Recently I borrowed the 1957 horror flick "The Aztec Mummy" from Netflix, and while the credits moved along, I saw this one, and it rang a bell.
Ten years before "The Aztec Mummy," Antonio Diaz Conde did the music for the Spanish-language film version of the John Steinbeck story "The Pearl." Spanish title: "La Perla." Here's the film on YouTube. It has English subtitles.
The Stooges were highly recognizable celebrities in the 1930s and 1940s, and did show-within-a-show comedy bits in many films, as well as cameo appearances. I was not expecting any Stooges in the 1941 film "Road Show," recently borrowed from Netflix on DVD. But here came someone I mistook for Moe Howard without the bowl haircut. Then I realized it was actually Shemp with a normal haircut. But his character's name in the movie is "Moe." An in-joke? Was Moe supposed to do the appearance, and then Shemp need to step in for some reason? Some Stooges scholar knows, but I don't.
I think the next-to-last time I encountered the word "faille" (pronounced "file") was in the Fabrics part of the Home Ec curriculum at Creston Junior High. The last time was in one of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer novels, this week.
The company which makes Jergen's hand lotion once made perfume branded after one film version of "Ben-Hur." Since this movie ad is from 1930 and the box is very Art Deco, the marketing people were thinking of the silent 1925 version with Ramon Navarro and Francis X. Bushman as the dueling charioteers. Neither Conrad Nagel nor Leila Hyams were in "Ben Hur," but they were about to co-star in the unmemorable film "Hell in a Circus."
Someone on YouTube has added an amusing modern musical soundtrack to the chariot race scene:
Kay was coming to the end of her radio program "Boogie Woogie Baton," more for personal reasons that anything, but this hit by The Four Freshman, accordion to an interview Kay gave in the 1980s, signaled that American musical tastes were changing and that swing, jazz, and blues were no longer in favor.
Someone's put the "At Last" track on YouTube:
Someone else has posted the whole soundtrack:
And here's the popular 1941 film:
Adolphe Menjou seemed European to movie audiences, though he was actually from Pittsburgh and the son of a French father and an Irish mother. He often played debonair types who looked good in evening dress. In the 1941 comedy "Road Show," Menjou starts out dressed in a white suit a la Mark Twain, then changes into a giant-check zoot suit with enormous wide-brim hat.
In the film, Menjou plays a man who lives in a mental hospital, from which he's been able to escape if he wants. His main "symptom" is the Bloom-A-Daisy, an invention which is like one of those puff-of-smoke-from-the-flash-pan cameras. but which a hand-cranked Polaroid type print mechanism which... Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?
Menjou's zoot suit ensemble is perfect for the last scene in the film, in which the veteran actor, working at a small carnival, drives off thugs with a miniature baseball bat and, later, a fire hose.
From the carnival fight scene in "Road Show" (1941)
