Is it just me, or is there something distinctly homo-erotic - or just plain weird - about these vintage American adverts?

Well, they certainly look like they're having fun! So do these fine young roister-doisters...

American magazine stands of the '20s and '30s must have been a riot of wit, vulgarity, elegance, taste, energy and colour

1939: the greatest year in the history of Hollywood - from Son of Frankenstein to Gone With the Wind

...and that wasn't the half of it! I've been hearing about the importance of 1939 in cinema history all my life, but it wasn't untilI I read Majestic Hollywood: The Greatest Films of 1939 by Mark A. Vieira that I realised just how bizarrely brilliant a year it was. Take just one month, December, when cinemagoers were offered...

I hate it when people whose work I admire - like TV comedy scriptwriter Graham Linehan - reveal themselves to be leftie cockwombles

I loved the comedy series, Father Ted and The IT Crowd, both co-written by Irishman Graham Linehan, who also worked on other personal favourites, such as The Fast Show and Brass Eye. As Father Ted and Brass Eye frequently satirised both old-fashioned conventional attitudes and political correctness - the creed followed by scaredy-cat modern conventionalists - I'd always assumed that Linehan would be a non-virtue signalling political agnostic. I even followed him for a while on Twitter. Then, in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, he revealed himself to be a standard-issue,  humourless, arrogant, intolerant leftist of  the worst sort - the sort who believes that (as he himself said) “If you’re not Antifa, what the hell are you? Anyone with any morality at all is Antifa,” and who, this last week, has been demanding that the fund to enable Count Dankula to appeal against his conviction for "grossly offensive" speech be shut down - because the bounder is evidently a neo-Nazi waycist!...

The long and the short of Hollywood actors and actresses - did you know that Sylvester Stallone is 5'8" and Judy Garland was 4'11"?

Boy on a Dolphin

I watched Jean Negulesco's 1957 romance-adventure film Boy on a Dolphin the other night. It's not a good film - but it's not terrible, either. What makes it bearable is a terrific performance by Sophia Loren as a Greek peasant who, while diving for pearls, discovers an ancient statue of - yes - a boy riding a dolphin, and spends the rest of the film yawing between noble archaeologist Alan Ladd and dapper crook, Clifton Webb. The sun-drenched Greek islands - filmed in Cinemascope and vivid DeLuxe Colour - look spectacular, but they're no match for Ms Loren's ravishing beauty (the opening sequence, which features the luscious Italian lovely in wet, bosom-hugging, skintight shirt presumably ensured the film's commercial success). 23-year old Sophia was 5'8" tall, while 44-year-old Alan Ladd (looking closer to 60 - booze will do that to you) stood somewhere between 5'4" and 5'7" - most likely 5'5". And yet this never becomes disconcerting ...

Flesh-crawling movies - The Old Dark House, The Ghoul, The Maze, Quatermass and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte

The Old Dark House (1932) was both English director James Whale's and actor Boris Karloff's follow-up horror movie to their smash hit of the previous year, Frankenstein. Based on the J.B. Priestley novel Benighted, it sounds like a routine "bunch of disparate people locked up in a spooky, isolated house on a stormy night" number - but the essentially parodic script is witty, and Whale and his sparkling, first-rate cast manage to make it genuinely funny and genuinely creepy. Karloff is effectively menacing as a deranged, alcoholic brute of a butler (a bearded version of Frankenstein's monster without the neck bolts or most of the pathos), particularly during the scene where he chases a young lady around the house in a drink and lust-fuelled rage - and Brember Wills as the house's resident pyromaniac, the pixie-like Saul, is, if anything, even more alarming...

The latest BBC Agatha Christie adaptation, "Ordeal by Innocence" turned out to be an "Ordeal by Incoherence"

Viewers have apparently been demanding that the BBC follows the modern media trend by making all three episodes of Ordeal By Innocence available right now. God alone knows why: I watched the first one, and it was a a real shocker, but for all the wrong reasons. Here are ten to be getting on with:

1. There's an adult character, supposedly adopted as a child, who speaks and acts like a Cockney gangster, despite having been brought up in a mega-posh family. I haven't read the book, so this may  or may not be in it - but it was confusing...

