11,893 stories by "Trav S.d."
Today is the birthday of the great Irene Ryan. Today she is best remembered for playing Granny on the hit CBS sit com The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971), although she had long career in vau…
Today is the birthday of Jean Arthur (Gladys Georgianna Greene, 1900-1991). It was only this week that I learned that I am distantly related to her! We are both descended from the early Virg…
 Today is the birthday of Spring Byington (1886-1971). I associate her primarily with playing silly old fussbudgets and society women in comedies but a reflection on her career reveals th…
Tonight at 11:30pm (EST) Turner Classic Movies will be showing Vincent Price in The Baron of Arizona (1950). A brief capsule review of the film below, and then, as part of the month…
Apparently, as of today we are mid-way through something called “Family History Month”. To what extent that holiday designation is merely an advertisement for certain web sites I…
Tonight on Turner Classic Movies — a slate of movies about very, very bad children. 8:oopm (EST) The Nanny (1965) Who is the one to hate and fear in this Hammer film? The disturbed hel…
Continuing our month-long series of classic horror posts launched here, today we look at Universal Pictures original Invisible Man series. While the first picture in this series is …
Filed under: BROOKLYN, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS, Vaudeville etc. Tagged: BROOKLYN, Cobra Club, Force Majeur, new vaudeville, Tanya Solomon
Today this is the birthday of Helen Ware (Helen Remer, 1877-1939). Ware was already a star of Broadway and the silent screen before she made her vaudeville debut at the Palace and the Keith …
Today is the birthday of Mervyn LeRoy (1900-1987) . Like most sentient beings I’ve known his name since childhood, as the producer of my favorite movie The Wizard of Oz (1939). I…
Continuing our month-long series of classic horror posts launched here, today we survey several films from the 1930s and 40s that are centered around mad scientists. Here we will find a cert…
As tonight TCM is showing a pair of Jack the Ripper related movies, I thought it would be timely to do this post about sadists and serial killers in classic horror, as part of the month long…
Today is the birthday of Bud Flanagan (Chaim Reuben Weintrop, 1896-1968) of the British music hall team of Flanagan and Allen. A few years ago, someone slipped me a couple of CDs of this…
Today is the birthday of William “Red” McKenzie (1899-1948). Â Originally from St. Louis, he became a prominent Jazz Age figure by playing the kazoo and comb-and-tissue paper! …
We were excited to attend the premiere performance of friend Stefania de Kennesey’s new opera the other night, her long awaited adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanit…
Today marks the anniversary of the release date of the W.C. Fields comedy Tillie and Gus (1933). This was his second team-up with worthy foil Alison Skipworth, whom he had paired up…
Today is the birthday of Harry Hershfield (1885-1974), known in his day as “the Jewish Will Rogers“. Iowa native Hershfield started out as a teenage cartoonist for Ch…
I think we can all agree that Italians and Italian-Americans rule. I come from Rhode Island, which is the closest thing America has to an Italiocracy. I grew up thinking beauty looked like P…
Continuing our month-long series of classic horror posts launched here, today we survey several films from the 1930s and 40s that are centered around sinister monsters and villains who schem…
Today is the anniversary of the release of the Marx Brothers’ comedy A Night in Casablnca (1946). A Night in Casablanca is the Marx Brothers’ come-back movie, made five yea…
Continuing our month-long series of classic horror posts launched here, today we survey Universal Pictures’ Mummy franchise. The fact that today also happens to be the birthday of t…
I’ve only lived in New York for over 25 years — without ever getting around to visiting the home of Edgar Allen Poe, one of my favorite writers. New Yorkers, you know the reason …
This is Part Two of our post from six months ago, a report of our first excursion out to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to pay our respects to the vaudeville stars, et al. Read that ac…
Tonight (tomorrow) at 12:45am (EST) Turner Classic Movies will be showing perhaps my favorite of the many cinematic versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jeky…
Today is the birthday of legendary cinematic auteur Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Read our full article on this amazing individual here). Â We therefore devote today’s installment in our Hall…
