Regrets? They had a few…

So, which of these photographs do you find most unsettling?

Top of the World

If you can watch this clip from the British Pathé newsreel “There’s One Born Every Minute,” starring 1930s “skyscraper daredevil” Ben Dova without experiencing a wave of vertiginous queasiness, you’re made of stronger stuff than we are.

Ninety-nine years Young

Today marks Loretta Young’s 99th birthday.

She enjoyed a long, fruitful career that began in the era of silent movies (she appeared in two pictures in 1917, when she was all of four years old) and ended in 1994, when she was 81, and she certainly made many memorable movies, The Bishop’s Wife and The Farmer’s Daughter among them. But our favorites among her oeuvre include the noir-ish 1951 thriller Cause for Alarm! and, especially, the many pictures she made in the late 1920s and early ’30s.

Surely few women have ever appeared more beautiful on-screen than Young did in those pre-code days.

Here’s more on Young’s life and career.

A don’t-miss classic from Blighty

If you live in NYC or have plans to be here in the next two weeks, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit to Film Forum for a screening of the fully restored Technicolor marvel The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Blimp, which stars Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesay, ranks as one of the best pictures ever turned out by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and given the stellar lineup of movies they were responsible for—The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, among many others—that’s saying something.

In fact, it’s one of the greatest pictures ever made in Great Britain. Film critic Andrew Sarris wrote of the picture, “When I first saw the badly butchered American release version of Colonel Blimp more than 40 years ago, I never imagined I’d live to see the day when I would have the effrontery to write that I preferred it to Citizen Kane.”

We’d hate to have to choose between Blimp and Kane, but you get the point. Blimp is a must-see.

Happy birthday, JFK!

Today marks the 116th anniversary of the birth of the great Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton.

Keaton’s by far our favorite silent comic filmmaker (though we’re fond of Harold Lloyd, too), and we do believe Ms. Cladrite feels the same way.

While enjoying a sojourn in Southern California some years ago, we picked up a book called Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton by John Bengston, which is filled with then-and-now shots of the filming locations used in Buster’s pictures.

Sadly, we didn’t have much time left in LA by the time we tracked down the book, but we did manage to make one pilgrimage, and I was tickled pink to do so.

Perhaps my favorite single moment in any Keaton movie occurs in Cops, a silent short from 1922. In it, Buster’s being chased by dozens, if not hundreds, of policemen, and at one point, he pauses in the middle of the street, seemingly trapped with no way of escape, and, as a car motors by, he calmly reaches out, grab the back end of the car, and, extended horizontally, is whisked away.

It’s a magic moment, like something from a cartoon, but Keaton performed the stunt in real life, not in an animated alternate reality. (To view a short clip of the sequence, click on the image on the right.)

And Bengtson’s exhaustively researched book pinpoints the exact spot—on Cahuenga south of Hollywood Boulevard—where that sequence was filmed. And the missus, bless her heart, snapped this shot of your humble correspondent standing where Buster once stood—all the while keeping an eye out for traffic so that blissful moment was not our last one.

We ask you again, are we not a lucky so-and-so?