There's Sometimes a Buggy

This Paramount 1936 Studios Year by Year episode is a Joan Bennett and Cary Grant screwball double feature, Big Brown Eyes (directed by Raoul Walsh) and Wedding Present (directed by Richard Wallace). If the cool people used to say that Hepburn and Grant were a better pairing than Hepburn and Tracy, now they're saying that Grant and Bennett are an even better pairing than Grant and Hepburn. Or they...

We begin our Danielle Darrieux Acteur Spotlight with the movie that made her internationally famous, Anatole Litvak's gorgeously morbid romantic drama Mayerling (1936), co-starring Charles Boyer; and Abus de confiance (1938), our intriguing introduction to Darrieux's collaboration with director Henri Decoin, her husband at the time. From doomed lover to starving law student, the very young Darrieu...

This Universal 1935 Studios Year by Year episode features some very curious medical ambitions: first, there's Eugene Frenke's wacky Life Returns , loosely based on the true story of scientist Robert E. Cornish and his canine Lazari; an act that could only be followed by John Stahl's Magnificent Obsession , starring Robert Taylor as a genius physician who can only realize his potential by becoming...

Our final Sandra Dee episode for a while sees us battling out whether the inanities of the Ross Hunter melodrama  Portrait in Black  (1960), based on a play by the writing duo behind White Heat , are fun or just dumb, after which we turn to Peter Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet (1961), the most curiously gentle satire of Cold War superpower misbehaviour it's possible to imagine. We do agree on one t...

For our September 2026 Special Subject we read Susan Sontag's essay "Bergman's Persona " and applied its ideas to Alain Resnais'  Last Year at Marienbad , mentioned in the essay, and Robert Altman's  3 Women , which owes a great deal to  Persona . Following Sontag, we ask what it would mean to try to approach a narrative film without needing to know "what happens in the story" and what other modes...

For this RKO 1935 episode, FOTP Ann Harding returns in Enchanted April  (directed by Harry Beaumont), based on a novel by Elizabeth von Armin that Elise declares, based on the cinematic evidence, to be the missing link between Jane Austen and Jane Bowles. Then we turn to one of Dave's favourites,  In Person  (directed by William A. Seiter), a Ginger Rogers comedy that paired her with an unusually...

For our second Sandra Dee episode we watched two films from 1959 (March 1959, to be exact): the Ross Hunter family melodrama  A Stranger in My Arms  (directed by Helmut Käutner), from a novel by the author of  Written on the Wind , and the infamous  Gidget  (directed by Paul Wendkos), based on Frederick Kohner's novel about his daughter. We do our best to reconstruct the movie  Stranger  could hav...

In this 1935 20th Century-Fox Studios Year by Year episode, Friend of the Pod William Wyler, in his only appearance at Fox during the studio era, hits it out of the park again with  The Gay Deception . This is one of two comedy masterpieces by Wyler in 1935, both woefully neglected, although this one foreshadows his one well-known comedy,  Roman Holiday , in certain of its plot elements. But it's...

For this Special Subject episode, we looked at a couple of interventions in European national cinemas by Max Ophüls,  La signora di tutti  (1934), made in Italy, and  Komedie om geld  (1936), made in the Netherlands. Although not generally associated with radical politics, or politics at all, in these two early, lesser-known films Ophüls uses melodrama and comedy respectively to explore commodific...

For our inaugural Sandra Dee Acteurist Spotlight we examined two pairings with John Saxon from 1958, The Reluctant Debutante  (directed by Vincente Minnelli), with Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall displaying their talents for farce, and  The Restless Years  (directed by Helmut Käutner), in which Dee gets to display her talent for psychological drama. Whether contending with aggressive peers and neurot...

For this Warner Bros. 1935 episode we watched a couple of melodramas that show a side of the studio's 1930s output less familiar than its fast-talking gangster and proletarian dramas:  The Right to Live  (directed by William Keighley), a love triangle story set among the rich and ableist, starring Josephine Hutchinson and Colin Clive; and  I Found Stella Parish , a spin on the Stella Dallas matern...

We say farewell to Jennifer Jason Leigh for now with two more harrowing works:  Georgia  (1995), written by Leigh's mother, Barbara Turner, and directed by Ulu Grosbard, and  Bastard Out of Carolina  (1996), directed by Anjelica Huston and based on the semi-autobiographical novel by CSA survivor Dorothy Allison. We talk about the endless ambiguities of  Georgia , a rare gripping dramatic work conc...