More rocking gems from David Stephens's "RocknRoll" e-book - including the Everlys, Jerry Lee, Joey Dee and Dale Hawkins

Having devoted my  last two posts to pre-British Invasion singles by black American acts released on the London American label here in the UK,  as an equal opportunities blogger I'm taking affirmative action to give the white folk a fair crack of the whip. Not all of the following records were released on London, but I either heard them for the first time or became reacquainted with them through one or other of David Stephens' two wildly entertaining e-books - RocknRoll and London Rocks. I'll start with Frank DeRosa and the D-Men's tough-as-old-boots, Duane Eddyesque 1958 instrumental, "Big Guitar":

I'd better come clean and admit...

12 great records by black R&B and Doowop vocal groups and duos - take a bow, The Rays, The Dynamics, Don & Dewey and The Chips

"Daddy Cool" was the B-side of The Rays' 1957 hit, "Silhouettes":

The Cadillacs had a hit with one of the great rock'n'roll breakthrough records, "Speedo", in 1955 - here's their very Coasters-like "Peek-A-Boo"...

12 great records by black singers culled from David Stephens' wonderful e-book, "London Rocks"

I'd heard Ray Charles's "Tell the Truth" - from his In Person album (1960), but I'd forgotten how cool, sassy and just altogether groovy it was. I have to thank...

RIP New Musical Express (print edition) - and how it got me my first job in TV News

50 years ago, Thursday evenings were the most exciting time of the week for me. That was when my father would return from work (Air Attaché at the Norwegian Embassy in Belgrave Square) clutching the latest, hot-off-the-press issues of three weekly music papers - New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Disc, which were available a day earlier in Central London than in Wimbledon. All three would have been read from cover to cover by the time I switched the light out that night, and I'd already be looking forward to next Thursday's batch. I may have been struggling with Latin and Maths at school (and would continue to do so) but when it came to pop music, I was pretty damn near omniscient. I was reminded of those halcyon days last week while reading Shake It Up Baby!: Notes From A Pop Music Reporter 1961-1972, the entertaining memoirs of the music journalist, Norman Jopling. He worked for Record Mirror, which was probably my favourite music paper (my least favourite was...

Golden Age Hollywood movies that are more fun than a barrel of monkeys - Destry Rides Again, Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Mark of Zorro, Heaven Can Wait & Barbary Coast

I watched Destry Rides Again (1939) for the first time last week - and, Lord, what a treat it turned out to be. No wonder Hollywood conquered the world. First, there's Marlene Dietrich as a cynical saloon singer/croupier in full Lili von Shtupp mode...

Congratulations, Grady Hendrix, on winning a Bram Stoker Superior Achievement Award for the brilliant "Paperbacks from Hell"

Grady Hendrix enjoying his Stoker award haunted house trophy

The horror writer Grady Hendrix emailed me last summer to check some details for the book he was writing - Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction. I responded, and (because I thought a historian of the genre might be interested) included a few anecdotes about my time working for New English Library, which lit the fuse on the great '70s horror boom in Britain by publishing James Herbert's first novel, The Rats, and which later added Stephen King to its roster (as well as lesser purveyors of pure pulp, such as Guy N. Smith and yours truly). That led to more emails, and an interview which eventually appeared in The Paperback Fanatic magazine. Before that was published, Paperbacks from Hell came out. I ordered a copy...

The definitive Top 20 early British rock'n'roll tracks

Billy Fury & Joe Brown

I say definitive simply because I need to stop looking for unexpected gems amidst the pile of manure that was British rock 'n' roll between 1956 and 1962. That it was so dispiritingly bad isn't really anyone's fault: the Brits were starting from absolute scratch - with the exception of Radio Luxembourg, there were no radio stations broadcasting this new stuff; they didn't have access to proper electric guitars or amplifiers; they weren't versed in the musical traditions (country, bluegrass, r&b, boogie-woogie, black rock 'n' roll, doowop) that all contributed to the American rock'n'roll explosion; they didn't have access to studios with the knowledge, the spirit or the right equipment to enable them to even vaguely replicate the exotic sounds coming out of the likes of Sam Phillips's Sun Studio in Memphis, Cosimo Matassa's in New Orleans, Leonard Chess's in Chicago or Norman Petty's in Clovis. So let's not be too sniffy...

