11,729 stories by "Trav S.D."
Tomorrow morning on Turner Classic Movies at 3:00am Eastern, a movie well worth setting your DVR for. My good buddy Bob Greenberg first put me on to this one. It’s Warner Bros. (Vitaph…
Tony Pastor, Father of Vaudeville: Italian-American It’s St. Joseph’s Day! Which is kind of like St. Patrick’s Day for Italians, except in New York we also have Columbus Da…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of the hilarious Larry Semon short The Show (1922), co-directed by Semon and Norman Taurog. As in all the Semon-Taurog collaborations this …
Today is the birthday of comic foil Fred Clark (1914-1968). He’s more versatile than that but that’s what we comedy fans tend to think of him as — a comic foil. His imposin…
How do you like THEM apples? I have so much to report about what’s planned for the coming twelvemonth that I’m breathless – -and there’s time enough to tell the rest …
Today on Turner Classic Movies at 2:30pm, the excellent Fritz Lang western Rancho Notorious (1952). In this RKO Technicolor fantasia, Marlene Deitrich is a criminal kingpin with legs a…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of Charlie Chaplin’s comedy short In the Park (1915). This is one of Chaplin’s early films for Essanay Studios, and to me it…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of The Bell Boy (1918), starring Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and Al St. John. In this gag-driven short, Arbuckle and Keaton play a couple…
We thought we’d acknowledge St, Patrick’s day by plugging an overlooked film with an Irish setting that’s not The Quiet Man. Ryan’s Daughter (1970) was Davi…
Just got the sad news that the all-too-young David Brenner has passed away. Brenner’s stand-up style was brash and urban as befits a street kid from Philadelphia. (Although his body…
Today is the birthday of Eddie Carmel, The Jewish Giant (1936-1972). Born in Tel Aviv, not far from the stomping grounds of the Biblical Philistine Goliath, Carmel was raised in the Bronx an…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of the classic Laurel and Hardy comedy Thicker than Water (1935). The comedy is divided into four sections. In the first Laurel, who rooms …
Today marks the anniversary of the release date of Look Out Below (1919), the first of Harold Lloyd’s many so-called “thrill comedies”, co-starring Snub Pollard and B…
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the release date of the Keystone comedy His Favorite Pastime, starring Charlie Chaplin and directed by George Nichols. The title is intended to be ironic…
Today is the birthday of the lovely singer-dancer-actress Olga San Juan (1927-2009). Born in Brooklyn and raised in both Puerto Rico and New York’s Spanish Harlem, San Juan began danci…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of My Little Chickadee (1940), the one and only co-starring vehicle of W.C. Fields and Mae West. While now thought of as a comedy classic s…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of Charlie Chaplin's much vilified final film, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967). As Walter Kerr wrote, "Chaplin can be bad but he can never be un…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of That Little Band of Gold (1915), directed by Fatty Arbuckle, and starring Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and Ford Sterling. This little movie feel…
H’m, one might think the LAST thing the world would need is a fawning paean to its most coddled, catered-to, reflexively narcissistic demographic, and yet, here one is. For the better …
Some great silent comedies on deck this weekend at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Saturday, March 14 at 4pm, two by  Buster Keaton: Seven Chances (1925) and T…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of the Buster Keaton comedy Hard Luck (1921), co-directed by Keaton and Eddie Cline. Hard Luck was a film that was considered "lost" until most o…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of Harold Lloyd’s 1920 silent comedy Haunted Spooks, co-starring Mildred Davis. It’s a fairly ordinary spook comedy, w…
Today is the birthday of Doris Eaton (1904-2010), whose chief claim to fame was having been the last surviving Ziegfeld chorus girl. The amazing thing about that is, her time with the Fol…
Today is the anniversary of the release date of the silent Laurel and Hardy classic short Duck Soup (1927). Why does it have the same title as the 1933 Marx Brothers movie? Perhaps the fa…
Hello and welcome again to Vaudephone, your one stop shopping for all the best contemporary variety acts, viewed through our patented retroscope. Today we feature the Bindlestiff Famil…
