“Why don’t you and me do some fancy stepping tonight?” —Gabey (Gene Kelly) to Ivy (Vera-Ellen) in On the Town Grab your tap shoes: today is Gene Kelly’s 105th birthday. I’ve been a Kelly fan almost since infancy and after decades of assiduous viewing, it’s easier for me to name the musicals I haven’t seen […]
A New York Story: ‘The Clock’ (1945)
Another hundred people just got off of the train And came up through the ground, While another hundred people just got off of the bus And are looking around – ‘Another Hundred People’, Company, Stephen Sondheim The Clock is a New York story, even though the actors never set foot there. Practically everything, from Penn […]
Bread and Circuses: ‘Ben-Hur’ (1925)
No, not that Ben-Hur– the other one. Three decades before MGM’s mighty, Technicolor sword-and-sandal epic starring Charlton Heston, there was MGM’s mighty, black-and-white sword-and-sandal epic starring Ramon Novarro. Both are adaptations of the same novel, Lew Wallace’s 1880 best-seller Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and, naturally, feature the most magnificent chariot races ever committed […]
Hooray for Hollywood
It’s eight o’clock on a Saturday night: a little girl huddles on the sofa, hands over her eyes, peering at the television. Rod Taylor is caught in a desperate battle against morlocks and if he doesn’t succeed, surely the monsters will break out of their cave to invade her living room. Yesterday she cheered as […]