"Collateral" - Six and a half years on, I ask the same question: "Why Is My Licence Fee Funding Rubbishy Propaganda by David Hare"

Carey Mulligan - what a waste of her talent

About 20 minutes into the first (and, for me, the final) episode of the BBC's new conspiracy thriller, Collateral, written by the revered left-wing playwright David Hare, a number of thoughts struck me simultaneously:...

$tateside, London American and Pye International - the record labels that brought us great American music in the early '60s

I experience a warm glow at the very thought of those labels - far more than I do when I'm reminded of, say, Parlophone, EMI, Top Rank, Pye or Decca. That's because $tateside, London American and Pye International's main function was to release singles and EPs of American material which UK labels had licensed from  labels in the States. Not every record released via these subsidiaries was brilliant - but a fair proportion of the great singles released before the British Invasion - i.e between 1956 and 1963 - appeared on one of the three. Even after the British Invasion, the number of brilliant American tracks released here remained high: British beat combos were recording cover versions of formerly obscure American hits (primarily R&B) - and British companies realised they'd already licensed many of the originals. I'm going to switch to full train-spotter mode and take a look at what each label was offering the 'Oi'll geeve eet foive" generation, starting with $tateside...

RIP Rick Hall: "Land of 1000 Dances", the Muscle Shoals FAME studio and the great '60s music racial melting pot"

Despite its title, "Land of 1,000 Dances" started out as a fairly gentle-paced gospel call-and-response-style chugger written and recorded in New Orleans in 1962 by the talented black New Orleans singer-songwriter, Chris Kenner, whose career was destroyed by chronic alcoholism and a three-year prison spell for statutory rape in 1968. The song was a middle-rank hit:

Three years later...

My cultural 2017: books, art, music, films (and sport)

Books: Fiction
Having set myself the goal of reading 25 novels I really should have read between 1st March 2017 and 28th February 2018, I have to report that I'm not going to make it. It seems that the emotional and intellectual effort required to fully engage with proper literature is simply too exhausting for me in my current enfeebled state. Still, I managed to read 19 of the titles before finally throwing in the sponge around the start of November. The most exciting discovery, for me, was probably Cormac McCarthy, whose All the Pretty Horses is a modern masterpiece.  My greatest relief was finding that my friend Christine Donougher's Penguin translation of Les Misérables is brilliant - utterly masterful.  My greatest feat, in terms of endurance, was finally reading Ulysses all the way through - and enjoying vast tranches of it. And my greatest surprises were rather enjoying Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and discovering just how funny David Copperfield is. One book which has stayed with me, despite my not enjoying it that much, is Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho - it has troubled my thoughts for months, and I rather wish I hadn't read it. My greatest disappointment was finding Henry James's The Wings of the Dove utterly unreadable - yet again...

Quentin Letts's New World Order from the latest edition of The Spectator is very funny...

Continued...

Years from now they'll be asking, "Where were you when you heard that former Labour minister Lord Adonis quit as the government's infrastructure tsar?"

Lord Adonis (I think)

Unfortunately, I've already forgotten. Mind you,  it's one hell of a blow for a government already reeling from the loss of another ex-Labour minister, Alan Milburn, from its social mobility board, earlier this month. If those two hammer blows - plus the loss of the Ashes - don't topple the Tories, I think we can assume that nothing will. One answer to the problem of serial flouncing out by former Labour minister Remainiacs from meaningless government roles would be not to give jobs to your party's political enemies, especially when they've been incompetent enough to allow their own party to fall into the hands of a cabal of deranged insurgents - why shelter them from their well-deserved political ignominy? Still, at least we can console ourselves with the news that Nick Clegg has been knighted for his services to Brexit and for his invaluable role in destroying the Liberal Democrat Party (thanks Nick)...