Elise's final Family Freak-Out, as promised, is the peak of the climb: two emotional marathons totalling 316 minutes and featuring some of the finest acting in the history of American cinema, Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's  Long Day's Journey Into Night  (1962), starring Katharine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone, and John Cassavetes'  A Woman Under the Influence  (1974), starring Gena Rowlan...

For this MGM 1935 Studios Year by Year episode we again explored the screen persona of forgotten star Ann Harding in a double feature, Biography of a Bachelor Girl  (directed by Edward H. Griffith) and  The Flame Within  (produced, written, and directed by Edmund Goulding). We discuss the changes from S.N. Behrman's 1932 play  Biography  and   how well its liberal political message survives them a...

For Part 2 of our Acteur Spotlight on Jennifer Jason Leigh we watched Robert Altman's cinematic embodiment of the Raymond Carver universe, Short Cuts  (1993), and one of Dave's all-time faves, Altman collaborator Alan Rudolph's portrait of Dorothy Parker, her loves, and her milieu,  Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle  (1994). We grapple with exactly why Altman wants us to spend so much time with t...

For this round of Paramount 1935 we watched William A. Wellman's The President Vanishes, based on the pacifist anti-fascist novel by Rex Stout, and the first film version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, directed by Frank Tuttle and starring George Raft as the devoted and unlucky friend of a criminal political boss. Elise is startled by Raft's liveliness (even as he spends a good stretch of th...

For the first episode of our Acteurist Spotlight on Jennifer Jason Leigh, we watched Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High  (1982) and Paul Verhoeven's  Flesh + Blood  (1985). We explore the possibility of Heckerling's portrait of a young woman's existential journey through the good, the bad, and the ugly of sexual discovery influencing an early draft of the Verhoeven heroine, and the youn...

Our Special Subject for June is Wong Kar-wai's so-called "Love Trilogy": Days of Being Wild  (1990),  In the Mood for Love  (2000), and  2046  (2004). Our discussion walks a tightrope of abstraction as we consider the philosophical implications of Wong's treatment of the theme of love: whether it can be consummated and how time, secrets, androids, and epistemology are involved. Proust, Tarkovsky,...

In this Universal 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we discuss the original There's Always Tomorrow , starring Frank Morgan and Binnie Barnes (remade by Douglas Sirk in the 50s with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck) and the bizarre Claude Rains vehicle  The Man Who Reclaimed His Head . The middle-class American nuclear families of the 30s and 50s curiously converge, and future Hollywood Ten sc...

For the final episode of our Isabelle Huppert Spotlight, we watched two movies with a colonial setting: Rithy Panh's The Sea Wall  (2008), based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, and Claire Denis'  White Material  (2009). Disturbing eroticism as a lens on colonial class and racial dynamics is something the films share, as well as white colonial failure, while Huppert in  White Material  emerges as...

Our text for this 1934 RKO Studios Year by Year episode is a William A. Seiter double feature distinguished by ultra-manipulative heroines and a simultaneous fascination with and unsubtle criticism of the rich: the comedy We're Rich Again , which earns a comparison to Preston Sturges for its innovative use of comedy tropes (particularly the high-concept heroine, brilliantly embodied by Marian Nixo...

Our Family Freak-Outs series continues to go from strength to strength as we examine Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind  (1956) and Kenneth Lonergan's  Manchester by the Sea  (2016), a couple of masterpieces of American cinema in radically different modes: Technicolor melodrama and micro-realism. We discuss the curious myth of America in  Written on the Wind , as embodied in the Hadley family's to...

For our second Isabelle Huppert Acteurist Spotlight we have another first encounter with an auteur, Claude Chabrol, with the unfortunately translated Story of Women  (1988), and take on Huppert's iconic performance in the also inaccurately translated  The Piano Teacher  (2001). Be prepared for harrowing subject matter and enigmatic behaviour as we discuss the inescapability of moral complicity, se...

For this round of Fox Studios 1934 we watched Change of Heart  (directed by John G. Blystone), Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell's final pairing, co-starring with James Dunn and a brink-of-stardom Ginger Rogers as college friends in unrequited love configurations; and  Marie Galante  (directed by Henry King), from source material by Jacques Duval best known as the basis for Kurt Weill's songs for t...

For our first Isabelle Huppert Acteurist Spotlight episode, we watched Maurice Pialat's  Loulou  (1980), in which Huppert stars with Gérard Depardieu, and Bertrand Tervanier's  Coup de Torchon  (1981), in which she supports Philippe Noiret in a transposition of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French West Africa. We discuss our first impressions of these two late 20th century French auteurs, the cross-...