Edward Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Today in film history, two of the most “shimmering, glowing stars in the cinema firmament” were born on the same day – Oliver Hardy (of Laurel and Hardy fame) and Cary Grant. Let’s wish Happy Birthday to two of Hollywood’s most fabulous stars by remembering their best movies. What are your favorites?
Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about A Hard Day’s Night from 1964, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are hundreds of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. This movie was filmed in black and white.
Being filmed in black and white is in itself not a big deal, but by 1964 most major movies were in color. Maybe United Artists didn't realize what they had in The Beatles. The foursome's subsequent film, 1965's Help!, also released by UA, had a much bigger budget of $1.5 million dollars compared to $500,000 for A Hard Day's Night, their only movie in black and white.
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Victoria Balloon | Talkin' the Oldies
Join us at the corner drugstore for a soda as guest contributor Victoria Balloon writes:
Whenever I need soothing, I watch an Andy Hardy movie. MGM made this series of B movies from 1937-1946 featuring the lives of the Hardy family with the focus on the adventures of son Andy.
A high school youth growing up in the small town of Carvel, Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) falls in love with various girls and gets into financial scrapes, usually related to the complexities of his love life. Father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) deals with the best and worst of human nature as seen from the bench while guiding his family though real-estate deals gone sour, multi-million-dollar inheritances, and the occasional family vacation.
A number of stars were in these films (the role of Judge Hardy was played first by Lionel Barrymore, then by Stone) and many young starlets passed through them (Ann Rutherford, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Donna Reed, Kathryn Grayson, Esther Williams, and Bonita Granville were a few of Andy’s love interests).
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Irv Slifkin | Talkin' the Oldies
The focus of Rhapsody in Blue (1945) is the incredible story and classic music of George Gershwin, whose short life ended at age 39, just a few years before this film was made. The bio-drama from Warner Brothers. stars Robert Alda as the Brooklyn-born George Gershwin, who we witness rise from piano player in a vaudeville theater to song composer to creator of such landmark works as "An American in Paris" and "Porgy and Bess" and the title piece, his first major classical endeavor, for which he is probably best known.
Along the way, we discover that George is a driven man with little time to settle down despite romantic interest from singer Julie Adams (Joan Leslie) and painter Christine Gilbert (Alexis Smith). The cast boasts some of old Hollywood's finest character actors including Charles Coburn, Albert Bassermann, Rosemary DeCamp as his mother (she was also Jimmy Cagney's mom three years earlier in Yankee Doodle Dandy even though he was really eleven years her senior) and Morris Carnovsky as George's proud father, who measures the importance of his son's music by the length of each piece.
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Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about Steven Spielberg's Duel from 1971, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are hundreds of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. This movie was shot in less than two weeks.
To be sure shooting costs were down to the bare minimum, corners were cut to keep the budget under $500,000 and the projected 10-day shooting schedule intact. Duel's estimated final budget came in at about $450,000, but principal photography was actually completed in about 12 days instead. Steven Spielberg used this, his first feature film, as a benchmark for how fast he can get a film into the can.
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Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about Beverly Hills Cop from 1984, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are hundreds of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. This movie held a theatrical record for 25 years.
Paramount hit it big in 1984 with the release of Beverly Hills Cop, which would go on to replace National Lampoon's Animal House as the highest-grossing R-rated comedy film in Hollywood history. Eddie Murphy's action/comedy would hold that record in the U.S. for 25 years, until it was in turn surpassed by 2009's The Hangover.
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Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner from 1967, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are hundreds of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. The movie takes place all in one day.
Although the events in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner occur over the course of a single day, it's a very busy one for the Drayton family of San Francisco. Liberal-minded parents Matt and Christina Drayton (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) discover that their daughter Joey (Katharine Houghton) has gotten engaged to an older man, one she just met while on vacation in Hawaii. Adding to the surprise, the fiancé in question, doctor John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), is black, which at the time would have kept the couple from tying the knot in 14 states. Yes, hard as it to believe, in early 1967, some states still had anti-miscegenation marriage laws on their books (explained further below in this article).
Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about Taxi Driver from 1976, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are hundreds of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. This movie has political overtones.
In the film, troubled ex-Marine and New York City cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) meets Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), a campaign worker for U.S. Senator Charles Palatine's (Leonard Harris) bid for the White House. Travis admires Betsy's purity and tries to befriend her (in his own inimitable manner), but things go awry, so he does what makes sense to him -- he decides to kill the presidential hopeful she is working for. Supposedly the senator's role was first offered to Rock Hudson, who had to turn it down due to his contractual agreement to do his then-TV series, McMillan & Wife.
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Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about Caddyshack from 1980, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are hundreds of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. This movie revolves around a particular occupation.
The movie title gives it away. Michael O'Keefe is a caddy at stuffy Bushwood Country Club, trying his best to get a college scholarship. It was O'Keefe whom director Harold Ramis felt was consistently the most convincing golfer of all the cast members, which included Ted Knight, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield. The basic storyline of the film is about O'Keefe's position as a caddy, which eventually gives way to him transforming into a player in a high-stakes finale involving Dangerfield in some of the funniest scenes in movie history, exposing Rodney's acting talents to millions who only knew him as a standup comic.
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Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
It took some doing to get Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald out of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer vaults and into viewers' homes. At this point, it should be said that both Naughty Marietta (1935), their first movie together, and Sweethearts (1938), their first in Technicolor, did have some deterioration in the film stock; not unusual for films that are over 70 years old.
Going in, it was known it was going to take a lot of work to get these classics cleaned up and ready for distribution. When film elements are problematic, they are usually rejected at the outset of the process. In the case of both of these classics, their source elements were newly manufactured, and there was no indication that there would be any hold-up in moving along.
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Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about Blazing Saddles from 1974, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are lots of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. This film has racial overtones.
In 1974, before the letters PC meant "politically correct," Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles towered as a laugh-out-loud comedy containing many references to racism and some rather derogatory terms for African-Americans. Much like the then-popular TV series All in the Family, though, the words were to mock bigotry, and throughout the film it's the prejudiced white townspeople and the villains who bear the brunt of all the jokes.
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Jerry Frebowitz | Talkin' the Oldies
Here are 10 trivia facts about Cat Ballou from 1965, which originally appeared as our Mystery Movie Quiz on our Facebook page. There are lots of pieces of behind-the-scenes information about this movie. Please feel free to comment and add more trivia we might have missed.
1. It was named by AFI as one of the 10 best of its genre.
In 2008, Cat Ballou was ranked by the American Film Institute as being among the 10 greatest films in the "Westerns" category. If there was a category for "Comedy Westerns," it would probably be high up on that list, too.
2. This was the director's first feature film.
Between 1954 and 1965, Elliot Silverstein directed episodes of some very high-profile TV shows, including Omnibus, Route 66, Have Gun, Will Travel, Dr. Kildare, The Twilight Zone, The Defenders and more. However, it wasn't until 1965 that Silverstein made his big-screen directing debut with Cat Ballou. A few years later, he had another highly visible film, A Man Called Horse (1970), and since that time has mostly concentrated on television. For trivia buffs, Silverstein was David Cassidy's stepfather for a short time.
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Tags: Cary Grant, Laurel & Hardy