Hours of Classic Crime and Mystery Movies. Discover Our Film Noir and Alfred Hitchcock Collections

in Film | July 19th, 2012

Above you’ll find Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen, free to watch in its entirety. Released in 1932, the film finds a gang of jewel thieves desperate to hide their latest bounty, a diamond necklace. Just when they think they’ve found the perfect house in which to stash it — the Number Seventeen of the title — their plans begin to unravel when various outsiders (including but not limited to a sneaky police detective) turn up there. Hitchcock delivers this story with an odd mix of suspense and comedy, and, perhaps as a result, it hasn’t been one of his most widely seen pictures. But you can watch it with a click of a mouse, just as you can any of the films in our collection of 21 Free Hitchcock Movies Online. There you can experience many evenings of entertainment from the English-turned-American master of twentieth-century cinematic suspense. From his Daphne du Maurier adaptation Jamaica Inn to his early hit The 39 Steps to his British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock delivers shipwrecks, conspiracies, paranoia, and uneasy romantic intrigue — all at no charge.

And if you watch all 21 free Hitchcock pictures, don’t worry; we’ve got more crime and mystery in store for you. Look no further than our collection of Free Film Noir Movies. Just above, we’ve embedded He Walked by Night, a gritty tale of postwar Los Angeles starring Dragnet’s Jack Webb. The film would go on to provide the basis for Dragnet itself. Or perhaps you’d prefer to watch The Lady from Shanghai, starring and directed by Orson Welles, which mixes film noir traditions with Welles’ own idiosyncratic, sometimes perfectionist and sometimes downright anti-perfection tendencies; “the weirdest great movie ever made,” critic Dave Kehr called it. If you’re looking for more noir Welles, our collection also contains The Stranger, his previous film. Starring Edward G. Robinson as a Nazi hunter, it came out as the first film after the Second World War to actually include footage of concentration camps. Both our noir and Hitchcock collections contain a great deal of history as well as a great deal of craft. They may not make movies like these anymore, but now it’s easier than ever to watch the ones they made back then.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Bob Dylan’s (In)Famous Electric Guitar From the Newport Folk Festival Discovered?

in Music | July 19th, 2012

On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan returned to the Newport Folk Festival, now the headline act. The purist audience expected to hear some Dylan classics played with an acoustic guitar — something like “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” They got anything but. Dylan traded in his Gibson acoustic guitar for a Fender Stratocaster, and began to bang out electrified versions of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” (see below). Pete Seeger, the folk icon, lost his cool and famously threatened, “If I had an axe, I’d chop the microphone cable right now.” The crowd booed (for reasons that some now interpret differently). Dylan abruptly left the stage, only to return with an acoustic guitar in hand. Later, during his 1965–66 world tour, embittered fans called him “Judas!”

Everything changed the moment Dylan went electric at Newport. Dylan’s own music, folk music, rock ’n’ roll — they all moved in new directions. And the guitar at the center of the controversy, it went silent for almost five decades … until now. This week, the PBS program History Detectives aired an episode that tried to determine whether Dylan’s electric axe may have wound up in the hands of Dawn Peterson, the daughter of a pilot who flew planes boarded by Dylan and other folk musicians. The forensic evidence suggests that it’s the real deal. But Dylan, through his lawyers, insists that he’s still in possession of the history-making guitar. It’s another layer of controversy that began 47 years ago.

Shakespeare’s Satirical Sonnet 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

in iPad, Literature, Poetry | July 18th, 2012

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” begins Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare. But why read the rest when you can see and hear it, in the video above, from Stephen Fry? No matter how often I’ve wished the voice inside my head could sound like his, I just can’t master intracranially replicating his distinctive combination of accent and manner. This deficiency bothers me especially when reading works as worthy as Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sonnet 130 in particular, a satire of the increasingly and obviously hyperbolic odes to female beauty popular in Shakespeare’s day, practically demands a persona as dryly knowing as Fry’s. But neither Fry in any of his work nor the Shakespeare of Sonnet 130 seem content to simply pop balloons of grotesquely overinflated sentiment. They know that, in refusing to trot out grandly tired comparisons of lips to coral and cheeks to roses, they pay their subjects a more lasting, genuine tribute in the end.

