There's Sometimes a Buggy

Part 1 of our Oscar Levant Special Subject sees us explain our very personal relationship with this singular figure of 1940s/50s Hollywood in preparation to discuss Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue  (1945), great Warner Bros. woman's picture/noir  Humoresque  (1946), Doris Day debut  Romance on the High Seas  (1948), and accidental Fred and Ginger reunion pic  The Barkleys of Broadway  (1949). Jus...

For our penultimate Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched Thornton Freeland's Jericho  (1937), in which Robeson plays a court-martialed WWI officer who takes up a new life as the leader of a group of Saharan herders and traders, and Pen Tennyson's  The Proud Valley  (1940), often cited as the film Robeson was proudest of, about the struggles of a community of Welsh miners. As in ou...

For this 1948 Warner Bros Studios Year by Year episode, we watched a couple of the studio's most prestigious releases for the year, John Huston's  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre  and Jean Negulesco's  Johnny Belinda . We explore some extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Jane Wyman in these tales of capitalist nihilism and rural prejudice.  Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s:    ...

For our 2024 Halloween Special Subject we watched two films in the German Expressionist tradition starring one of the greatest actors to be relegated to Hollywood character actor status, Peter Lorre: Fritz Lang's masterpiece M  (1931),   through   which Lorre came to international recognition playing a child murderer, and Lorre's first Hollywood film, Karl Freund's  Mad Love  (1935), to which he a...

Things are looking up in this week's Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, for which we watched  Big Fella  (directed by J. Elder Willis), in which Robeson is a dockworker who becomes involved in the search for a kidnapped rich kid, and  King Solomon's Mines  (directed by Robert Stevenson), the first film adaptation of the H. Rider Haggard colonial adventure epic. We make our arguments for ...

Our MGM 1948 Studios Year by Year episode is a Freed Unit double feature: the great Irving Berlin musical Easter Parade , starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, and  Summer Holiday , a Mickey Rooney coming-of-age story based on a play by Eugene O'Neill, directed by studio-era "art director" Rouben Mamoulian. We discuss  Easter Parade  as a vehicle for presenting Judy Garland's "problematic" anti-...

In this episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we consider the ways in which Robeson, as acteur, inscribes himself on James Whale's Show Boat  (1936) and J. Elder Wills'  Song of Freedom  (1936). First, we consider the racial themes of  Show Boat , and how both the writing of Robeson's character, and Robeson's playing of him, undermines the stereotype ostensibly being presented;...

In this Paramount 1948 episode we dig deep to get the stories behind the stories of two great film noirs starring Ray Milland:  The Big Clock  (directed by John Farrow), based on a novel by Depression-era poet and Communist Party fellow traveler Kenneth Fearing, and  So Evil My Love  (directed by Lewis Allen),   a historical noir/Gothic melodrama based on a novel by the prolific and many-pseudonym...

For our second Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we watched  The Emperor Jones  (1933), a film by Dudley Murphy loosely based on the Eugene O'Neill play, and the Kordas'  Sanders of the River  (1935), an experience that proved crucial in Robeson's own political education. We discuss the Modernist appropriation of African culture and the figure of the African American, methods of rational...

We devoted our 2024 September Special Subject to American silent film auteur Lois Weber. We discuss four films, the allegorical Hypocrites  (1915), which created a sensation at the time with its full-frontal female nudity, and three films that showcase Weber's progressive Christian social vision,  Where Are My Children?  (1916), which confusedly tackles the subjects of birth control and abortion,...

In this 1947 Universal Studios Year by Year episode, a little Ella Raines never hurt no one: we struggle to understand her role in the intermittently riveting Gothic melodrama Time Out of Mind  (stylishly directed by Robert Siodmak), while Edmond O'Brien struggles to understand her role in Vincent Price's life in  The Web , a white-collar film noir directed by future blacklistee Michael Gordon.  T...

The first episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series has a high context-to-text ratio, as we introduce one of the most important figures in entertainment and political activism of the 20th century. The two movies we look at, Oscar Micheaux's  Body and Soul (1925) and Kenneth Macpherson's Borderline  (1930), by auteurs from radically different backgrounds with radically different aims...

We've been waiting for this episode, a 1947 RKO noir double bill with two of the all-time greats, Jacques Tourneur's  Out of the Past , in which Robert Mitchum's cool detective and Jane Greer's psychopathic moll work at cross purposes in their attempts to escape their shady pasts so that they can be free to love, and Robert Wise's  Born to Kill , in which Claire Trevor's morally flexible social cl...

