There's Sometimes a Buggy

Our Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view gets started with the two 1985 films that established his range, giving a naturalistic portrayal of a working-class youth in the one and a caricature of an upper-class aesthete in the other: Stephen Frears'  My Beautiful Laundrette , Hanif Kureishi's Oscar-nominated dark comedy about race, class, and sexuality in Thatcher-era England, and Merchant-Ivory's...

It's 1938 and Warner Bros. is in its prime, and so is Bette Davis, just now moving into the kind of top-quality romantic melodramas in which she'd excel. No longer the studio of James Cagney, Joan Blondell, gangster heroes and Busby Berkeley spectacles, it's now the studio of Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, glossy melodramas and action-adventure heroes; or at least, these stars and genres are co-existin...

For our Xmas 2021 episode, two bittersweet intellectual soap operas about forbidden love and sexual non-conformity in mid-20th century America, Douglas Sirk's  All That Heaven Allows  (1955), starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and Todd Haynes'  Carol  (2015), starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blachett. We talk about the interplay of satire and sincerity in Sirk, romance as a vehicle for self-actuali...

We bid Margaret Sullavan a sad farewell with her two final films, Cry 'Havoc' (1943), a very dark WWII propaganda film with an all-female main cast in which the Battle of Bataan meets  Stage Door , and  No Sad Songs for Me  (1950), a peak-crazy woman's picture in the mode of  The Shining Hour  with a slyly progressive screenplay by Howard Koch. Sullavan manages to make having your man stolen from...

For this week's Studios Year by Year, it's MGM 1938 and two aviation movies starring the King and Queen of Hollywood, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. In Jack Conway's wildly entertaining  Too Hot to Handle , Loy is a daredevil aviator with a sentimental mission and Gable an unscrupulous journalist who doesn't know whether he wants to exploit or worship her. It's all in good fun until the movie decides...

For our penultimate Sullavan episode, two movies widely disparate in tone: John Cromwell's  So Ends Our Night  (1941), the fourth and final Sullavan appearance in an anti-Nazi film (and the second based on an Erich Maria Remarque novel); and  Appointment for Love  (1941), a less bitter  Woman of the Year in which Sullavan revisits her Even  Newer  Woman character from  Next Time We Love  and direc...

For Paramount 1938 we have two semi-comedic, quasi-historical tales of charming rogues,  If I Were King  (directed by Frank Lloyd, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges), starring Ronald Colman as medieval bohemian poet Francois Villon, and  The Buccaneer  (directed by frenemy of the podcast Cecil B. DeMille), starring Fredric March as Louisiana pirate and key figure in the Battle of New Orleans, J...

For our Noirvember episode, we look at four Anthony Mann noirs,  Railroaded!  (1947),  T-Men  (1947),  Raw Deal  (1948), and  Side Street  (1950). We follow Mann as he ascends from Poverty Row to a collaboration with one of film noir's most distinctive cinematographers, John Alton, to the big-time at MGM, with his protagonists only getting more sweaty and desperate and his underworld brutes remain...

This Universal 1937 episode stays paused on the pivotal moment in the studio's history, with another James Whale/Deanna Durbin pairing: Whale's last hurrah, The Road Back , and Durbin's second outing,  One Hundred Men and a Girl . Whale's film, based on a Remarque novel about Germany between the wars (familiar territory for the pod), compromised by Nazi censorship, and mutilated by the studio, may...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Margaret Sullavan takes on the Nazis in Frank Borzage's  The Mortal Storm  (1940) and Fannie Hurst in Robert Stevenson's  Back Street  (1941). We discuss the subtleties and broad strokes of this early Hollywood depiction of Nazi Germany, Borzagean heroism, and performative fascism. Turning to  Back Street , we consider what this Code-era remake of a cl...

Halloween is always a good time to ponder the horror of incarnation, familial feeling, and our alienation from God. While there are strict horror movies that tackle these subjects, Ingmar Bergman definitely puts his own twist on them, and so we bring you Halloween with Bergman. In The Silence (1963), a woman dies in a hotel room in a foreign country where the people speak no known language, abando...

For RKO 1937, Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from effervescent-but-repressed to robot-with-a-heart-of-gold in the last entry in her latest series of box office bombs, the J. M. Barrie dual-identity farce  Quality Street  (directed by George Stevens), and her brief return to critical and commercial viability,  Stage Door  (directed by Gregory La Cava), with Ginger Rogers. Two films th...

In this week's episode of our Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we look at a couple of thirds: Sullavan's third film directed by Frank Borzage - the crazed melodrama The Shining Hour (co-starring Joan Crawford) - and third (and most famous) pairing with Jimmy Stewart: the melancholy romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner (directed by Ernst Lubitsch). We consider The Shining Hour...

