There's Sometimes a Buggy

An odd pairing for this MGM 1940 episode: King Vidor's  Northwest Passage , which is not about finding the Northwest Passage at all but about an attack on an Abenaki village by an independent ranger company attached to the British Army; and Frank Borzage's mystical prison break movie,  Strange Cargo . We make the argument for a  Starship Troopers  reading of  Northwest Passage  before grappling wi...

This Week's Special Subject is a look at the early silent cinema of Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, during the years preceding  The Passion of Joan of Arc . We discuss  Michael  (1924), about the relationship between a famous painter and his male model, and  Master of the House  (1925), a comedy about the taming of a tyrannical patriarch. Subjects include Dreyer's unique take on the visionary p...

In our inaugural Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we join Gladys Georgianna Greene as she signs on at Columbia Pictures, two years before her star-making team-up with Frank Capra. Her first two films for Columbia, Whirlpool  and  The Most Precious Thing in Life , are a couple of curious weepies with missing-parent plots that allow Arthur to play first the daughter, then the mother, but n...

For this 1940 Paramount episode, an Akim Tamiroff (and Muriel Angelus) double feature in which we unlock the secrets of Preston Sturges' inspiration. First, we look at  The Way of All Flesh  (directed by Louis King), a little-known proto-noir Christmas movie that seems to have taken its inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne, as filtered through the sensibilities of top screenwriters Lenore Coffee a...

In our final Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvreview episode, we look at a commercial and critical flop, Rob Marshall's  Nine  (2009), a musical based on Fellini's celebrated semi-autobiographical film  8 1/2 , and a commercial and critical triumph, Steven Spielberg's  Lincoln  (2012), covering the final four months of Abraham Lincoln's life and especially the process of passing the Thirteenth Amend...

Join your hosts as they race the clock to adumbrate the myriad merits of French Golden Age Master, Jacques Becker! We key in on the director's ingenious use of diverse genres to drop diegetic depth charges into the abyss of gendered subjectivity at midcentury. From the nerve-wracking rom-complications of Antoine et Antoinette to the Bert n' Ernie gangster pyjama party of Touchez pas au grisbi , no...

Universal, 1939: we continue the saga of John Stahl's final years with the banker regime with  When Tomorrow Comes , a frankly pro-labour romance, full of eccentric charm, that rewrites the fate of Irene Dunne's  Back Street  character while reuniting the actress with Charles Boyer after their success in  Love Affair . Then we turn to the studio's B mode with Joe May's intermittently audacious, bu...

At last we come to the Daniel Day-Lewis perhaps best known to cinephiles: the over-the-top monstrous patriarchs of Martin Scorsese's  Gangs of New York  (2002) and Paul Thomas Anderson's  There  Will Be Blood  (2007). Working from a couple of the best viewings we've personally had of these movies, we discuss how Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview build upon the Day-Lewis persona, how they radic...

For our RKO 1939 episode, a Directed by Garson Kanin double feature:  Bachelor Mother , starring Ginger Rogers as an unwed department store clerk accused of motherhood; and  The Great Man Votes , starring John Barrymore as an alcoholic intellectual struggling to raise two children, including the most precocious child actor of them all, Virginia Weidler (of  Philadelphia Story  fame). We discuss th...

We return to our Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view with 1996's The Crucible (directed by Nicholas Hytner with a screenplay by Arthur Miller, based on his 1953 play) and 1997's The Boxer, reuniting Day-Lewis with writer-director Jim Sheridan and writer Terry George from In the Name of the Father and returning to the subject of Northern Ireland and the Troubles. We discuss the ways in which The...

This week's Special Subject takes a look at Sex, Satire, and American Culture in Frank Tashlin's  Artists and Models  (1955), starring Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, and Dorothy Malone, and in Billy Wilder's  Kiss Me, Stupid  (1964), starring Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, and Felicia Farr. Tashlin uses comic books to portray American culture as a strangely sexless-yet-sex-obses...

Fox, 1939: the Greater and the Lesser John Ford Fox movies of 1939,  Young Mr. Lincoln , and  Drums Along the Mohawk , both starring Henry Fonda. We argue with  Cahiers du Cinéma  about the politics of  Young Mr. Lincoln  and find continuities between Ford's work with Will Rogers and his presentation of Lincoln, and discuss Edna May Oliver's comic theft of an otherwise pretty standard, racist sett...

In this Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we look at two movies from 1993: Jim Sheridan's  In the Name of the Father , about mid-70s English-Irish relations, anti-terrorist hysteria, and father-son relationships; and  The Age of Innocence , Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel about social mores in New York at the end of the 19th century. We discuss Scorsese's layered...

