Tail Pop

Melvin Frank & Norman Panama’s ‘The Court Jester’

When I was growing up in the 1960s, the entertainer Danny Kaye seemed to be everywhere — today traveling the world on behalf of UNICEF, tonight hosting his own CBS variety show. My classmates and I knew the songs from Hans Christian Andersen (1952), even if we boys didn’t always admit it. […]

This Quarter in Film History

Les Beatles Nouvelle Vague: A Hard Day For Night

It is hard to believe now, but in the early 1960s, the young, long-haired Liverpudlian lads John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr (known collectively as the Beatles) were considered to be an insidious force, challenging British as well as American stereotypes of youthful masculinity, just as their distinctive, infectious “beat music” threatened to take over the pop charts of both countries. […]

This Quarter in Film History

When the South Rose Again

One century ago, on February 8, 1915, David Wark Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’ premiered under its original title, The Clansman, at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. […]