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Hi Rich, Well, I DO enjoy the much-maligned Wheeler & Woolsey ;-) But I have a feeling the Clark & McCullough films will always maintain an elusive, "creepy" feel about them: Paul McCullough, dull & unfunny...Bobby Clark, frenetic (and unfunny)! I don;t know, Paul McCullough m...

In 2008 Elif Kaynacki and I co-hosted a Mabel Normand retro at the Eye Film Institute (then the Nederlands Filmmuseum) and we showed AT CONEY ISLAND in 35mm. It was absolutely gorgeous. We also showed MOLLY O, HEAD OVER HEELS, and premiered the Filmmuseum's restoration of her Goldwyn film THE FLOOR...

This bit had to had originated on stage. It just screams 'vaudeville routine.' And yet I've never read of any stage comic performing this.... Good God, it goes back to Commedia Del Arte' ! I remember once sitting among a group of historians trying to figure out just how far back one could trace tha...

Dear Mafiosi: A request for some Stooges-related help: does anyone know if the cartoon segments from “The Stooges Scrapbook” (1960 TV pilot) circulate anywhere? I see that a couple of people have posted the live-action segments (subsequently reworked into Three Stooges in Orbit) on Youtube. I know ...

There is also Max Linder's version in SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK which had it's moments. I just like the way that McCarey stages both versions with Chase and the Marxes. And he must had to since many of the same shots from SITTING PRETTY are in DUCK SOUP. (Although, was he calling the shots yet behind th...

It sounds as though the ever-popular Mirror Routine was being beaten to death during the mid-1940's: in 1944 Bob Hope & Victor McLaglan do their version in THE PRINCESS AND THE PIRATE, in '45 it's Lou Costello & Joe Sawyer in NAUGHTY NINETIES, and then in '46 it's this Errol Flynn picture! ...

So we're watching NEVER SAY GOODBYE (1946), a minor Errol Flynn Warners comedy with a Christmas theme last night, and in the middle of it, he and Donald Woods, both dressed as Santa Claus, do the Mirror Routine! So add this one to the list with Charlie Chaplin, Charley Chase, The Marx Brothers, and ...

Okay Fellow Mafiosi, here's wishing You and Yours (and Them and Theirs) a Happy Holiday Season! A Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Kool Kwanza, or whatever reason you have to get drunk, eats good food, buy presents, and say, maybe wish your fellow human well at the end of the year. Here's to a better...

I just acquired a print of Lloyd Hamilton's Wedding Belles. Head/tail credits and set up is missing. Footage is 600 feet approx. with some splices due to editing. Cast includes: Gertrude Astor, Arthur Housman, and Eddie Gribbon. Plot: Ham is on an Ocean liner trying to get his girl. I thought this ...

A Very Happy Thanksgiving. Richard, I know that you aren't a huge Lloyd fan, but the turkey on the trolley sequence in that one screams holiday almost as much as the later scenes of wanting to get rid of one's In-Laws. Agnes McFadden Who the holy heck says I'm not much of a Lloyd fan? He may not be...