I was stunned this morning while driving to work, listening to a story on NPR about a lawsuit in Israel, brought by Jewish women who have been harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jews during bus rides. The story can be heard here.
Gender segregation? The assertion that women should not be educated beyond high school? Fundamentalist Judaism sure sounds a lot like Fundamentalist Islam.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/DrX.flv 400 300]
Let’s do one more old movie with a mad doctor! Here are six choice minutes taken from the climax to Doctor X (1932). It was filmed in 2-color (red, green) Technicolor and was directed by Michael Curtiz, who started in silent movies and was best known for ‘Casablanca’. That’s Fay Wray at 25, as the “dame in dis-dress,” a year before King Kong.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/Mickey.flv 400 300]
After posting Ub Iwerk’s “Skeletons in the Closet” and the Warner Brothers cartoon “Pigs is Pigs“, I guess there’s no avoiding Mickey Mouse’s memorable meeting with “The Mad Doctor” from 1933. In an attempt to avoid any “Imperial Entanglements” with Dizzney, I’ve selected a mere 90 seconds.
During WW2 (formerly WWII) it was up to Cannon, the towel company, to tell the women of America, holding down the home front, what life was really like for their fighting men overseas. Click the thumbnail pictures.
http://youtu.be/kkW3XQKBy1M
The 1937 cartoon “Pigs is Pigs” is disturbing in a way that the previously posted “Spooks” isn’t. As nightmarish as the prospect is of being turned into a skeleton, by a skeleton, it’s totally unreal. In contrast, eating oneself to death is an all-too-real possibility for millions of people.
The pig in “Pigs is Pigs” isn’t Porky, but he appears to make an appearance as the running piggy in the middle. Why does Mama Pig have a German accent?
Mark Evanier isn’t a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. But, then, he doesn’t like cole slaw either. Hitchcock is my favorite director, at least up to Psycho, but Evanier considers even that movie a disappointment.
Hitchcock can, I suppose, be categorized as a genre director of thrillers; but that would be the same as saying John Ford was a genre director of westerns, or Frank Capra specialized in screwball comedies.
NPR has a feature on a new book about the music in Hitchcock’s movies. Click here to hear. The audio player below has Bernard Herrmann conducting a brilliant arrangement of his music for Psycho, 14 minutes long, that I transferred from an old LP.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/Psycho.mp3]