There's Sometimes a Buggy

On this week's Warner Bros. 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at some of the studio's mid-30s B-output: the jazzy, Modernist, montage-ist, telephonic  I've Got Your Number , starring Pat O'Brien as an insouciant and sometimes insolent Everyman (in a comedy team-up we never knew we needed with fuming mentor Eugene Pallette) whose redemption arc is sparked by beleaguered working girl Joan B...

Our Special Subject for this month is The Archers in Black and White: A Canterbury Tale  (1944),  I Know Where I'm Going!  (1945), and  The Small Back Room  (1949). We discuss Powell and Pressburger's interest in the claims and sins of tradition and modernity, their handling of intense romantic relationships, and their search for transcendence in nature and the past. Then, in Fear and Moviegoing i...

We conclude our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight with a couple of her big Hollywood movies after the turning point of From Here to Eternity : Vincente Minnelli's  Tea and Sympathy  (1956), in which she appears as Laura Reynolds, a role she originated on Broadway; and Henry King's  Beloved Infidel  (1959), in which she stars as Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham in an autobiographical accoun...

Our MGM 1934 episode this week is a Jean Parker (Beth in RKO's 1933 Little Women ) double feature. She plays the rebellious daughter in the family melodrama  Wicked Woman , which features a fine central performance by noted theatre actress and blacklistee Mady Christians, and a conservationist's daughter who starts an "unlikely animal friends" experiment with a puma cub and a fawn in  Sequoia . Wh...

 For the 2nd part of our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight we check in on Kerr's "lost years" at MGM to see what Hollywood was finding for her to do before her breakthrough performance in From Here to Eternity . In Norman Taurog's  Please Believe Me  (1950) she leads a cast of oddballs, including Robert Walker and Peter Lawford, as a respectable British girl who learns how to be American by first b...

With this episode we launch the first of Elise's three-part Special Subject,  Family Freak-Outs . We start with some musings about how to define this micro-genre, what makes it different from a standard family melodrama and its relationship to horror, and then we move into our first two freak-outs, Charles Burnett's  To Sleep with Anger  (1990) and Wes Anderson's  The Royal Tenebaums  (2001). Whil...

For this Paramount 1934 episode we watched  Search for Beauty , which pits beauty-as-health (a wasted and almost unrecognizable Ida Lupino and frequently topless, sometimes bottomless, and always witless Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe) against beauty-as-sex in a meta-commentary on pre-Codes released just before the crackdown, and the Hecht-MacArthur-Garmes  Crime Without Passion , starring Claude R...

Our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight starts strong with two entertaining progressive WWII-era British films, John Baxter's  Love on the Dole  (1941), a socialist portrayal of working-class life in Manchester during the Great Depression, and Alexander Korda's  Perfect Strangers  (aka  Vacation from Marriage ), a sort of comedy of remarriage that envisions a radically new kind of marriage arising ou...

For this Universal 1933 Studios Year by Year episode we commit the sacrilege of trashing a James Whale movie, The Invisible Man , which is also Claude Rains' first major screen role, albeit mainly as a voice. A ranting, irascible voice in a movie with very little evidence (in our irresponsible opinion) of Whale's voice. But then we turn to a movie bearing a strong directorial imprint, William Wyle...

We bid a fond farewell to our Acteurist Spotlight on Delphine Seyrig with the greatest movie of all-time (as of the most recent BFI critics' poll), Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce 1080 Bruxelles  (1975) and its "sequel,"  Golden Eighties  (1986), Akerman's retro-80s-while-it's -still-happening musical. We give our latest thoughts on anxiety, oppression, and orgasms in Jeanne...

Our 2026 Valentine's Day episode explores the romantic appeal of Adam Sandler through his first rom com pairing with Drew Barrymore, The Wedding Singer  (1998), and his celebrated collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson,  Punch-Drunk Love  (2002). While  The Wedding Singer  pursues a sweetness and sincerity alien to the studio-era romantic comedies it in some ways emulates, Anderson's enigmatic fa...

