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Jazz, Movies Part 1
So, we’ve had posts on the main movies in which Hutton Playtime featured, pretty heavily at that. It’s hard to think of another shoe that is so iconic in movies. Desert boots had their day but they could have been Clarks or one of many hundreds of period imitators.
But when we see the Playtime, that’s what they were. Made by Hutton of Northampton.
Hutton Playtime have been spotted by me in many other movies and the music related arena, sometimes just a fleeting glimpse.
Here is the final roundup of Hutton Playtime in the movies, all those fleeting moments (and some of them are truly fleeting, they need several rewinds and freeze framing to confirm, but my eagle eyes are so used to scanning for boots in old movies and photos that I don’t think I miss any!)
A little bit late, but better than never, as they say.
Here are just a few of those examples:
Miles Davis
Miles relaxing in the studio and on the shoot for the famous (and much posted online) cover shot of him wearing a green Brooks Brothers pull over shirt. What isn’t shown in most images online are his feet. Shod as he was in Hutton Playtime!
Gerry Mulligan
A famous shot of Mulligan from 1952. Mulligan was without doubt one of the forerunners of jazz guys wearing Ivy Style, with his crew cut and beefroll loafers, way before the ‘boom years’ when no jazz musician would be seen dead wearing anything else.
John Coltrane
A very rare shot of John Coltrane warming up on soprano wearing a pair of Hutton Playtime shoes.
Jason Robards
Robards here wearing a distinctly McQueen inspired outfit. Robards can be seen in almost every scene of the 1965 movie A Thousand Clowns as well as the lobby cards for the release.
Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins of course wore a pair of leather Playtime in Five Miles To Midnight (1962) with Sofia Loren.
Some poor editing has Perkins’ Hutton’s weirdly cut in and out of shot in scenes where he’s climbing out of his Paris apartment window whilst pretending to be dead for an insurance claim scam.
As the movie is in black and white, it’s very possible that they were the pair featured here in this color photo – a deep burgundy brown. If not, Perkins had more than one pair!
Bryan Forbes
Screenwriter/Actor/Producer Bryan Forbes is another regular wearer of Hutton Playtime. In fact, Forbes style was a classic Anglo American crossover so it makes sense that in addition to his ivy style corduroy suits that he’d be a wearer of Playtime. As well as wearing the Hutton Playtime shoes in the 1953 British noir Wheel of Fate, Forbes had a soft spot for the Playtime chukka, as seen here directing in the early 1970s.
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