THE H.U.A.C & McCARTHYISM PT1

THE H.U.A.C & McCARTHYISM PT1

October 20, 2023 Alan Royle 0

  The HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)  was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and rebel activities in the USA by individuals or organizations suspected of having Communist ties. The threat of Communism, labelled as ‘The Red Scare’ drove a wedge between society and the US Government. As investigations […]

TOMMY KIRK – A TALENT UNTAPPED

TOMMY KIRK – A TALENT UNTAPPED

September 26, 2023 Alan Royle 1

  TOMMY KIRK (1941 – 2021)                                             Tommy was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1941. His interest in acting was ignited at the age of thirteen when he was cast in […]

‘MAMMA MIA!’ & ‘MARY POPPINS’

‘MAMMA MIA!’ & ‘MARY POPPINS’

December 27, 2022 Alan Royle 6

  MAMMA MIA! (2008)                                                                                  It will probably come as a shock to readers (it certainly did to me) to learn that this bloody awful musical became, in December 2008, the highest-grossing movie in UK history, surpassing Titanic (1997)! It has, however, since been passed by Avatar in 2009. […]

RANDOM QUOTES – PT130.

RANDOM QUOTES – PT30.

August 19, 2020 Alan Royle 2

  HARPO MARX:                                           [The famous harp-playing Marx Brother recalled the act performing in vaudeville] ‘If an audience didn’t like us we had no trouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spit-balls, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching […]

HOLLYWOOD & THE ‘COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY’.

HOLLYWOOD & THE ‘COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY’.

February 14, 2020 Alan Royle 6

                        To understand how the US Government came to investigate possible links between Hollywood and the Communist Party, we need to go back as far as 1938, when the Moscow show trials preceded the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, […]

Three old comics.

October 15, 2016 Alan Royle 0

                                     Jack Benny (1894 – 1974) In his will Jack Benny left instructions for a single red rose to be delivered to Mary Livingstone, his widow and co-star from his radio days, every morning […]

The Magical Fifties.

June 17, 2016 Alan Royle 0

  I remember being taken in the fifties by my grand-parents to the open-air cinema nearby to watch black and white dramas starring the likes of Joan Crawford, George Raft, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Dana Andrews, Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Ida Lupino and many others. For some reason a handful […]

More tragic Hollywood.

November 17, 2015 admin 0

  I fell in love for the first time when I was nine. It was 1957 and the object of my infatuation was a brunette with a cute smile and Mouseketeer ears on TV’s Mickey Mouse Club. Her name was Annette Funicello and to me she was perfection with a […]

MAUREEN O’HARA – The Queen of Technicolor.

November 1, 2015 admin 2

                                        On October 24, 2015 the movie world lost one of its icons, the Irish-born beauty Maureen O’Hara. She was 95 years old. Having fallen in love with her screen image […]

Gay/Bisexual Actors in Old TV Shows ( Pt 3 )

June 21, 2015 admin 12

  Nigel Hawthorne (1929 – 2001) The most surprising fact about the superbly written (and acted) Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister is that only 38 episodes in total were made, 22 in the first show and just 16 in the second. Hawthorne was quite brilliant as Sir Humphrey Appleby […]