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Featured Film (full movie): Take Me Back to Oklahoma - 1940
Wanted by the law...marked by the lawless...betrayed by his best friend...but you can't stop a Texan while there's a song on his lips...and lead slugs in his six guns!
Tex (Tex Ritter) and his friend Slim (Slim Andrews) go undercover to help Jane Winters (Terry Walker) keep her Stageline running as Mr. Storm and his gang slowly pick it apart in order to take over her business. Jane has already had all of her Stage Coaches destroyed except one. Tex gets hired as a Stage Coach Driver and when he sees that he needs help he calls in his friends, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, a country music band, who also do a concert for charity. The Ticket booth gets robbed and Tex is framed for the robbery. Its up to Tex to clear himself of the crime and bring the real criminals to justice.
ShareThisThe Towers - 1950's
A color documentary which examines the creation of the Watts Towers and the Italian immigrant and visionary Sabato Rodia who realized them. This film contains intriguing footage of mid-1950's Watts, the neighborhood where greats like Charles Mingus amongst many others grew up.
The Watts Towers or Towers of Simon Rodia in the Watts district of Los Angeles, California, is a collection of 17 interconnected structures, two of which reach heights of over 99 feet (30 m). The Towers were built by Italian immigrant construction worker Sabato ("Sam" or "Simon") Rodia in his spare time over a period of 33 years, from 1921 to 1954. The work is an example of non-traditional vernacular architecture and American Naïve art. The Towers are located near (and visible from) the 103rd Street-Kenneth Hahn Station of the Metro Rail LACMTA Blue Line.
The Watts Towers were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. According to reviewer Robert Koehler in Variety, the documentary film I Build the Tower is "the most complete visual account of self-made architect Simon Rodia and his masterpiece."
“ I had in mind to do something big and I did it. ”
—Simon Rodia
The sculptures' armatures are constructed from steel pipes and rods, wrapped with wire mesh, coated with mortar. The main supports are embedded with pieces of porcelain, tile, and glass. They are decorated with found objects, including bed frames, bottles, ceramic tiles, scrap metal and sea shells. Rodia called the towers Nuestro Pueblo, or "our town." Rodia built them with no special equipment or (so far as is known) predetermined design, working alone with hand tools and window-washer's equipment. Neighborhood children brought pieces of broken glass and pottery to Rodia in hopes they would be added to the project, but the majority of Rodia's material consisted of damaged pieces from the Malibu Pottery, where he worked for many years.
ShareThisFlagellants of Nocera Terinese - 1960's
Every seven years in the town of Nocera Terinese, Italy, a mysterious rite hundreds of years old still takes place to this day.
On Good Friday, Flagellants from the surrounding villages perform the ritual of the battenti.
In this tradition, the participants embed shards of glass in pieces of cork, then forcefully drive the makeshift scourges into their bare legs. Bleeding, they jog the route of the Easter procession, enduring the pain and suffering of religious sacrifice in the name of spiritual cleansing.
ShareThisNewsreel: Snowstorm strands dozens on Donner Pass - 1952
Just because you're snowed-in here-and-now doesn't mean you wouldn't have been in similar circumstances there-and-then.
In this case, the passenger train "City of San Francisco" has been stranded in over ten feet of snow after a blizzard within the legendary Donner Pass.
The travelers survived this journey, unlike their fabled predecessors, the legendary Donner Party of the mid-19th century, who, when stranded, resorted to cannibalism.
The Donner Party (sometimes called the Donner-Reed Party) was a group of American pioneers who set out for California in a wagon train. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–47 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness.
The journey west usually took between four and six months, but the Donner Party was slowed by following a new route called the Hastings Cutoff, which crossed Utah's Wasatch Mountains and Great Salt Lake Desert. The rugged terrain, and difficulties later encountered while traveling along the Humboldt River in present-day Nevada, resulted in the loss of many cattle and wagons, and divisions within the group.
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