Summer Under the Stars is back! TCM’s annual celebration of classic Hollywood features a slew of entertaining pictures with some of the biggest and brightest names. Musical-wise, your best bets are to keep an eye on August 4 (Judy Garland), August 25 (Dick Powell), and August 30 (Betty Grable). But the whole months is full of wonderful treats!
San Diego Comic-Con has grown over the years from a sleepy exchange of comic books in a hotel basement to a massive pop culture Event, attracting hundreds of thousands of people to the San Diego area. There’s a lot beyond the blockbuster movie panels that seem to grab most of the headlines nowadays, including an expansive show floor of exhibitors and a bustling array of smaller panels, including many that will be particularly enticing to fans of classic film and television. Check below for some of Comic-Con’s highlights in classic film and TV, from panels to parties… and also note that I’ve temporarily adjusted my definition of “vintage” to just being outside the past 30 years, to allow for a little more wiggle room.
Imagine a world where you commute to work by hoverplane, consume all your food and drink via a digestible tablet, and use a sequence of letters and numbers as a name. That’s the speculative setting of Just Imagine, the 1930 sci-fi musical that takes place in the far-off future of… 1980. Aside from that veneer, it’s a simple enough …
Although the legend of Wyatt Earp and his gunfight at the O.K. Corral seem like a familiar piece of American folklore to us now, the story wasn’t actually common knowledge until decades after it happened—and even then, it only entered the public imagination through the magic of media. Stuart Lake’s 1931 book, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, was monumental in introducing the public to the story of the Western lawman, who had passed away just two years prior. From the pages of that book came three direct cinematic adaptations, the last of which, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), was an especially popular and an essential component in establishing the myth of the man and his legendary shootout.
A slow start to the month, musical-wise, so I took the long weekend off from updates! But there’s some rare stuff coming up that may be of interest to die-hard musical fans, featuring some big stars in minor works that are a bit difficult to track down normally.
Few other performers can claim the title of “triple threat” so handily as Gene Kelly did with MGM in the 1940s and ’50s as an actor, a singer, and, of course, a dancer. But his career wasn’t limited to only those three titles; throughout the course of his professional life, he was also a producer, a director, a writer, a choreographer, and, all the while, an athlete. For a studio that claimed “more stars than there are in heaven,” Kelly was one of their brightest, an indelible association with the genre MGM took to new heights: the movie musical.