Another of the eight Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy films has been released on DVD!

Bitter Sweet is now available…  It was their 7th film together and their second together in Technicolor.

Link to purchase this film

The Jeanette MacDonald version of “Smilin’ Through” (1941), in Technicolor and co-starring her off-screen husband Gene Raymond, and Brian Aherne, has been released on DVD!

Jeanette looks beautiful in color playing dual roles.  Trivia alert: the cameo she wears in this film was her own – a gift to her from Nelson Eddy. It belonged to his great-grandmother and he added diamonds to it.

The original cast of this project was supposed to be Jeanette with Robert Taylor and Jimmy Stewart. But Stewart joined the army and Taylor went on a two-month vacation with his wife, Barbara Stanwyck.  Brian Ahern was signed to replace Jimmy Stewart. Gene Raymond wasn’t signed until after the first week of filming!

Link to order the film

These are the first 2 Jeanette-Nelson team films to be released on commercial DVD.

UPDATE: They are both available at Amazon.com.

Link to Naughty Marietta

Link to Sweethearts

Enjoy!

Jeanette MacDonald & Lassie in The Sun Comes Up (1949)

Those who cling to the image of André Previn as a Wunderkind in a turtleneck may be gobsmacked to learn that April 6 marked his 80th birthday. In the course of a multifaceted career, Mr. Previn has distinguished himself as a symphonic conductor, a chamber musician, a jazz pianist, and a composer of symphonic and chamber music, opera, Broadway shows, concert song, popular American song, and Hollywood film scores. To mark this banner year, Mr. Previn has been involved in an exhausting international performance schedule….

Of his modus operandi as a composer, Mr. Previn asserts: “No notebooks or sketches. I just get to work on the first blank page. Even if I throw out the first week’s work, I’ve got to write something down. Once I’m over that hurdle, I write very quickly. It’s a habit that comes from my shabby Hollywood background,” he says with a chuckle, “writing scores under strict deadlines for MGM.”

Mr. Previn wrote his first soundtrack exactly half a century ago. It was for a distinctly minor picture, “The Sun Comes Up.” “Jeanette MacDonald, Lloyd Nolan and Lassie — go figure that billing. In any case, I was a kid at the time and just thrilled to see my name on that screen. After that, MGM knew I could handle their assignments, so I got an endless stream of cheap, fast movies. I like to think I’m writing better music than that now.”

Link

Jeanette MacDonald in Don't Bet on Women with Edmund Lowe

In honor of  Jeanette MacDonald’s birthday June 18, get 10% off both her Autobiography and the collection of her handwritten love letters to her 1927-8 beau, Irving Stone.

Also, two of her rarest films, thought to be lost for decades, are available at 20% off today – Oh, For a Man! (1930) and Don’t Bet on Women (1930).

Link to sale

Jeanette MacDonald & Nelson Eddy in Naughty Marietta

Rotten Tomatoes was honored to sit down with Betty White to discuss her Five Favorite Films (hint: she’s a romantic at heart) and to revisit her incredible career in Hollywood — an impressive body of work that includes hosting her own self-titled talk show, her own variety show, creating iconic characters like “The Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls, and winning five Emmys — all before jumping headfirst into movie roles. Read on to learn Betty White’s Five Favorite Films and hear her insights into great television writing, silly moments on the set of The Proposal, and her take on the art of the conversation.

Her five favorite films: Naughty Marietta, Out of Africa, Lost Horizon, The Bridges of Madison County, Kramer vs. Kramer. Re: her first choice:

I don’t think I’d be in this business if it wasn’t for Naughty Marietta, with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. I was 14 and I was SO in love with Nelson Eddy I thought it was the end of the world, and I didn’t just like Jeanette MacDonald, I was Jeanette MacDonald! You know, at 14. And at 14 I also thought, Nelson Eddy married somebody and I thought he needed a much younger woman. I think I saw Naughty Marietta 48 times. I wasn’t even interested in show business until then; I did school plays and that kind of thing, but I hadn’t thought of it as a career until I got hooked.

Link

Hi Sharon,

I am reading your book Sweethearts and I have watched Maytime,  Rose Marie and Sweethearts twice in the last couple of weeks.  As a result, I have fallen madly in love with these two gorgeous and talented people and their glorious voices, and at the same time have been devastated by their frustrating inability to find a way to join their lives in a harmonious and stable marriage when they were so obviously meant to do so.

Your richly detailed and informative book makes me believe that they were in fact all things to each other:  lover, friend, brother/sister, father/mother, child.  Their volatile passion—especially Nelson’s for Jeanette—as well as their compassion and tender regard for one another’s welfare are just two of the many facets of their relationship.  It is an amazing story and I am unable to put it aside for very long, no matter that I have to go to work every day and try to live a reasonable and productive life myself.

Just now I learned through Amazon that there are South American versions of their films on DVD.  What is your opinion of these products?  Am I wrong, or is it true that no one in this country is planning to issue them on DVD anytime soon?  If not, that is really too bad considering that it isn’t going to be long before VCRs will be obsolete.

