There's Sometimes a Buggy

This time on our oeuvre-view of Setsuko Hara's (English-subtitled) career, Kurosawa's The Idiot/Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky, is paired with Ozu's Early Summer for maximum tonal dissonance. Our heroine proves her range again—even with her Noriko roles. Join us for a discussion of sexual psychosis and tragic caritas in The Idiot and the perverse obsession with normalizing Noriko in Early Summer. Ti...

MGM, 1933. Two very different movies: Penthouse, a crime drama and romantic comedy directed by W. S. "One-Take Woody" Van Dyke, and King Vidor's hard-to-find The Stranger's Return, an agrarian family melodrama reputed to have been Ozu's favourite movie. Myrna Loy, as an unflappable and lovable party girl, with her Thin Man director and producer for the first time, and an uncharacteristically relax...

Summer comes even to a virus-ravaged northern hemisphere, and we're here to celebrate with two teen movies that have a surprising amount in common: Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) and Delmer Daves' A Summer Place (1959). The former turns out to be much less about sex than its reputation would have you believe, while the latter is much more about sex than you'd imagine for a movie starri...

Paramount, 1933 (or so): a Charles Laughton and Karl Struss double feature. We start with Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, pitting piety against perversion. Fredric March in a mini skirt, Claudette Colbert in a milk bath, Laughton as a ditzy Nero, and a bunch of Christians bedecked with arrows. But are the Christians really Communists, or are they Mormons? Next, Island of Lost Souls, base...

We get to the first Ozu in our Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view at last, but first we look at Tadashi Ima's two-parter, Blue Mountain Range/Aoi sanmyaku (1949), a surprisingly fun movie that leads us to discuss Allied Occupation liberal propaganda, dating as a recent invention, why all men will want to have sex with Katharine Hepburn or Setsuko Hara in the future, and how a geisha is like John W...

In this week's edition of The Studios Year-by-Year, it's Universal 1932, and we have two horror movies with wildly divergent styles. First, it's Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue, perhaps the sickest and most sadistic of the 30s Universal horror classics (surpassing even The Black Cat) and a probable influence on RKO's King Kong. Then it's John Stahl's Back Street (also shot by Karl Freund...

For June's Special Subject, we look at three films by Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak about the aftermath of the Partition of India: Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), Komal Gandhar/E-flat (1961), and Subarnarekha/Golden Lining (1962). Refugee life, classism, intersectional analysis, melodrama, the confusion of familial and romantic relationships, and the possibility of hope within a d...

RKO, 1932: Selznick has come in as production chief and fired everyone but Pandro S. Berman. We look at the result of this new regime in the form of two La Cava-helmed pictures. First, the white elephant, Symphony of Six Million, based on a short story by Fannie Hurst, shows us how RKO does the Lower East Side. Then, the termite, The Age of Consent, examines the sexual mores of American college li...

In our final episode of "unknown" Setsuko Haras before we get into the Ozus and Naruses, we cover another tonally dissonant double feature, Kôzaburô Yoshimura's TEMPTATION/YUWAKU (1948) and Keisuke Kinoshita's HERE'S TO THE YOUNG LADY/OJOSAN KANPAI (1949). We discuss the way these films—a love triangle melodrama and a strange screwball melodrama seemingly inspired by Hepburn and Tracy movies—seem...

In this Fox 1932 episode of Studios Year by Year, Fox Film Corporation finds its voice despite behind-the-scenes upheaval, and we offer the name "humanism" for that voice. Termite art classic For Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh), a loose and leisurely proto-screwball comedy, stars Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett as a pair of fresh-mouthed but tender-hearted working-class lovers. In Frank Borzage's After...

We devote some meta-theorizing to Setsuko Hara's screen persona and its reception and look at two of her lesser-known films that are available with English subtitles, Kōzaburō Yoshimura's A Ball at the Anjo House (1947), and the very uncharacteristic A Woman in the Typhoon Area (1948, directed by Hideo Ôba), in which she plays a vampy tramp who is nevertheless as caring as her more familiar charac...

This week we talk French Melville—no, not Jean-Pierre, but two temperamentally polar 1999 films by French auteurs based on works by Herman: Claire Denis's Beau Travail and Leos Carax's Pola X, based respectively on Billy Budd, Sailor and Pierre, or the Ambiguities. We ask such questions as: Why fascist aesthetics? Why opera-scored Tai Chi? Why incest? Why unsimulated sex? These are just the kinds...

In this week's Studios Year by Year episode, another studio finds its voice in 1932: Warner Bros. gives us the consciousness-raising prison drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn LeRoy) as well as the weird little maternity ward movie Life Begins (dir. James Flood). They share a harrowing vision of life and Glenda Farrell in uncharacteristically unsympathetic roles. We discuss I Am a...

