There's Sometimes a Buggy

Back to Borzage for Fox 1931 with the inaptly-titled BAD GIRL, plus Raoul Walsh's THE YELLOW TICKET. Deconstructed masculinity in Depression-era New York! Sex worker registries in czarist Russia! Boxing ring cuddles! Nude bathing in women's prisons! Lionel Barrymore chewing the scenery, James Dunn having male hysterics! This episode has got it all. And then Elise tries to suss out connections betw...

A transitional Jennifer Jones episode: from another summary of the Jones persona, King Vidor's RUBY GENTRY (1952), to a new era of filmmaking and a new kind of role in De Sica's TERMINAL STATION (1953). We give our verdict on the director's cut of the latter, the first time either of us has seen it. And in Moviegoing, Elise holds forth on PSYCHO and the Art of Hitchcock, and we briefly discuss Par...

The alpha & omega of Josef von Sternberg's oeuvre, 1925's The SALVATION HUNTERS and 1953's ANATAHAN, prompt us to consider whether the stormy marriage of auteur and system can sometimes be more conducive to artistic accomplishment than creative independence. Then, prompted by recent moviegoing, we announce upcoming episodes/series on Ritwik Ghatak and Margaret Sullavan. Time Codes: 0h 01m 00s:    ...

This week, for Warners Bros. 1931: THE MALTESE FALCON (dir. Roy Del Ruth) and THE LAST FLIGHT (dir. William Dieterle). Warners is an early adopter of Dashiell Hammett, but is his least political novel a good fit for the most political studio, or not? And Dieterle, in his first English-language film, turns Warners into Paramount and tackles the Lost Generation, introducing themes that he'll continu...

The masterpieces keep coming in our Jennifer Jones series. This week it's Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth (1950), a meta melodrama that clearly gave Kate Bush some ideas, and William Wyler's Carrie (1952), a noirish costume drama about the precariousness of the American middle class. Then we say farewell to TIFF's Scorsese retrospective with our Top 10s and discussion of MEAN STREETS and AF...

In our first MGM 1931 episode, we look at two very different fallen woman movies, POSSESSED (dir. Clarence Brown), starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, and SUSAN LENOX (HER FALL AND RISE) (dir. Robert Z. Leonard), with Gable supporting (in the technical sense only) Greta Garbo. POSSESSED, taking cognizance of the Depression, leans as far left as MGM will ever get, while SUSAN LENOX shows us how...

In the first There's Sometimes a Buggy Christmas episode, we discuss two studio-era Hollywood movies that you never knew were Christmas movies: Michael Curtiz's FOUR DAUGHTERS (1938) and Preston Sturges's THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (1944). Hear us explain how Four Daughters anticipates both Casablanca and Blue Velvet, and learn why Christianity is the ultimate comedy. Time Codes: 0h 01m 00s:   ...

In our 2nd episode devoted to a TIFF retrospective, we cover News From Home: The Films of Chantal Akerman and share with you our excitement about a new favourite director. Topics that come up in the course of discussing Akerman's obsessional-yet-variegated filmography include Freud, mothers, the historico-geographic basis of identity, the nature of desire, passivity, projection, politics, Hitchcoc...

On to 1931 and back to Paramount for a Sylvia Sidney double feature: a genre exercise from Mamoulian (CITY STREETS) and a finger exercise from Sternberg (AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY). We debate whether Sternberg's version serves or travesties Dreiser's novel, and whether it matters. Then, the return of Scorsese Corner to discuss TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, and (Dave's favourite Scorsese movie) NEW YORK, NEW...

Jennifer Jones exhibits a new level of craft in two very different roles in two 1949 movies, WE WERE STRANGERS (dir. John Huston) and MADAME BOVARY (dir. Vincente Minnelli). Elise and Dave ponder how these movies, respectively daring for their revolutionary politics and gender politics, ever got made. Dave identifies the greatest scene in any movie ever. Elise tries to explain Flaubert's relations...

Our first Universal 1930 episode veers from racial insanity, courtesy of John Murray Anderson's two-strip Technicolor musical KING OF JAZZ (spoiler: the King is a White Man), to grisly Christian sentimentality, via William Wyler's HELL'S HEROES (aka Several Corpses and a Baby), which also makes this an accidental Christmas episode. If that's not enough, we also bring Big Discussion of Scorsese and...

We have a conversion experience with DUEL IN THE SUN (King Vidor, 1946) and return to PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (William Dieterle, 1948). Are these the two definitive Jennifer Jones movies? The best movies she made? The best movies that Selznick produced? We consider these questions as we continue to ponder the unfolding of Jones's persona. We also set up our Scorsese Corner and begin our floating discus...