Fry’s reading comes from a new iPad app, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In an apparent realization of all those literary “multimedia experiences” we dreamed of but could never quite achieve in the mid-nineties, it presents the 154 sonnets as they looked in their 1609 quarto edition with scholarly notes, commentary, and interviews with experts. Other performers enlisted to read them include Patrick Stewart (presumably another sine qua non for such a project), David Tennant, and — because hey, why not — Kim Cattrall. A fine idea, but new-media visionaries should take note that I and many others are even now waiting for apps dedicated to nothing more than Stephen Fry reading things. Someone’s got to capitalize on this demand.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Life and Times of Nelson Mandela Retold with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

in History, Media, Technology | July 18th, 2012

Back in March, we told you about the launch of The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive, which makes available thousands of papers belonging to the man who galvanized the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, before eventually becoming the leader of the nation. Partly funded by Google, the archive lets you revisit important moments in Mandela’s life — his Early Life, his Prison Years, and his Presidential Years.

That Digital Archive offers one way to tell Mandela’s story. Now here’s another. The creators of the web site Mandela Story launched a short video yesterday that looks at Mandela’s life through the lens of social media. And it’s meant to raise a serious question: “Would Mandela have spent 27 years in captivity if he (and others) had access to the same technology, social media platforms and tools as we do today?”

It’s short and certainly creative. And if it speaks to you, you should check out Rembrandt’s Facebook Timeline, a clip created by The Rijksmuseum that imagines the social life of the great Dutch painter.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Astonishing Film of Arthritic Impressionist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915)

in Art | July 18th, 2012

You may never look at a painting by Pierre-August Renoir in quite the same way again after seeing this three-minute film. It didn’t show in his artwork, but Renoir suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis during the last three decades of his life. He worked in constant pain, right up until the day he died.

In this rare footage from 1915 we see the 74-year-old master seated at his easel, applying paint to a canvas while his youngest son Claude, 14, stands by to arrange the palette and place the brush in his father’s permanently clenched hand. By the time the film was made Renoir could no longer walk, even with crutches. He depended on others to move him around in a wheelchair. His assistants would scroll large canvases across a custom-made easel, so that the seated painter could reach different areas with his limited arm movements.

But there were times when the pain was so bad he was essentially paralyzed. In the book Renoir, My Father, the painter’s famous filmmaker son Jean describes the shock his father’s wasted figure and gnarled hands gave to people who knew him only from his beautiful art:

His hands were terribly deformed. His rheumatism had made the joints stiff and caused the thumbs to turn inward towards the palms, and his fingers to bend towards the wrists. Visitors who were unprepared for this could not take their eyes off his deformity. Though they did not dare to mention it, their reaction would be expressed by some such phrase as “It isn’t possible! With hands like that, how can he paint those pictures? There’s some mystery somewhere.”

The film of Renoir was made by 30-year-old Sacha Guitry, who appears midway through the film sitting down and talking with the artist. Guitry was the son of the famous actor and theatre director Lucien Guitry, and would go on to even greater fame than his father as an actor, filmmaker and playwright. When a group of German intellectuals issued a manifesto after the outbreak of World War I bragging about the superiority of German culture, Guitry was infuriated. As an act of patriotism he decided to make a film of France’s great men and women of the arts. It would be released as Ceux de Chez Nous, or “Those of Our Land.” Guitry and Renoir were already friends, so when the young man embarked on his project he travelled to Renoir’s home at Cagnes-sur-Mer, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. The date was shortly after June 15, 1915, when Renoir’s wife Aline died. In Sacha Guitry: The Last Boulevardier, writer James Harding describes the scene:

The choice of time was unfortunate. That very day Renoir’s wife was to be buried. Sacha went to the old man who sat huddled arthritically in his wheel chair and murmured: ‘It must be terribly painful, Monsieur Renoir, and you have my deepest sympathy.’ ‘Painful?’ he replied, shifting his racked limbs, ‘you bet my foot is painful!’ They pushed him in his chair up to a canvas, and, while Sacha leaned watching over his shoulder, Renoir jabbed at the picture with brushes attached to hands which had captured so much beauty but which now were shrivelled like birds’ claws. The flattering reminder that he was being filmed for posterity had no effect on the man who, on being awarded the cravat of a Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur, had said: ‘How can you expect me to wear a cravat when I never wear a collar?’

Renoir died four years after the film was made, on December 3, 1919. He lived long enough to see some of his paintings installed in the Louvre. When a young Henri Matisse asked the suffering old man why he kept painting, Renoir is said to have replied, “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 23 ) |

Hunter S. Thompson Remembers Jimmy Carter’s Captivating Bob Dylan Speech (1974)

in Books, Literature, Music, Politics | July 18th, 2012

Forty years ago, Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which “is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting,” says Matt Taibbi in a new edition of the book. Fear and Loathing ’72 entered the canon of American political writing for many reasons. But if you’re looking for one bottom-line explanation, it probably comes down to this: Says Taibbi, “Thompson stared right into the flaming-hot sun of shameless lies and cynical horseshit that is our politics, and he described exactly what he saw—probably at serious cost to his own mental health, but the benefit to us was [his legendary book].”