In our Fox 1937 episode this time around we cover a couple of oddities that nevertheless provide a good snapshot of the studio's latter 30s.  Charlie Chan at the Olympics , starring Shakespearean-trained Swedish-American Warner Oland in his final year as Honolulu's Chinese Sherlock Holmes, flaunts racially integrated American Olympic teams at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, while failing completely...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we follow Margaret Sullavan to MGM, watching two films from 1938,  Three Comrades  and  The Shopworn Angel . Borzage's film, based on Erich Maria Remarque's Lost Generation novel about Germany between World Wars, could not be more different in tone from H. C. Potter's love triangle melodrama, but both centre on a love that transcends the conventional,...

For this pass at Warner Bros. 1937, we have two more vehicles for Dave's favourite actress, Kay Francis:  Confession , Joe May's scene-for-scene remake of the German melodrama  Mazurka ; and Michael Curtiz's Stolen Holiday , a version of the Stavisky affair with Francis, Claude Rains, and Ian Hunter making up the Curtiz Triangle and Orry-Kelly, as usual, fearlessly emphasizing the outré bodies of...

Our Summer in France series concludes with a look at the dynamic duo of poetic realism, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. We discuss their first collaboration,  Jenny  (1936), and two noirish Oedipal fever dreams,  Le quai des brumes  (1938) and  Le jour se lève  (1939). We also look at a Carné film from the period in which Prévert was not involved,  Hôtel du Nord  (1938), an...

In this MGM 1937 episode, we look at two star-studded historical romances about charismatic political leaders and their mistresses:  Conquest  (directed by Clarence Brown), with Charles Boyer's Napoleon Bonaparte and Greta Garbo's Marie Walewska, and  Parnell  (directed by John Stahl), with Clark Gable's Charles Stewart Parnell and Myrna Loy's Katharine O'Shea. Despite the poor-to-terrible reputat...

Our third Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode features another odd juxtaposition:  Next Time We Love  (1936), a melodrama of ideas that pairs Sullavan with Jimmy Stewart for the first time; and  The Moon's Our Home , a (flat) screwball comedy in which she co-stars with ex-husband Henry Fonda (1936). We do some deep reflecting on love, gender roles, and human potential, and try to get a...

For our Paramount 1937 episode, we look at two movies starring Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray: Mitchell Leisen's comedy/melodrama  Swing High, Swing Low  and Wesley Ruggles' screwball comedy  True Confession . Topics include our surprise at Leisen's go-for-broke portrayal of male abjection and MacMurray's risk-taking in  Swing High, Swing Low ; the quiet virtues of Paramount's leading men; the...

Our second Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view entry delivers emotional whiplash as we move from King Vidor's Civil War drama  So Red the Rose  (1935), in which Sullavan plays a southern belle who's forced to mature when the world she knows collapses around her ears, to William Wyler's comedy  The Good Fairy  (1935), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, in which she plays a naive orphan who c...

In this episode we cover three films from the period of Jean Renoir's flirtation (or fornication?) with Communism:  The Crime of Monsieur Lange  (1936),  The Lower Depths  (1936), and  La Marseillaise  (1938). We discuss how Renoir's depiction of the French Revolution differs from the one familiar to the Anglo-American world, uncover the woman behind the Radical Renoir, and analyze the interaction...

In this Studios Year by Year episode, we witness the changing of the guard at Universal in 1936, in which James Whale's  Show Boat  brings down the Laemmle Era, and Deanna Durbin's first feature, Three Smart Girls , ushers in the Bankers Era. We find good things to say about both, but we're not gonna lie, most of the episode is devoted to Edna Ferber/Kern and Hammerstein/Whale's  Show Boat  and it...

This week on the pod, we get started with our new Acteurist Oeuvre-View series: Margaret Sullavan. We were expecting solid entries from the selective Sullavan, but weren't fully prepared for John Stahl to match his  Back Street  achievement with Sullavan's screen debut,  Only Yesterday  (1933). We discuss its relationship to Opühls'  Letter from an Unknown Woman , with which it shares a source, wh...

RKO, 1936: Anne Shirley and Katharine Hepburn have father trouble. In  Make Way for a Lady  (directed by David Burton), Shirley gets hysterical at the thought of indulgent 20th century dad Herbert Marshall developing a sex life; while in  A Woman Rebels  (directed by Mark Sandrich),   Hepburn blames stern Victorian dad Donald Crisp for her sexual aberrance. We discuss the careers of the source nov...