Film of the Day | MovieSteve

Manhattan

2023-10-302013-09-25 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 September George Gershwin born, 1898 On this day in 1898, the writer of Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Someone to Watch over Me, Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess was born in Brooklyn, New York. A school dropout, Gershwin, born Jacob Gershowitz, was playing piano in clubs at the age of 15, published his first song when he was 16 and was writing shows by his early 20s. His breadth was amazing – Tin Pan Alley songs, entire Broadway and Hollywood musicals and his “folk opera” Porgy & Bess all poured from him, with Gershwin all the time … Read more

Valhalla Rising

2023-10-302013-09-24 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 September The Battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066 On this day in 1066, an Anglo Saxon army led by King Harold Godwinson went into battle against a Norwegian army led by Harald Hardrada. The English (ie Anglo Saxon) army numbered about 15,000, the invading army around 9,000. As the numbers suggest, the English won, though at a cost of at least five thousand men (estimates put the losses on the other side at around six thousand, or two thirds of the army). Why does this battle matter? For a start it marks the last time the Anglo Saxons would win anything … Read more

The Shop Around the Corner

2023-10-302013-09-23 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 September CompuServe launches first consumer internet service, 1979 On this day in 1979, after ten years of supplying dial-up computer timesharing to businesses, CompuServe (originally Compu-Serve) started to offer something similar to the great unwashed. The service was called MicroNET and was sold through Radio Shack stores in the USA. It proved more popular than CompuServe had anticipated and by the following year had been renamed CompuServe Information Service. By then consumers could access news stories, stock quotes and weather reports and they could book airline tickets using only their computer. They could also chat in forums and communicate via … Read more

Ray

2023-10-302013-09-22 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 September Birth of Ray Charles, 1930 On this day in 1930, Ray Charles was born. Six times married, the father of 12 children, Charles also found time to help create what is now known as soul music, a fusion of gospel, jazz and blues, a prime example being his song Georgia. Sighted at birth, Charles started losing his vision when he was five and was completely blind by the age of seven, thanks to glaucoma. Charles was playing in bars in his early teenage years, by the time he was 19 he was having his first hits. Ten years later, … Read more

Zift

2023-10-302013-09-21 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 September The Bulgarian Declaration of Independence, 1908 On this day in 1908, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria declared his country to be independent of the Ottoman empire and a full country in its own right. Only a few years earlier Bulgaria had de facto absorbed the Ottoman province of East Rumelia as the Turkish empire, which had held so much power in the Balkans, started to lose its grip, particularly following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which Turkey lost. The independence of Bulgaria was to some extent the logical progression of 1878’s Congress of Berlin, a grand border-drawing exercise carried out … Read more

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

2023-10-302013-09-20 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 September Publication of The Hobbit, 1937 On this day in 1937, George Allen & Unwin first published a children’s story by John Ronald Ruel Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford. It was called The Hobbit: or There and Back Again, and had grown out of pipesmoke gatherings of an informal literary group of Oxford academics called the Inklings, who met at a pub on Tuesday mornings. Perhaps as a reaction against the modernist experimentation of writers such as James Joyce, the Inklings favoured strong narratives and fantasy, both of which are present by the … Read more

The Battle of the Sexes

2023-10-292013-09-19 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 September Billie Jean King plays Bobbie Riggs at tennis, 1973 On this day in 1973, a retired 55-year-old male tennis pro who had won Wimbledon in 1939 took on one of the timeless champions of women’s tennis, then in her absolute prime. The media hoopla surrounding this tennis match at the Houston Astrodome cannot be overstated. It is still regularly described as “the most watched tennis match in TV history” which can’t still be true, but nevertheless gives an idea of the interest. Riggs, a showman, gambler and wielder of a huge shit-eating grin, had shown a master’s command of … Read more

A Hard Day’s Night

2023-10-302013-09-18 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 September Brian Epstein born, 1934 On this day in 1934, Brian Epstein was born. Dead by the age of 32, the Liverpudlian who became famous as the manager of The Beatles first heard of the band while working in his father’s Liverpool record shop, NEMS. Having seen them, liked them and discovered that they weren’t really being managed, Epstein took them on and proceeeded to turn them into the publicly acceptable face of Merseybeat – nice suits, nice hair and a nice co-ordinated bow to end their set instead of jeans, leather jackets, scruffy hair and messing about on stage. … Read more

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

2023-10-302013-09-17 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 September Tiffany and Co founded, 1837 On this day in 1837, Charles Lewis Tiffany and his partner Teddy Young opened a fancy goods and stationery shop in Lower Manhattan. Tiffany, Young and Lewis changed its name to Tiffany & Co when Charles Tiffany took sole control in 1853. At the same time he shifted its emphasis to jewellery. Growing fat on the revenue from its mail order operation, Tiffany also started to get a name as a provider of quality items – silverware, surgical instruments and swords. By the 1880s it had become closely associated with diamonds after buying the … Read more

Cosmopolis

2023-10-302013-09-16 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 September Occupy Wall Street starts, 2011 On this day in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement, unable to set up its protest against US financial institutions in its original two preferred locations, took over Zuccotti Park, New York. With its rallying cry “We are the 99 per cent,” it made reference to the growing disparity in income distribution in the US (back more or less to its levels around the time of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, in spite of more than 80 years of relative prosperity) and set off a wave of similar protests all over the world. … Read more