Thank you for your time and for making this information about these fascinating people available to us.  I am truly grateful to have this peek into their personal lives, an experience which makes me wish I could have known them.

Best wishes,

Barb

Answer: I have seen the South American DVDs of Rose Marie and Maytime. Once you turn off the Portuguese subtitles, the films are excellent quality and sound. If you’re desperate to have them on DVD, this certainly is an option.

The New York Times has reprinted their 1943 movie review of “The Phantom of the Opera,” which starred Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster and Claude Rains as The Phantom.

Perhaps there is renewed interest in all things Phantom since Andrew Lloyd Webber recently announced he’d written a sequel to his Phantom musical.

The review of Nelson’s film, which was originally published on October 15, 1943, seems to sum up correctly the weaknesses of this film. True, Nelson sang wonderfully in the film …but that black wig was dreadful. The movie’s main failing seemed to be that it couldn’t decide whether it was a Nelson Eddy film or a horror movie. It didn’t fully succeed either way, and Nelson Eddy obviously felt it didn’t work for him as he left Universal Studios without filming the second picture he’d hoped to make at that studio.

The review reprint also has a color trailer that you can watch!

The fact that the name of Nelson Eddy appears at the head of the cast of Universal’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” which came to the Capital yesterday, is not to be taken as evidence that Mr. Eddy has finally found his role. He is no phantom in this one; he is very much in solid evidence, and his lungs are working as strongly and as loudly as they have ever worked before. Indeed, you might almost think the picture was made just so he might sing. And that is the principal reason why this remake of the old Lon Chaney film is bereft of much of the terror and macabre quality of the original.

Read the rest of the review at the link.

Earlier, microphones were known as transmitters. In 1878, Thomas Alva Edison made the first commercial microphone. It was a type of carbon microphone. Later, in Bell Laboratories in 1962, a new type of capacitor microphone was invented.

There were a number of microphones which have made their marks over the last few decades. Some of the names went on to create history but now they are a part of the vintage microphones.

-Altec model 647
-American model D76
-RCA KB-1A, MI-11000
-RCA KN-3A, MI-3045
-RCA carbon type 1
-RCA model BK-7, MI-11016
-Amperite model R80L
-Bruno labs RV-3
-General Electric or Westinghouse carbon or condenser microphones
-Remler, Turner, or Jenkins-Adair condenser microphones
-Western Electric carbon transmitter model 369
-Western Electric condenser housing model 9-A
-Turner model 51D
-Western Electric carbon transmitter model 273

The History & Development of Vintage Microphones

The early 1930s saw the movie industry trying out new technology to record musical scores. However, the range of microphones offered was low. In came the MGM Studios, in Culver City, CA, to try out the newly invented cardioid mic made by the Siemens Co, Germany. It was used to make “Naughty Marietta” with the likes of Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy.

Link

It’s rare that there isn’t some princess action happening at my house. I am the father of a 4-year-old, and, like so many children of her gender and age, she has a thing for princesses. For the most part, this manifests itself in the expected Disney ways, with a well-worn copy of Cinderella getting a lot of DVD play. It’s also a current career choice, although in all fairness, it receives stiff competition from dentistry and rock star.

Still, give the girl a tiara, flouncy gown and a ball to wear them to, and she’ll be happy.

So, in honor of the little Princess Uhles, I’d like to present the following list of princess films, nary a one produced by the Mouse House. That would be too easy.

ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953): Although it might be argued that Gregory Peck is playing Cary Grant in this film, there are charm and chemistry between him as an American newsman in Rome and Audrey Hepburn as a princess on the lam.

THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940): This special effects spectacular has aged much better than the later Disney version. Sabu stars as the thief; Conrad Veidt chews scenery as the villain Jaffar; and, in the all-important princess role, the rarely seen June Duprez, who retired from film in the late 1940s.

THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1937): Part swashbuckler, part romantic comedy and part Prince and the Pauper rehash, this immensely enjoyable movie about a prince pretender and the royal to whom he is falsely engaged is the very lightest sort of Saturday matinee treat. Ronald Colman stars as both the real and pretender prince, and the lovely Madeleine Carroll stars as Princess Flavia, who begins to uncover the truth behind the deception.

THE SWAN (1956): MGM celebrated the engagement of Grace Kelly to Monaco’s Prince Rainier by resurrecting an old script about a young princess in love for the soon-to-be-royal actress to star in. This is neither Ms. Kelly’s finest role nor film, but given the historical perspective that surrounds it, it’s a lot of fun.

NAUGHTY MARIETTA (1935): In this Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy vehicle, the princess in question hops a slow boat to New Orleans to escape an undesired marriage. In the Big Easy, she finds herself falling for the mercenary who saved her from pirates. Awkward. In true MacDonald/Eddy fashion, all problems are resolved with the aid of a heartfelt ballad, in this case the classic Sweet Mystery of Life .

Link