A few years ago I was watching a European gangster film (can’t remember the name of it). The film contained the standard array of beatings, shootings, and other mayhem – all that plus subtitles! The audience sat unmoved for about two hours of this bludgeoning, bloodletting and body-stacking. Then towards the end of the movie, …
If you are in the habit of watching old movies, it’s hard to avoid comparisons between fashions in years past and today. Obviously, the costumes in period pieces often look more bizarre (dig that ruffled collar on Queen Elizabeth…check out that hoopskirt on Scarlett O’Hara) than the attire of the future in science fiction films. …
The wisecracking, street-smart newspaperman was something of a stock character in old movies (notably The Front Page in 1931). Such movies often portrayed aggressive, ambitious reporters competing against one another for stories while working for morally-challenged editors and publishers seeking to boost circulation by any means necessary. For the most part, journalism was a rough-and-tumble …
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was immortalized in a song, reminiscent of an old sea shanty, written and performed by Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot. He based his song on “The Cruelest Month,” an article in Newsweek magazine that appeared soon after the November 10, 1975 disaster, and recorded the song in December. A …
Right from the start, Nevada was something of an outlier among the states of the union. Though Nevada Territory had nowhere near the 60,000 inhabitants supposedly required for statehood in 1864, the Union stronghold was hurriedly admitted on October 31, 1864 so two more electoral votes (the 16,420 popular votes cast were the fewest in …
Long before CGI, humans being menaced by giant creatures they had previously dwarfed had great cinematic allure. In particular, the 1950’s were rife with science fiction films involving tiny creatures grown gigantic. To wit: YEAR CREATURE(S) TITLE 1954 Ant Them! 1956 Tarantula Tarantula 1957 Scorpion The Black Scorpion 1957 Grasshopper Beginning of …
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“When a man falls in love, it is a completely new experience, but for a woman it is an additional experience to those she has already had. F. Scott Fitzgerald I am always amused by egalitarians who decry double standards whenever some sort of standard is upheld for one sex but not the other. You …
Some decades ago, I remember my cousin’s son saying that when he grew up he wanted to be like Bill Gates. I don’t remember how old the kid was at the time, but I don’t think he meant he wanted to be a software developer. In fact, I don’t think he was old enough to …
A funny thing happened to one of Alfred Adler’s theories on the way to the psychology textbook. It underwent a sex change – long before it was fashionable to do so. Adler was one of the pioneers of psychiatry. Born in 1870, appropriately enough, in Vienna, where Freud hung out his shingle. In fact, Adler …
