Who doesn’t love letting their hair down (or putting their hair up) and having a good dance? And if you’ve not got the moves yourself then watching dancing can be just as therapeutic. Just watching this amazing Charleston video (below) made me grin from ear to ear and I hope it has the same effect(…)
A tale of savagery, seduction and Stockholm Syndrome amongst the sand dunes… The Sheik, a silent-movie from 1921, is widely-regarded as the movie that really established Rudolph Valentino to stardom, so I thought I should give it a watch and boy was it a revelation! Watching silent movies is a funny old business, and I(…)
Well, I say there are 3, but frankly there are so many stunts packed into these movie clips that I couldn’t reliably count them. Movie-goers in the silent movie era loved slapstick as well as bold and outrageous stunts, all of which were made without the help of CGI and which could have been catastrophic(…)
Got that Sunday blues feeling? I’m delighted to say I haven’t for once. Summer seems to have appeared from nowhere and we’ve had a strangely surprising March heatwave today (perhaps that vintage swimwear article wasn’t too early after all!). I’d love to know what you think of this movie trailer which has just been released.(…)
Jayne Mansfield was an iconic bombshell of the 50s and 60s and was known as the ‘Working Man’s Monroe‘. She was a master of self-publicity and pioneered the use of the wardrobe malfunction to raise her profile. “A forty-one inch bust and a lot of perseverance will get you more than a cup of coffee-a(…)
In February 1954 Marilyn Monroe travelled to South Korea to entertain the troops. She performed a quickly thrown-together show titled ‘Anything Goes’ to audiences which totalled over 100,000 troops over 4 days. She flew to Korea during her honeymoon in Japan with husband Joe DiMaggio. The baseball star was said to be annoyed by the(…)
With the Winter Olympics in full swing it’s a great time to talk about 1930s skating and movie star Sonja Henie. Henie was a Norwegian skater who won pretty much everything in ice-skating from 1927 to 1936 back in the days when figure skating competitions took place on frozen lakes rather than ice rinks (see(…)
Valentine’s day is rapidly approaching, and I know it’s an occasion that people either love or hate, so I thought this was a great Valentines theme. ‘I Won’t Send Roses’ is almost an anti-love song – if you don’t know it, it comes from the 1920s musical Mack and Mabel and it makes me weep(…)
I discovered this amazing video a few days ago on Vimeo and thought you’d love it as much as I do. It’s called ‘100 years of fashion in 100 seconds’ and, well, that says it all really. It’s a fabulous compilation of fashion and dance-styles from 1911-2011 and it’s totally great – I challenge you(…)
Following on from my fascination with the history of the London Underground earlier this week, I wanted to share this amazing video with you. It shows original footage of London in 1927 next to the same journey photographed now. It’s not just interesting to see how different things are (the number of buses vs cars,(…)
The 80s was a great time for movies. Perhaps because my whole childhood was the 80s: I was 6 at the start of the decade and 16 by the end of it so my choice of movies might reflect this. Although I have to admit discovering some of these movies later on. They’re not in(…)
One of the Christmas traditions in our house is the annual watching of Mary Poppins. We don’t even pay that much attention to it any more, it’s just on in the background and we just join in with our favourite bits. I’m going to have Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious suck in my brains for at least the next(…)
1940s studio publicity photo of MGM actress June Allyson for the film Music for Millions (1944). I love her stripey blouse, it’s another one of those outfits which probably look better in black and white than in colour! I didn’t realise who she was from the photo, but as soon as I saw her smile(…)
Christmas just isn’t Christmas without some Bing Crosby and I thought this quote was particularly apt, especially after seeing the mayhem and stress out there with everyone doing last-minute shopping today! Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won’t make it ‘white’
I couldn’t resist sharing this. I love Morecambe and Wise just as much now as I did as a little girl and I still haven’t found anything to top their Christmas Specials. So I thought I’d share my joy at watching this with you. I have no idea whether Morecambe and Wise ever made it over to(…)
I wanted to share something a little different with you today. This lovely animation has been created by animator Gavin Edwards and was inspired by the Post War Textiles exhibition at the Copenhagen Design Museum. This is what he had to say about his inspiration and creative proces: The exhibition in question was at the(…)
Alla Nazimova, Arthur Hoyt & Rudolph Valentino in the movie Camille from 1921. Camille is basically the same story as La Traviata: a good time girl (with consumption) falls in love with the hero, they live happily for a short time before fate intervenes and various bad things happen including her dying of consumption. I(…)
Go on, have a slice of pure unadulterated joy this Sunday morning. What could be a better start to the day than Gene Kelly and Jerry mouse having a dance? This clips is from the 1945 movie ‘Anchors Aweigh’. Enjoy! x Edited with BlogPad Pro