Warner Brothers, 1939: this is a big one, a double feature of Dave Faves,  The Roaring Twenties , directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney and Priscilla Lane (among others), and  Dust Be My Destiny ,   directed by Lewis Seiler and starring John Garfield and Priscilla Lane again. We take the opportunity to contrast Cagney and Garfield, Warners' characteristic "proletarian" male stars of th...

In this episode of our Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we go from the depths of obscurity, the straight-to-video  Eversmile, New Jersey  (1989, directed by Carlos Sorin), to the heights of box office success, with Day-Lewis's first, and only, Hollywood action movie,  The Last of the Mohicans  (1992, directed by Michael Mann).We praise the hilarious slice of madness that is  Eversmile, New...

MGM, 1939: the beginning of an era, as the Freed Unit gets started with the first Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musical,  Babes in Arms  (directed by Busby Berkeley), and the end of an era, with Tod Browning's last film, the supernaturally tinged locked room mystery and bid for B-seriesdom,  Miracles for Sale . Reflecting on the role of the blackface number in  Babes in Arms  prompts us to take a...

In this Book Club edition of the podcast, we finally have a chance to explore the work of Friend of the Pod Henry James. We look at James's short novel  Washington Square  (1880) and long short story "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), and two of their adaptations,  The Heiress  (1949, directed by William Wyler) and  The Innocents  (1961, directed by Jack Clayton). We focus on the arcs of the heroines...

We start off 1939 with a bang with two Paramount movies that gave us a lot to discuss. First, Cafe Society  (directed by Edward H. Griffith), the first of several pairings of Fred MacMurray with early Hitchcock blonde Madeleine Carroll, with an original screenplay by future Columbia Pictures producer Virginia Van Upp, takes the screwball (for the most part) out of class-conscious 30s romantic come...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we're still in the early stages of Daniel Day-Lewis's career, and once again the utterly obscure (Pat O'Connor's quirky comedy  Stars and Bars  (1988)) is paired with a much better-known film (Jim Sheridan's  My Left Foot  (1989), based on the life of disabled writer and painter Christy Brown). We discuss Stars and Bars ' attempt to achieve a tone like Scorses...

For this Universal 1938 episode, we begin by again discussing the relationship between comedy, tragedy, and horror, courtesy of John M. Stahl's  Letter of Introduction , featuring famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his alter ego, Charlie McCarthy. Edgar rises and Adolphe Menjou falls in a kind of Tolstoyan double plot. Then we watch as Universal's new banker overlords do their best to launch ano...

For our Valentine's Day 2022 episode, we examine Leos Carax's unique take on romantic love, from the adolescent autocritique of  Boy Meets Girl  (1984) to the anarchy and ecstasy of  Les amants du Pont-Neuf  (1991) to the abyss-gazing of his mind-boggling musical,  Annette  (2021). We discuss Carax's repeated association of love with abjection; his critique of the artist; and the many links betwee...

For RKO 1938, a Ginger Rogers double feature:  Having Wonderful Time  (directed by Alfred Santell - and George Stevens?), based on the play by Arthur Kober (the ex-Mr. Lillian Hellman), and  Vivacious Lady  (definitely directed by George Stevens), one of the best Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, but not one of the best known. We discuss the consequences of the de-ethnicizing of Kober's play; Steve...

Our second Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view introduces us to the little-known, but very worthy, Nanou  (1986), Conny Templeman's first and seemingly only feature, which we liked enough to discuss it in detail even though Day-Lewis's part is very minor. We draw comparisons between the film and Joanna Hogg's  The Souvenir , and between Day-Lewis's part in it and Ben Stiller's in  Reality Bites...

In this 20th Century-Fox 1938 episode we look at two Tyrone Power-starring historical disaster spectacles,  Suez  (directed by Allan Dwan), about the construction of the Suez Canal and various sorts of post-Napoleonic idealism, and  In Old Chicago  (directed by Henry King), a heavily fictionalized account of how Mrs. O'Leary's cow started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Dave and Elise respectively...

In Part 1 of our Anna Magnani Sampler, we explore a range of the legendary Italian actress's modes and moods: from the neorealism of Rossellini's  Rome, Open City  (1945) to the postmodernism of Renoir's  The Golden Coach  (1952); from a working-class mother's tragi-comic attempt to make her daughter into a neorealist child star in Visconti's  Bellissima  (1951) to an ex-prostitute's tragi-heroic...