Ethel Merman sings Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (from Annie Get Your Gun) on Shower of Stars. She is introduced by Red Skelton. This episode was originally cast by CBS on January 20, 1955:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“‘Isn’t it sad,’ he said, ‘that writers who, in their youth, break their backs to escape the bourgeoisie, end up by imitating them—at least the wealthy ones.’”

Siegfried Sassoon (quoted in S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary: A Memoir)

From 2009:

I wrote about film regularly between 1998 and 2005, and at the end of that time I drew up a double-barreled list of the movies I’d reviewed that I liked best. These were the top twenty….

Read the whole thing here.

“‘It is right,’ said the abbess. ‘It isn’t kind.’”

Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“A Conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright: Sixty Years of Living Architecture,” originally telecast by NBC on May 17, 1953 on Wisdom, a series of interviews with notable figures in the arts, politics, and the humanities. The interviewer is Hugh Downs:

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“Penny’s eyes, too, kept straying to the window; the window of the outer office looked northeast over London, and, sitting at her desk, Penny could see far over the roofs to the thin green skyline of Hampstead and Highgate. A new office block hid the turrets and towers of Westminster, but the campanile of the cathedral could be seen overtopped by one of the new office buildings. Something happened to people’s minds when man learned to build offices higher than spires, thought Penny.”

Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

National Review has published a symposium in its latest issue called What We Love About America. The thirty-one contributors include Richard Brookhiser, Joseph Epstein, Mark Helprin, Megan McArdle, Lance Morrow, John Podhoretz, Kevin Williamson, and—yes—me. My piece is called “Western Movies”:

Taken together, the best Hollywood westerns come as close as anything ever has to comprising America’s creation myth, a tale of brave men and women who rode toward Monument Valley to make better lives for themselves and their children. Of course we all know it wasn’t as clear-cut as that, which is what makes their story mythic: It’s what we want to believe about American history. But if it isn’t all true, neither is it all false…

Read the whole thing here.

Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, is interviewed by John Lehmann on Monitor, originally telecast by the BBC on October 12, 1958:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)