Hollywood My Home Town (DVD)

For three seasons on NBC, The DuPont Show of the Week presented a variety of informational and entertaining programs. On January 7, 1962 it debuted "Hollywood - My Home Town", hosted by comedian and raconteur Ken Murray (1903-1988). The son of vaudeville performers, Murray had moved from New York to Hollywood in the 1920s to find success. Instead of sending his family back home postcards, he sent them 16mm film he shot of local celebrities. Murray became a TV personality in the 1950s with The Ken Murray Show on CBS (1950-1953). He would be regularly invited on to other hosts' programs, where his "Hollywood Home Movies" (which he never stopped taking) were often shown. So popular were these segments that DuPont offered Murray an hour to introduce and talk about the best footage he'd shot over the past three decades. Appearing in Ken's home movies are Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper, Mary Astor, Jimmy Durante, and Ward Bond, among many others. Rudolph Valentino is shown fencing, while at a baseball game the Three Stooges clown around with Boris Karloff in full Frankenstein makeup. In some more contemporary footage, we see a dark-haired Jayne Mansfield in a va-va-voom swimsuit with her husband, bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, and their youngest daughter, Mariska Hargitay. "Hollywood - My Home Town" was so successful that it led to several more compilations of Murray's footage, including the subsequent television special "Hollywood Without Make-Up" (1963) and the feature-length film Ken Murray's Shooting Stars (1979). For his contributions to the preservation of film history, Ken Murray was awarded a star on the prestigious Hollywood Walk of Fame.

• documentary