Getting Started

Memories of

Young Frankenstein

and

Marty Feldman

“Freshly Dead”

Chest Burster

Ok.  I get it now.  Just like my buddy was when he first saw my chest wound after he saw my operation he was waiting for the Alien to come bursting from my chest.

That’s understandable I guess.    Cute Kittens and Sexy Nurses just weren’t was expected. Nice narrative explanations of what had really happened weren’t really getting it either

I didn’t return to my usual smart-aleck accounts of the news or academic descriptions of world political theory, So I’ll give you what you ‘paid for”  Her ya go,

Better now?  Let’s us continue on to cuter and sexier things shall we?

Sunset Boulevard (video)

Final scene with Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) from Sunset Boulevard.  Joe (William Holden) provides narration.

Sunset Boulevard

I Finally Saw It.

Sunset Boulevard.  WHAT A MOVIE!

Starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, and icon film director Cecil B. Demille as himself, it is a story of madness, and what people will do for physical and/or mental security.

See the video of the Final Scene.

WARNING!  Plot Spoiler!

he story, set in ’50s Hollywood, focuses on Norma Desmond, a silent-screen goddess whose pathetic belief in her own indestructibility has turned her into a demented recluse. The crumbling Sunset Boulevard mansion where she lives with only her butler, Max who was once her director and husband has become her self-contained world. Norma dreams of a comeback to pictures and she begins a relationship with Joe Gillis, a small-time writer who becomes her lover, that will soon end with murder and total madness. 

In Hollywood of the 50’s, the obscure screenplay writer Joe Gillis is not able to sell his work to the studios, is full of debts and is thinking in returning to his hometown to work in an office. While trying to escape from his creditors, he has a flat tire and parks his car in a decadent mansion in Sunset Boulevard. He meets the owner and former silent-movie star Norma Desmond, who lives alone with her butler and driver Max von Mayerling. Norma is demented and believes she will return to the cinema industry, and is protected and isolated from the world by Max, who was her director and husband in the past and still loves her. Norma proposes Joe to move to the mansion and help her in writing a screenplay for her comeback to the cinema, and the small-time writer becomes her lover and gigolo. When Joe falls in love for the young aspirant writer Betty Schaefer, Norma becomes jealous and completely insane and her madness leads to a tragic end

*******

I have always been vaguely familiar with the plot line but not until I saw the movie for the first time today did I know how it ended and it was great!  I have used a famous quote from the movie here in a a post.

I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. Demille.

Fiddler on the Roof (videos)

“If I Were a Rich Man” and “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof (with Topol).

Enjoy.

House of Wax

House of Wax (1953)

Blame Kitty Packard for this post.  When I found her blog, Kitty Packard Pictorial, I begin to think of all the old movies that I loved so much so many years ago.

House of Wax is just one of these.

As a child I was horrified by the evil of Vincent Price and his gross disfigurement.  As an adult when I already knew what was coming I reveled in the melodrama.

The movie stars Vincent Price.  Also memorable are Carolyn Jones who was best known for Morticia Addams in The Addams Family and a young Charles Bronsen as Igor.  Pop some popcorn and plop down and prepare to be entertained Old School.

Here is a copy of the plot summary from The Independent Movie Database (IMDb)

A sculptor of wax figures for a museum is horrified when his partner proposes setting fire to the unpopular museum in order to collect the insurance money. As the wax figures melt amid the blaze, the two men have a fight. The sculptor is knocked out in the scuffle and left to “perish” among the flames. He resurfaces many years later for the launch of his own wax museum. The opening coincides with the sudden disappearance of some dead bodies from the city morgue. His assistant begins to suspect his boss of foul play, especially after the deranged wizard of wax begins eyeing his assistant’s lovely girlfriend’s friend as a model for a waxed figure of Marie Antoinette.