Rodgers’ friends and colleagues pay tribute to him in this long-unseen television special produced by the Souvaine Corporation and broadcast on NBC. Among the original Broadway cast members reprising the songs they introduced are Vivienne Segal (“Bewitched” from “Pal Joey”) and Alfred Drake (“People Will Say We’re in Love” from “Oklahoma!”). Vera Zorina dances “Rodgers in Three Quarter Time,” a ballet created expressly for the show set to three Rodgers waltzes, and Mary Martin sings “Wonderful Guy” as Rodgers himself accompanies her on piano.
Category: Television
Film director Alfred Hitchcock discusses his life and career in long talks with Pia Lindstrom (newscaster and daughter of Hitchcock star Ingrid Berman) and with film historian William Everson. Excerpts from several films illustrate these interviews. Discussion topics include: what is fear?, method acting vs. film acting, the difference between the usual “Who Done It” mystery and what he considers to be real suspense. His choice of leading ladies and why (Bergman, Baxter, Kelly, Marie Saint, Leigh, etc.).
On this episode of Camera Three, actress Claire Bloom reads poetry. Excerpts include selections from T.S. Eliot, Lord Byron, A.E. Housman, Sir Philip Sydney, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and medieval carols.
In this comedy special, Lily Tomlin plays familiar characters such as young Edith Ann, housewife Judy Beasley, and telephone operator Ernestine, while debuting a new character, Wanda V. Wilford. Lily opens the show by talking about how there’s “more to life” than being a gifted actress, and how, as a youth, she dreamed of becoming “a big city waitress.”
Charlie Gordon, a mentally challenged man who is eager to learn, is given an experimental operation to increase his intelligence to genius level. The experiment seems to work, until one of the lab animals the procedure was tested on begins to lose its intelligence…
Francois Truffaut in conversation in 1977 with Richard Roud, then Director of the New York Film Festival. Truffaut, director of “Jules and Jim,” “The Four Hundred Blows, etc. was in America for the premier of “The Man Who Loved Women” at the 15th NYFF. The film director speaks of his childhood, the moral challenge of World War Two, the real meaning of the “auteur theory”, how the conservative French film industry was forced to change, Truffaut as a “culture hero” in the US, making a film that is as personal as a novel, the difference between French and American approaches to cinema, and many other themes.
America’s great film director-actor Buster Keaton, discussed by film critic Andrew Sarris and Raymond Rohauer, cinema historian, with some unusual perspectives on his goals and motivations. Illustrated with many film excerpts from 1917 to 1928. Rohauer knew Keaton and was partly responsible from rescuing many of his old films from destruction. Sarris is a leading film critic who has often written about Keaton. Excerpts include portions of “The General”, “Cops”, “Frozen North”, “The Boat”, “Sherlock, Jr.” and others. Rohauer also describes rescuing Keaton’s films from a garage and talking with Keaton at the end of his life when he had been forgotten.
After the Civil War ends, a rich horse rancher out West hires the Bannisters, a married Southern couple who lost everything in the war, to help run his ranch. What the Banisters don’t know is that their new boss has more on his mind than breeding horses, and his plans include the pretty Mrs. Bannister.