed in female relationships, which is unavailable to men, and thus all the more desired.
This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized — feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream. How this unlikely cathexis occurred, and how it functioned, is the subject of this essay. ..."
Noah Berlatsky, for Bright Lights Film Journal, is having a look at Men in Women-in-Prison.

"My first visit to the movies"

Hi!

2 years ago I invited people to sniff the vinyl of their favorite record.
The post (and the tales of the sniffers) turned out to be a very fun and interesting one.

Now I have invited friends and cool cats for a new assignemet.

What I wanted to hear about this time was: "My first visit to the movies"

I asked people to tell a little about their first (memorable) visit to a movie theater or cinema.

What film was it? Popcorn? Was there a trailer? Who were you going with? What did the theater look like? How were the seats? How was the smell? Were you scared? Did you have to leave for the restrooms in the middle of the show?

All these are questions they got to digest while searching their past.

First stories are in. Every single submission / story will get it's own entry.

All of the posted stories will be reached by clicking the label: "My first visit to the movies"

Let the posting begin - and let the curtains open!

/Z aka mrdantefontana

Stylish Batch

Lollywood 70's
Uploaded by bearsurfer

Sinatra Squirrel

Let's just assume exotique booze was involved creating this somehow ...

Video created and uploaded by RubberRepublic

The fatal instincts of Gloria Grahame

" ... Once, when I was drunk in an attic in New Jersey, I flipped on the television, and there was Gloria Grahame in something called Naked Alibi (1954), lip-synching to a song and gyrating obscenely in a sleazy club, a taunting, creepy image that kept me from sleep and kept me watching as she played out another brutal film noir plot, raising her eyebrows and goading the men around her to violence, rough sex, and ruin. Most of Grahame's films have lurid titles: Blonde Fever (1944), Roughshod (1949), The Bad and the Beautiful, Sudden Fear (both 1952), The Good Die Young (1954), Blood and Lace (1970), and, my personal favorite, Mama's Dirty Girls (1974). Say her name out loud, and it even sounds like her: Gloria Grahame, fancy and earthy at once, tart, ungraspable. She generally makes her entrance on-screen accompanied by a wail of hot jazz, eating candy, applying lipstick to that puffy mouth, flipping her dirty hair and cheap hoop earrings, extending her toned legs so we can see her shapely feet tied up in ankle-strap high heels. Her perversity knows no limits on-screen; in life, she was capable of sleeping with the 13-year-old son of her second husband, Nicholas Ray (she later married this stepson and bore him sons). She could never deny her impulses, and her wantonness made and then destroyed an exciting career in movies. ...

... Gloria Grahame lived on the sidelines of her films because it was there that she could cause the most trouble; she might appear in any movie, young and sullen, aged and insistent, under a pound of make-up or plain-faced, fucking the pain away, putting out a cigarette in someone's eye, giggling for no reason. She's inescapable, a disruptive force, and when I hear her in my head, she seems to say, "C'mon, you know you want to . . ."
Dan Callahan tells us about the fatal instincts of Gloria Grahame for Bright Lights Film Journal.

A great clip with Gloria from Fritz Lang's The Big Heat:

Video clip added by Indigo1045

Doctor X

John McElwee, and his Greenbriar Picture Shows has a highly interesting post up about Pre-Code Horror movie Doctor X:
" ... Doctor X and Mystery Of The Wax Museum are unique for being the only horror films shot in any kind of Technicolor during the thirties. The two-color process was never satisfactory for cartoons, and musicals suffered from pallid representations of costumes and décor, but horror films stood to reap enormous benefits from not of this earth color seemingly shot through lens smeared with formaldehyde. I don’t know how that Doctor X crew stood workdays that ran to twenty hours under the martinet direction of Michael "Skip Lunch" Curtiz (shown here with star Lee Tracy) [Edit by mrdantefontana: shown in the full post over at Greenbriar Picture Shows. Not in this post] . Unions in 1932 were proposed, if at all, in secret meetings among participants who knew not the meaning of days off. On Sabbaths while most rested, the Doctor X team had worked straight through Saturday night and into early morning hours, so that when they did finally arrive home, sheer exhaustion negated Sunday recreation other than blessed sleep. For those in the camera’s glare, lights needed to enable Technicolor were intense beyond endurance and some players sustained damage to eyes they’d keep for life. ..."

Enjoy the full post here.