Thompson may have reached some journalistic apogee with his coverage of the ’72 Nixon-McGovern campaign. But his political writing hardly stopped there. The Gonzo journalist covered the ’76 election for Rolling Stone Magazine. And inevitably he crossed paths with Jimmy Carter, the eventual winner of the election. Above, Thompson recalls the day when Carter first made an impression upon him.

It happened at the University of Georgia School of Law on May 4, 1974. Speaking before a gathering of alumni lawyers, Carter upset their celebratory occasion when he dismantled the criminal justice system they were so proud of. And Carter particularly caught Thompson’s attention when he traced his sense of social justice back to a song written by Bob Dylan:

The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. After listening to his records about “The Ballad of Hattie Carol” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and “The Times, They Are a‑Changing,” I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.

I grew up as a landowner’s son. But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record, “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.” So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.

You can read the full text of Carter’s speech here. It’s also worth watching a related clip below, where Thompson elaborates on Carter, his famous speech and his alleged mean streak that put him on the same plain as Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger (the godfather of The Hells Angels).

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Google Street View Opens Up a Look at Shackleton’s Antarctic

in Google, History, Technology | July 18th, 2012

The discovery of the South Pole is a story whose hero seems to change with every telling. Sometimes it’s Robert Scott, sometimes Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and, most recently, Scott’s protégé, Sir Ernest Shackleton. All three—and geologist Sir Douglas Mawson—are essential characters in a series of early 20^th century expeditions to a forbidding territory nearly inaccessible to the average human being. Now, Google has opened up the Antarctic for everyone to explore from the safety of padded office chairs, comfy couches, and coffee-shop seating. Google Street View was launched in May 2007 and has since expanded its scope to give the average user visual access to some fairly remote and exotic locations. Google’s World Wonders Project provides astonishing views of an ancient Zen Temple in Kyoto and the coasts of Dorset and East Devon in England, among many other stunning sites. Most recently, Google Street View has made available 360-degree views of the wooden huts used by Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton a century ago during their Antarctic expeditions. (Start your tour here.)

Both Scott’s and Shackleton’s huts have been preserved intact as historical sites by New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust. The explorers’ tools and supplies, in their original arrangement, are on full display in detailed panoramic images of the huts’ interiors—a departure from the typical exterior perspectives of Street View. Also viewable in the Antarctic series of views is the Cape Royds Adelie Penguin Rookery, the world’s southernmost penguin colony and home to many thousands of Adelie penguins. Like all Street View images, including the Scott and Shackleton huts, the Rookery views are static—images of bygone moments frozen in time—but they are no less breathtaking for it.

The image below shows the interior of Shackleton’s hut and all of its belongings.

Google Art Project Expands, Bringing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Museums to the Web

Josh Jones is currently a doctoral student in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watching Psycho (1960)

in Film | July 17th, 2012

Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic films, didn’t come together very easily. Hitchcock’s studio, Paramount Pictures, didn’t like anything about the film and denied him a proper budget. So the director went solo and funded the film through his television company Shamley Productions. The budget was tight — less than $1,000,000. Costs were firmly controlled. Hence why, in 1960, the film was shot in black and white.

When Psycho hit theaters, Hitchcock controlled the promotion. The stars — Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh — didn’t make the usual rounds in the media. Critics weren’t given private screenings. And Hitchcock created buzz for the film when he exerted directorial control over the viewing experience of the audience. Showings of the film began on a tightly-controlled schedule in theatres in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. And a firm “no late admission” policy was put in place. You either saw the film from the very beginning, or you didn’t see it all. Signs appeared in front of cinemas reading:

We won’t allow you to cheat yourself. You must see PSYCHO from the very beginning. Therefore, do not expect to be admitted into the theatre after the start of each performance of the picture. We say no one — and we mean no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)!

Theatre managers initially balked at the idea, fearing financial losses. But Hitchcock had his way. And he was right. Long lines formed outside the theaters. Psycho enjoyed critical and commercial success, so much so the film was re-released in 1965.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Hours of Classic Crime and Mystery Movies. Discover Our Film Noir and Alfred Hitchcock Collections

Bob Dylan’s (In)Famous Electric Guitar From the Newport Folk Festival Discovered?

Shakespeare’s Satirical Sonnet 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

The Life and Times of Nelson Mandela Retold with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Astonishing Film of Arthritic Impressionist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915)

Hunter S. Thompson Remembers Jimmy Carter’s Captivating Bob Dylan Speech (1974)

Google Street View Opens Up a Look at Shackleton’s Antarctic

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watching Psycho (1960)

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