Adventures in Blu-ray: Merrily We Live (1938)

In cinematic screwball comedies of the 1930s/1940s, wealthy people were always given a hefty transfusion of eccentricity in order to make them more accessible to non-wealthy folks.  (Rich people!  They’re just like us!)  That is most definitely the case with the Kilbourne family, a clan whose matriarch Emily (Billie Burke) has an interesting hobby:  hiring…

Money in the Bank(s)

You may recall in April of this past year that Thrilling Days of Yesteryear beat the drums for a Kickstarter project instigated by the good people at Grapevine Video.  The mom-and-pop label responsible for bringing so many outstanding silent and sound features—with some serials and classic TV thrown into the mix for variety—to Blu-ray/DVD passed around a…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Television’s Lost Classics, Volume 2

Back in September of this year, I reviewed a new VCI/MVD Entertainment release in Television’s Lost Classics, Volume 1...and in that essay I mentioned that a second collection of Golden Age treasures would sally forth on October 9th.  In Lost Classics, Volume 2, the presentation spotlights four half-hour “pilots” for potential boob tube fodder—with two…

“Possessed of an instinct keener than man, Wolfheart suspects evil doings…”

Last month, as I was entertaining myself with the two-reel comedies on The Sprocket Vault set Thelma Todd & ZaSu Pitts: The Hal Roach Collection 1931-33, I spotted one of the blog’s favorite character actors, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, in two of the Thel-Zase entries.  In Catch-As-Catch-Can (1931), Guinn is the lovable lug of a…

Major Awards!

The august aggregation of classic movie bloggers known as The Classic Movie Blog Association (well, I think it’s kinda catchy) put on their best bib-and-tucker Monday night to attend the 2018 Annual CiMBA Awards Dinner.  It’s a most swanky affair; they have at least four different forks at each place setting (you really only need…

Boris Bad Enough

The very first “blogathon” in which I participated took place in 2009, when the Frankensteinia blog hosted a seven-day tribute to actor William Henry Pratt—better known to (and beloved by) fans as Boris Karloff.  My love of Karloff’s work was an inspirational muse during this event; I posted entries on Thrilling Days of Yesteryear for…

Adventures in Blu-ray: The Day of the Jackal (1973)

On August 22, 1962, Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiery—in concert with the right-wing Organisation armée secrète (OAS)—attempted to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle by firing on de Gaulle’s automobile as it maneuvered through the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart.  De Gaulle miraculously survived the attempt (one of the machine gun bullets narrowly missed his head), and Bastien-Thiery…

Book Review: It’s Saturday Morning!

It’s hard to believe that there was a time in my life when Saturday mornings weren’t made for sleeping...but rather, getting up “at the crack of ice” (as my pal Maureen likes to call it) and blissing out in front of the set to watch the endless parade of TV animation.  Those fondly-remembered “days of…

Get Bent

Fragile young Daisy White (Mae Murray), a destitute child of the slums (plus she’s got a heart condition), pleads with a bartender for a little medicinal whiskey for her ailing mother.  Alas, Daisy has no credit with the proprietor, and she is shooed away—but not before her situation attracts the notice of confidence man John…

“Ah ah ah ah…don’t touch that dial!”

After six years of drawing the comic strip Dumb Dora (about a brunette who “wasn’t as dumb as she looked”), Murat Bernard “Chic” Young handed it off to artist Paul Fung once Chic decided to embark on a new venture.  That new strip would soon become one of the most popular newspaper comics of all…