Having Wonderful Time – 1938

A quick drop-in post for the first time in two years! Turner Classic Movies is showing this picture as part of their tribute to Lucille Ball, who is in the film but not the lead. My immediate take-aways: I need to watch more Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. movies, Ginger Rogers was incredibly lovely and funny and...

Sweetheart of the Campus – 1941

Growing up, I was regularly exposed to the music, films, and television series that my parents had grown up with.  This is the rite of passage for almost all of us, and many of us tolerate it until we reach an age of decided tastes and opinions (seemingly younger all the time!).  While we rarely...

Good News – 1947

MGM musicals are a brand.  Every major studio during the classical era tried their hand at musicals, and you'll find successful ones with a variety of stars, but MGM, in my opinion, owned the genre.  During the 1930s, musicals were how studios stretched the capabilities of sound technology, as well as how they entertained downtrodden...

A Yank at Eton – 1942

It's 1942, and one of MGM's go-to stars is 22-year-old Mickey Rooney.  There's a war on, but that isn't stopping MGM from making schmaltzy pictures about plucky teenagers, and no one played plucky better than Rooney.  Breaking their mold just a bit, they took all-American Rooney and set him smack dab in a fish-out-of-water tale...

A Sea of Grass – 1947

Recording movies to watch them later is an old habit, one I've had since I was reusing the same VHS cassette over and over again, watching and erasing films or television programs regularly.  The age of the DVR (digital video recorder) is a great one for those of us who say, gosh, I want to...

Reinvention

There's a chance you landed on this blog today looking for a political post of some kind. That blog retired a few years back, sad to say. The circumstances that led me to starting and running a political blog have shifted, I find that while I have a lot to say on the issues I'm...