In the inaugural episode of our Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, the vagaries of foreign film availability lead to an historically illuminating double feature. First up, the fascist propaganda film that made the teenage Setsuko a star, a Japanese-German co-production, melodrama/mountain film/semi-documentary extravaganza, The Daughter of the Samurai (1937), directed by Arnold Fanck and M...

It's time for an epic retrospective episode, sparked by TIFF's Call Me Jimmy: The Films of James Stewart, which was unfortunately interrupted by COVID-19. Nevertheless, we watched the remaining films at home, plus a few that weren't scheduled. Here we substantially discuss Clarence Brown's OF HUMAN HEARTS (1938), Frank Capra's MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939), and Anthony Mann's THE NAKED SPUR...

Get excited about this one! In our MGM 1932 episode of The Studios Year by Year, the Culver City colossus hits its stride and proves that you don't need auteurs when you have scripts, directors, and stars. It's a Jean Harlow double feature, playing two wildly different characters in RED DUST (dir. Victor Fleming) and RED-HEADED WOMAN (dir. Jack Conway). In addition to Harlow, we discuss '30s scree...

It's a bittersweet episode as we bid farewell to our Jennifer Jones series with first viewings of her final two starring-role films, Henry King's TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1962) and Daniel Petrie's THE IDOL (1966). We find our heroine once again playing characters embroiled in dark Freudian psychodramas, and consider how King's film alters F. Scott Fitzgerald's alternate universe roman à clef, and whet...

This time on The Studios Year by Year it's a rather unfair pairing of Lubitsch's (or Cukor's?) ONE HOUR WITH YOU with Mamoulian's LOVE ME TONIGHT. They have less in common than you'd think for both being operettas starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald made by Paramount in 1932. Looking for something to lift your mood while you're waiting for quarantine to lift? We confirm with this vie...

In our penultimate Jennifer Jones episode, we consider whether Selznick's final production, A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1957), is Hemingway's vision of war or Selznick's, and contemplate Selznick as Auteur. Then we turn to THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET (1957), which is not exactly the staid literary costume drama Elise was expecting. The Jones oeuvre continues to intrigue! Time Codes: 0h 01m 00s:        ...

For our first COVID-19-era Lightbox retrospective episode, we look at the enigmatic cinema of Angela Schanelec. We focus on her two most recent films, THE DREAMED PATH (2016) and I WAS AT HOME, BUT... (2019). Then, in our final, presciently-named Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment for "the duration", it's the last Bressons of TIFF's anniversary retrospective that we were able to see (LANCELOT...

Universal, 1931: we discuss one of the greatest movies of the 30s, James Whale's WATERLOO BRIDGE, and William Wyler's Oedipal horror movie, A HOUSE DIVIDED. And in our Moviegoing in Toronto section: erotic pedagogy in Jacqueline Audry's OLIVIA (1951), Christian anarchism in Frank Capra's YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU (1938), and more Bresson. Time Codes: 0h 01m 00s:          A House Divided (dir: Wil...

In this week's Jennifer Jones episode, we view our heroine in two new lights: as wife (in Nunnally Johnson's 1956 social problem epic, THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT) and spinster (in Henry Koster's GOOD MORNING, MISS DOVE 1955). Then, in our Moviegoing Section, we discuss Joseph Mankiewicz's THE GHOST & MRS. MUIR (1947) as the Hollywood Gertrud, along with Bresson and the pleasure of asceticism...

LONELY WIVES (dir. Russell Mack) meet KEPT HUSBANDS (dir. Lloyd Bacon) in our RKO 1931 episode of The Studios Year-by-Year. Edward Everett Horton sex farce or battle-of-the-sexes melodrama-played-for-farce—this one has got it all. And in our Moviegoing in Toronto section, a Mary Pickford and Clara Bow double feature has us thinking about feisty Victorian maidens and heroic modern gals. Time Codes:...

This time on our Jennifer Jones 'cast it's two movies based on novels by Communists, bafflingly made during the early Cold War era, one a failure and one a hit. We start with the failure, the original Dirtbag Left hang-out movie, John Huston's BEAT THE DEVIL (1953). It was based on a novel by Claud Cockburn (one-time Stalin apologist), with script contributions from Cockburn and a hot young noveli...

What better befits a Valentine's episode than a couple of films about star-crossed lovers. First, it's punk (Nicholas Cage, in his first starring role) meets prep in Martha Coolidge's low-key, surprisingly affecting teensploitation cult classic VALLEY GIRL (1983). Then, John Travolta in his sex symbol prime drifts up on the beach of middle-aged one percenter Lily Tomlin in MOMENT BY MOMENT (1978),...