We went deep for our second King Vidor Special Subject episode, looking at four films from the 1930s:  Street Scene  (1931), adapted by Elmer Rice from his famous stage play about working-class New Yorkers; the little-known  Cynara  (1932), starring Ronald Colman as a kindly upper-middle-class man who stumbles into adultery and the abyss;  Our Daily Bread  (1934), Vidor's eccentric, self-produced...

Our final Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is an odd one, with Dave arguing for the value of John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant  (1985), a Nazi conspiracy thriller from a novel by Robert Ludlum, and Elise arguing for the value of  The Other Side of the Wind  (2018), Orson Welles' startling comeback film-that-never-was. Then we give our favourite Lilli Palmer films, with rationale...

This Fox 1947 Studios Year by Year episode looks at two examples of the docu-noir: Boomerang!  (directed by Elia Kazan), starring Dana Andrews as a prosecuting attorney who has to decide between morality and political expedience; and  Kiss of Death  (directed by Henry Hathaway), in which Victor Mature's sympathetic gangster is menaced by Richard Widmark's psychopathic gangster and the legal system...

Our penultimate Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode brings us Lilli as a protagonist again at last, in Lotte in Weimar  (1975), based on the Thomas Mann novel, and Lilli Lite in  The Boys from Brazil  (1978), an outrageous anti-Nazi sci fi story in which Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck wage an epic battle (and also get into a very brutal girl-fight). And this week's Fear and Moviegoing in...

This Warner Bros. 1947 Studios Year by Year episode features two gems that put their own particular slant on noir's familiar theme of murderous conflict between women and men: Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed , starring a more-than-usually deranged Joan Crawford, with Van Heflin as the rakish object of her obsession, and Delmer Daves'  Dark Passage , starring an unusually passive Humphrey Bogart as a...

Our second Anna Magnani Sampler includes three Hollywood films, two with parts written for her by her friend Tennessee Williams, as well as the second film directed by Pasolini: The Rose Tattoo  (1955),  Wild is the Wind  (1957),  The Fugitive Kind  (1960), and  Mamma Roma (1962). Paired with a wacky Burt Lancaster, a bullying Anthony Quinn, a quietly intense Brando, or a nihilistic teenager, Magn...

In this episode of our Lilli Palmer Acteur-ist Oeuvre-view series, we watched a couple of 1969 movies somewhere on the horror spectrum:  De Sade , a movie of ideas that doesn't live up to them, written by famed horror/sci fi author Richard Matheson; and  The House That Screamed , an Italian slasher with a twist or two to recommend it. Good parts for Lilli Palmer in a couple of seriously silly movi...

For this MGM 1947 Studios Year by Year episode, we discuss Cynthia , a gentle family melodrama starring a luminous 15-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as an over-protected teenager, and  High Wall , a psychiatric film noir with great roles for Robert Taylor and Herbert Marshall as sweaty noir protagonists at cross purposes. Our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, meanwhile, features discussion of two...

After some rocky episodes, our Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view uncovers a couple of gems: Nobody Runs Forever  aka The High Commissioner  (1968, directed by Ralph Thomas), a spy thriller bursting at the seams with the charms of Rod Taylor and Christopher Plummer, and  Hard Contract  (1969, the only feature film made by writer-director S. Lee Pogostin), one of the most eccentric movies we've eve...

For this Paramount 1947 Studios Year by Year episode we watch a couple of films by producer/director team of Seton I. Miller and John Farrow:  California , starring the belligerent sexual tension of Barbara Stawyck and Ray Milland in a left-leaning fable about the establishment of law and order in the West Coast, and  Calcutta , a terrific Alan Ladd/Gail Russell noir, stylishly shot by Billy Wilde...

For our June Special Subject we revisit the work of Kenji Mizoguchi, looking at two films from earlier than his best-known (in the West) period: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums  (1939), about cross-class lovers and what it takes to become a great artist, and  The 47 Ronin  (1941), based on a true story that became emblematic of samurai values. Topics discussed include King Vidor parallels, fe...

This week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view sees Lilli in two small but crucial roles: Sebastian  (1968), starring Dirk Bogarde as a Cold War cryptanalyst of divided political loyalties, and  Oedipus Rex  (1968), starring Christopher Plummer as Freud's favourite plaything of the gods. We discuss Cold War politics, the Swinging Sixties New Woman, free will, and the perils of adapting ancient Gre...