Old Hollywood bloopers

My God, Reagan looks-- and sounds-- SO young in that scene with Wyman.

During WW2 Reagan and a bunch of Hollywood stars like Bill Holden and Burgess Meredith were in a Hollywood unit making training films. A senior general in the Pentagon learned what bloopers were and demanded to be entertained by the bloopers from these training films but was unaware such mistakes were immediately trashed.

Their solution to keep Washington happy was to stage a bunch of bloopers and send those on.

Who is the cute young guy with Bogie at 5:30?

I'm always astonished at how HANDSOME Humphrey Bogart was before the ciggies carried him off. It must be as a kid I only knew him from his later years and all the cartoon takeoffs with his famed voice/accent and mug. In those things he never looked anything other than a smelly old sot.

I just had a baby in the ladies' room.

That could be Billy Halop R3.

I think the film is You Can’t Get Away with Murder.

*Some* of them should have had their mouths washed out with soap!

[quote] Reagan looks-- and sounds-- SO young in that scene with Wyman.

The ideal male per his contemporaries. Now we have Timothée Chalamet. So much for evolutionary progression.

R3 Billy Halop. He later played cab driver Bert Munson on All In The Family, when he was no longer young or cute.

If anything that blooper reel gave a good look at how charm free Bette Davis could be on set many times. If she screwed up she was more often all giggles, but when others screwed up she had a look on her punim that could kill.

This was a good reminder of my young years in the early 50s. The worst thing you'd usually hear coming out of an adult's mouth was "goddamn". That was the reigning curse of the day. You rarely if ever heard anyone say "fuck" or any derivation thereof.

People just had more class back then. LOL

*

Ann Sheridan had a great laugh.

I had the opposite reaction to Bette Davis, I thought she was charming.

Same on Bette, r14. A total pro!

This makes me realize how little we ever see of the Golden Age stars of the 30s and 40s in their natural state. Guards down, no PR dept. control, no studio censoring. Fascinating, really, because they're just like you and me.

And interesting how they all mostly try and stay in character once they mutter their swear words. Time was money!

Their heavily mannered, stagy accents drop away and they suddenly sound like normal people just long enough to say "God damn it!"

The Bette Davis ones were wonderful

Cagney seemed like such a pro and a good sport even when things went wrong.

Cagney's face when he busted up the shuttered door was hilarious. Did they rig the door with balsa wood as a practical joke?

There is one blooper not in this collection which is hilarious where Gene Lockhart blows a line about someone being too big for their britches.

I found here from 044. There are a couple of goofs with Gene over the line.

Cagney was extremely attractive! His personality and mannerisms are great too. Reagan looks like a normal guy, never found him cute at all but he was a horse person so he had that going for him. I agree that Bogie was a hottie too, very masculine. What is the accent that they all seem to have, kind of midwestern? Odd how American English has changed. They all dressed elegantly as well.

Also the goofs for The Man Who Came to Dinner in R21 are very funny.

Danny Kaye was drop dead gorgeous

Billy Halop took Judy Garland's virginity

John Garfield…swoon!

Thanks for the Billy Halop info. I remember the old craggy version of him from All in the Family.

[quote]Billy Halop took Judy Garland's virginity

So he was gay after all!

Who's the chick who does the mumbo head shaking bit?

Ann Sheridan.

Actors back then could be so mannered and rigid,3 it's nice to see them cutting loose.

Yes I don't like John Garfield's acting because he does James Cagney obnoxious but in the goofs he has a sense of humor.

Good on Warners for having the sense of humor about themselves to save bloopers and make an 'official ' reel of them for in-house amusement. You just know any MGM 'goofs' were instantly destroyed. I wonder when Warners stopped saving them?

There is a Fox clip of Betty Grable exclaiming 'shit' after she fucks up a dance number in TIN PAN ALLEY.

At Metro we blooped in high style!

There were no ‘goofs’ at MGM, young man.

Greer Garson didn’t bloop.

[quote]What is the accent that they all seem to have, kind of midwestern? Odd how American English has changed

You mean when they're acting? It's called a Mid-Atlantic accent, a British-American hybrid.

Prior to the 19th century, the English that the British and American colonists spoke sounded closer to the standard American accent.

In the early 1800s, the British adopted Received Pronunciation (aka King's English) to distance themselves from Americans.

Later in the century, the upper crust in the Anglophile Northeast developed the Mid-Atlantic accent. Thus, it became associated with the Yankee upper crust.

At the turn of the 20th century, pretentious stage actors began utilizing the Mid-Atlantic accent.

In the 1920s, with the advent of sound, many film actors and broadcasters adopted it, too. Hence, the Mid-Atlantic accent's heyday was the 1930s and1940s.

By the 1950s, the Mid-Atlantic accent began to fall out of favor, as people demanded more realism in films, because regular Americans did not speak like that.

R32 - Internet Archive has bloopers aka breakdowns and blowups up to 1947.

Except for Bette Davis who was from Eastern Massachusetts anyway, where are these mid-Atlantic accents? Stanwyck had a pseudo-Brooklyn accent, Ronald Reagan certainly never had any mid-Atlantic accent. Neither did Jimmy Stewart. Garfield sounded like he was from New York, Bogart certainly did, and so did Cagney. I’m baffled people hear a mid-Atlantic accent, specially at Warner Bros.

I believe it was Jackie Cooper who was Judy Garland’s first around 1938. He was very taken with her, but once she got her virginity out of the way, she started playing the field.

R36 has no idea what they’re talking about.

R38 has a much firmer grasp on reality.

1944 is not in the Internet Archive collection.

The one with the old man giving Errol Flynn a massage is funny. So is Barbara Stanwyck with Dennis Morgan.

R39, Jackie sure got around.

“At 34 years old, Joan Crawford reportedly let the child star use her badminton court. As he recalled it, one day he snuck a peek up her dress, made an advance at her and she closed the blinds. A six-month dalliance supposedly ensued.”

R23

Can’t wait to watch those! That movie never fails to crack me up: “Meet me upstairs at 3 PM and bring some rye bread.”

The director with the English accent is Edmund Goulding.

Bette Davis said that when Jack Warner had to address his staff he was bad at it so the blooper of him repeatedly blowing lines seems to match that story.

R46, Bette said he butchered the English language every time he gave a speech.

Where is Warner in the blooper?

Jack Warner