DEAN MARTIN & JERRY LEWIS – PT2.

August 3, 2019 Alan Royle 2

  Jerry Lewis (L) & Dean Martin One of Dean Martin’s & Jerry Lewis’s connected ‘friends’ in the fifties was the gangster Willie Moretti, a long-time associate of mob boss Frank Costello. Willie was the man who allegedly ‘convinced’ Tommy Dorsey to let Sinatra out of his contract with the […]

DEAN MARTIN & JERRY LEWIS – PT1.

July 31, 2019 Alan Royle 0

  Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis circa 1950 According to Jerry, what set Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis above the other great comedy duos was simple enough. Burns & Allen, Abbott & Costello, Hope & Crosby, and all the rest, were vaudevillians, stage performers who worked with an audience and […]

KIDS & JUVENILES – PT9

July 28, 2019 Alan Royle 0

    MILEY CYRUS (1992 – ) Miley hails from Franklin, Tennessee, where she entered this world as Destiny Hope Cyrus in 1992, the same year that her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, topped the US Country charts (it reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well), with his single […]

MOVIE TRIVIA – PT135

July 25, 2019 Alan Royle 0

    Audrey Meadows – glamour shot I have been watching television since the mid-1950s, several hundred series, many of them sitcoms, yet I still rank The Honeymooners (1955-56) very near the top of the heap. Like most viewers, I appreciate witty, sharp scripts above anything else, yet the more […]

MOVIE TRIVIA – PT134.

July 22, 2019 Alan Royle 0

  Ingrid Bergman & Alfred Hitchcock Ingrid Bergman told her first husband, Peter Lindstrom, that she could never work effectively without being in love with either her director or her leading man – hence her affairs with Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Omar Sharif and Bing Crosby, to name […]

MOVIE TRIVIA – PT133.

July 19, 2019 Alan Royle 0

    How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) could have been a really good romantic comedy. But it wasn’t and that is a pity. It boasts the services of three extremely desirable Hollywood women in the leading roles, Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, and all three are terrific. […]

MOVIE TRIVIA – PT132.

July 16, 2019 Alan Royle 2

    Columbia head Harry Cohn pictured with Rita Hayworth The notoriously vulgar Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, had his mind set on using Rita Hayworth, an actress he sexually harrassed for decades, for the role of Billie Dawn in the 1950 classic Born Yesterday, but she had just […]

MOVIE TRIVIA – PT131.

July 13, 2019 Alan Royle 0

    Helen Mirren & River Phoenix in The Mosquito Coast (1986) The Mosquito Coast (1986) is a disappointing film, mostly because of Harrison Ford’s somewhat over-the-top performance in the lead. Oddly, of all the films he has so far made, he considers it to be his favourite. Considering it is […]

KIDS & JUVENILES – PT8

July 10, 2019 Alan Royle 0

  JOHNNY CRAWFORD (1946 – ) Johnny Crawford was one of Walt Disney’s 24 original Mouseketeers in 1955, but the original group of boys and girls was cut to 12 for season two and Johnny was let go. Today, he is best remembered by ‘baby-boomers’, who recall him playing Chuck […]

KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY – PT3.

July 7, 2019 Alan Royle 0

                     NOAH BEERY (1882 – 1946) Like his younger brother, Wallace, Noah Beery hailed from Kansas City, Missouri in the 1880s. He made his stage debut at 16 before following Wallace into films in the early days of the motion picture […]