We look at the first three films of Li Yu, FISH AND ELEPHANT (2001), DAM STREET (2005), and LOST IN BEIJING (2007), the latter seen by us at the TIFF Cinematheque retrospective Seeing the Unseen: Re-Encountering Chinese Cinema, which focused on films by Sixth Generation directors that had trouble with government censorship in China. It's not difficult to see how the Verhoeven-meets-Renoir-esque LO...

This week sees Elise fully convert to the studi-auteur theory, thanks to two more-or-less randomly chosen RKO features from 1930 by a couple of Georges, MIDNIGHT MYSTERY (B. Seitz, later of Andy Hardy movie fame) and THE SILVER HORDE (Archainbaud, who went on to direct the other Some Like It Hot... with Bob Hope), which illustrates the expanded romantic plot possibilities of the Pre-Code era. Also...

Our first Halloween special looks at a monster for whom familiarity has bred unjustified contempt. Looking at Tod Browning's 1931 DRACULA and Francis Ford Coppola's misleadingly-titled BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA from 1992, we discuss the Cursed Count as a romantic and a sympathetic figure; the two films' departures from Bram Stoker's novel; xenophobia and monstrousness; their very different takes on Va...

We declare the year 1930 CANCELLED prior to discussing John Ford's UP THE RIVER & Frank Borzage's LILIOM (little known today - but based on the same source as the musical CAROUSEL). We consider the different (maybe opposite) ways in which these Fox movies portray sympathy for the victims of class society without criticizing the system, in contrast to a Warner Bros.-style treatment of similar mater...

In our second Jennifer Jones episode, we defend William Dieterle's LOVE LETTERS (1945), putting it in the context of 40s psychiatric melodramas and WWII amnesia movies, and consider the good and bad of what Ernst Lubitsch's CLUNY BROWN (1946) has to say about female sexuality and English complacency.   Time Codes: 0h 1m 00s:            Love Letters (dir. William Dieterle) 1h 00m 28s:          Clun...

In our first 1930 Warner Bros. episode, we consider DAWN PATROL as an early example of cahier hero 'Auward 'Awks's philosophy of masculinity, and note the emergence of the Warners ethos in Mervyn Leroy's PLAYING AROUND, including consciousness of class, sympathy for criminals, vaudeville Yiddish characters, and a touch of patriarchal anxiety.   Time Codes: 0h 1m 00s:       The Dawn Patrol (dir. Ho...

"Autumn is the most bourgeois month," as Keats said. Elise and Dave prove this is so by exploring Nora Ephron's two autumnal Upper West Side romantic comedies, WHEN HARRY MET (1989) and YOU'VE GOT MAIL (1998), a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER. Elise passes judgment on the two latter movies on the basis of her extensive experience of working in retail and intimate knowledge o...

In the first MGM episode of our Studios Year by Year series, the year is 1930, and Elise and Dave watch as the straggler studio struggles with the challenges of early sound in THE BISHOP MURDER CASE, starring Basil Rathbone as Philo Vance, with two credited directors (Elise posits a third, unknown genius). Then we switch over to a Marion Davies comedy, NOT SO DUMB, directed by King Vidor, Dave's f...

Join Dave and Elise for episode one of our (near-)complete filmography series on the great Jennifer Jones (née Phylis Isley). We provide a few preliminary thoughts re: our take on the Jones/Selznick synergy and then dive right into the films. Song of Bernadette kicks things off with quite a blessed bang, situating our star at the conceptual vanishing point between the instinctual and the ineffable...

Elise and Dave launch their extended excursion into oligarchic auteurism with a pair of films from the studio whose special touch may very well have been its hands-off approach to directorial oversight. Certainly Behind the Make-Up (aka The Feeder ) makes a very interesting companion piece to Dorothy Arzner's later masterpiece Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) – a film discussed on this very feed earlier...

Dave and Elise close out their discussion of the Dietrich/Sternberg septet with three films that examine three distinct paths (and aftermaths) to victory for the Dietrich persona. From superhero weepie to Henry James inflected Game of Thronery to a kind of class-conscious Carmen– this one's got it all! Time Codes: 0h 1m 00s:       Blonde Venus 0h 33m 00s:     The Scarlet Empress 1h 09m 52s:     Th...

Welcome to the first installment of Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto! This time out, it's part one of our mammoth conversation covering Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg's inspired 1930s collaborations. We saw the films as part of The TIFF Lightbox's recently concluded retrospective, Insolent Enigma/Arrogant Auteur .  Join us as we feel our way toward a critical counternarrative to the anemic a...

This week's episode serves as both a prolegomenon to our imminent Hollywood Studios Year By Year series and as a wistful look back to Dave's teen years, when he picked up Ethan Mordden's freewheeling speed date with Old Hollywood History and discovered a new way to split the difference between Adornian culture industry theory and auteurist ontology. Journey back to a time when oligopoly really mea...