Aeolian Vocalion

Arthur Lake and Florence Lake were siblings.

Arthur played Dagwood in the Blondie film series, while Florence played Edgar Kennedy's wife in his long-running RKO short comedy series.

To legally regard two co-habiting homos as the cultural and moral equal of a genuine husband-and-wife is the same demented mindset that conveys there's no difference between men and women, and thus, perverted dudes must have access to womens bathrooms and locker-rooms.

This country has been an off-kilter, sick joke of a nation ever since.

No surprise. America is too wedded to depravity at this point. It will probably never jettison the profane farce of homo marriage. As emblematic of Western Civilization's decline and demise as anything.

Pervert nation.

Neat stuff.

Universal released another war film two years later, "The Doomed Battalion" (1932), starring Luis Trenker, which is quite a forgotten film. It's actually a rather interesting curio, showing the WW1 conflict between the Austrian and Italian armies in the Dolemite mountains. The Austrians hold fortifications high in the cold, snowy, desolate mountains, keeping the Italians from progressing, although the latter control the village below. Filmed on location, it has some marvelous photography gracing a rather hellish scenario.

The film is one of those odd ducks in which Universal, run by Carl Laemmle, was making deals with the German film industry, right before Hitler came to power. The movie was primarily a German production, but there was an English-language version made at the time, with some new scenes with familiar faces from American films, like Herman Bing and Gibson Gowland, undoubtedly shot in California by Universal. Trenker himself spoke some English lines for the English-language export version, and there were some scenes with obvious dubbed English chatter by soldiers. Anyway, it's a pretty obscure, forgotten film, but as a gritty war-themed film quite an interesting one.

H.M. Wynant (98)

I'm sometimes wary about recommending "Bad Company" (1931) to folks, as it's a pretty oddball film, with some weird humor and overheated dramatics. But visually it has some very memorable scenes, and its direction is very fluid for an early talkie. I first taped a copy of it off the TNT network in the late-1980s, and probably revisited it five or six times over the years. It's hardly a typical gangster film, with its almost dreamlike aura, tied to a nervous unease. The then-current (and rather haunting) hit tune "Sweet and Lovely" is instrumentally heard behind the opening credits, and then again a few times later, including a surreal montage sequence. It's a very quirky film. Worth seeing, but admittedly not for all tastes. Mostly for deep-dive connoisseurs of old-time movies.

Betty Boop in "Snow White" (1933)

Not specifically Halloween-themed, but by gosh, the content fits.

Total nightmare fuel.

Don't leave out the "Oprah" effect.

Most women didn't fall for all that 60s/70s bra-burning feminism nonsense. Especially out in mid-america. It wasn't until you had 25 years of "Oprah" brainwashing that women started going bonkers and embracing bizarro cultural aberrations as normalcy.

"Racket Squad"

I attended a screening of "The Leopard" (1963) on the UT campus in Austin, with star Burt Lancaster in attendance, along with some of the descendants of the Sicilian family depicted in the film. Memorable event, listening to them all giving backstories on its history after the screening.