Old Hollywood
Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball

Mia Farrow -Lullaby (Rosemary’s Baby: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Composed by Krzysztof Komeda 

Marty Feldman & Abby Normal in Young Frankenstein (1974, dir. Mel Brooks) (via)

Marty Feldman & Abby Normal in Young Frankenstein (1974, dir. Mel Brooks) (via)

Ketty Lester - Love Letters

Notable moments in pre-Code Hollywood: The Sign of the Cross (1932), in which Cecil B. DeMille re-created in sadistic detail the excesses of the “Arena Games” in Nero’s Rome. Highlights include gladiator vs. bear wrestling matches, Amazonian women beheading pygmies, and sexy Christian martyrs getting served up to crocodiles, lions, and gorillas for the entertainment of spectators (many of these scenes were cut by censors after the Production Code went into effect, but have since been restored). 

Notable moments in pre-Code Hollywood: The Sign of the Cross (1932), in which Cecil B. DeMille re-created in sadistic detail the excesses of the “Arena Games” in Nero’s Rome.

Highlights include gladiator vs. bear wrestling matches, Amazonian women beheading pygmies, and sexy Christian martyrs getting served up to crocodiles, lions, and gorillas for the entertainment of spectators (many of these scenes were cut by censors after the Production Code went into effect, but have since been restored). 

What’s really causing your nightmares: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906, dir. Edwin S. Porter) Full film online here.

What’s really causing your nightmares: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906, dir. Edwin S. Porter) Full film online here.

Marguerite Gance in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, dir. Jean Epstein) (via) Full film online at Internet Archive.   “Yes, I hear it, and have heard it. We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak!  And now—the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?’—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—’I tell you that she now stands without the door!’ The huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher.” -Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Marguerite Gance in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, dir. Jean Epstein) (via) Full film online at Internet Archive.  

“Yes, I hear it, and have heard it. We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! 

And now—the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?’—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—’I tell you that she now stands without the door!’

The huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher.”

-Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

L’Argent/Money (1928, dir. Marcel L’Herbier)

L’Argent/Money (1928, dir. Marcel L’Herbier)

Duke Ellington - Rhapsody in Blue 

Composer: George Gershwin/Personnel

Happy 4th of July from your friends at the Overlook Hotel

Happy 4th of July from your friends at the Overlook Hotel

Monica Vitti & Alain Delon in The Eclipse (1962, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

Monica Vitti & Alain Delon in The Eclipse (1962, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

Bobby Vinton - Blue Velvet (1963)

Q. Did Bobby Vinton’s version of the song ‘Blue Velvet’ inspire the movie?

David Lynch: It was the song that sparked the movie! Bernie Wayne [& Lee Moris] wrote that song in the early 50s….Bobby Vinton’s version was the first one I ever heard. I don’t know what it was about that song, because it wasn’t the kind of music that I really liked. But there was something mysterious about it.

It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns - lawns and the neighborhood. It’s twilight - with maybe a streetlight on, let’s say, so a lot of it is in shadow. And in the foreground is part of a car door, or just a suggestion of a car, because it’s too dark to see clearly. But in the car is a girl with red lips. And it was these red lips, blue velvet and those green-black lawns of a neighborhood that started it.

-excerpted from Lynch on Lynch

Olivia Hussey in Romeo & Juliet (1968, dir. Franco Zeffirelli) (via)

Olivia Hussey in Romeo & Juliet (1968, dir. Franco Zeffirelli) (via)

Nino Rota - Epilogue (Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

“I just want [people] to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer.’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.” -Rod Serling (1975, via)

“I just want [people] to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer.’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.”

-Rod Serling (1975, via)

“Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the 20th century. He puts to a test a complicated theorum of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further—or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present—one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as …the Twilight Zone.” -Rod Serling, “No Time Like the Past”, The Twilight Zone

“Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the 20th century. He puts to a test a complicated theorum of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further—or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present—one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as …the Twilight Zone.”

-Rod Serling, “No Time Like the Past”, The Twilight Zone