This 1933 RKO Studios Year by Year episode takes us from the sweepings on the floor of a palatial early 20th century department store to celestial shenanigans high above Rio de Janeiro. Lester Cohen's adaptation of his Dreiseresque novel Sweepings  (directed by John Cromwell), another failson saga strongly anticipating HBO's  Succession , struggles to translate generational saga into a coherent 80...

For the second part of our Delphine Seyrig Acteurist Spotlight we disregarded chronology to discuss two intensely experimental Marguerite Duras films, India Song  (1975) and  Baxter, Vera Baxter  (1977). We enumerate Duras' peculiarities as a writer and filmmaker and their effects in these studies of sexual and existential crisis, set against the backdrop of European colonialism and the second-wav...

In this episode we revisit three Technicolor melodramas made by British cinema's great auteur duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, bursting with vibrant emotions and sensuality that exercise a dangerous allure over their protagonists: Clive Candy, the upper-class colonialist twerp played by Roger Livesey in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp  (1943) who discovers the poetry in his soul than...

This week's 1933 Fox Film Studios Year by Year episode paradoxically digs into the Hollywood beginnings of a couple of Paramount powerhouses via William Dieterle's Adorable , a musical based on a German operetta co-written by Billy Wilder (who'd be writing for Fox directly by 1934), and William K. Howard's  The Power and the Glory , with an innovative screenplay by Hollywood newcomer Preston Sturg...

Our Acteur Spotlight kicks off with six movies starring Delphine Seyrig, beginning this episode with Alain Resnais' Muriel  (1963) and Marguerite Duras' debut as a feature film director,  La Musica  (1967) (co-directed with Paul Seban). We find that these two films about former couples discussing, debating, and negotiating how to live with their past make a good pairing for their existential contr...

This week's Warner Brothers 1933 Studios Year by Year episode brings the studio-as-auteur question back into focus with two highly distinctive Pre-Code musicals with a similarity of style and social outlook that can't be attributed to the directors, screenwriters, source material, or the presence of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic choreographer and stager of musical numbers, Busby Berkeley. We argu...

Our S&xMas episode looks at two provocative, controversial, and not very sex-positive works made by aging auteurs after a long hiatus, Stanley Kubrick's  Eyes Wide Shut  (1999) and Paul Verhoeven's  Elle  (2016). Join us as we trace Tom Cruise's all-American odyssey of sexual paranoia and Isabelle Huppert's very European journey away from sex with men, asking such important questions as "Is Paul V...

It's our final Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, with which we also say goodbye to our comprehensive approach toward attaining a privileged vantage point on an actor's entire oeuvre. Of course, we cheated a little on this one and stopped short of Gloria's exploitation film era. Our oeuvre-view ends with two Westerns, Ride Out for Revenge  (1957) and  Ride Beyond Vengeance  (1966), enti...

For this 1933 MGM episode we focus on rehabilitating John Gilbert's sound-era reputation with a double feature of underrated gem  Fast Workers , a construction worker love triangle melodrama directed by Tod Browning, and Gilbert's most famous sound movie, Rouben Mamoulian and Greta Garbo's very serious (but also very sensual) costume drama  Queen Christina , about a woman whose ideals clash with h...

In this week's episode of our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we explore the unique casting of unmusical Gloria in Fred Zinnemann's film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!  (1955) and follow the thread that leads (through Jud Fry) from the supposedly "wholesome" musical to Charlie Kaufman's dark, experimental  I'm Thinking of Ending Things . Then we switch over to British espiona...

This Paramount 1933 Studios Year by Year episode features two of the studio's defining stars of the era: the Marx Brothers, in their final, most famous, and (maybe) most nihilistic Paramount film,  Duck Soup , directed by Leo McCarey, and Gary Cooper, miscast (or maybe not) in  One Sunday Afternoon  in the role that would go to James Cagney in the Warner Bros. remake,  The Strawberry Blonde . We z...

For our November 2025 Special Subject we watched the Antoine Doinel films of François Truffaut:  The 400 Blows  (1959),  Antoine et Colette  (1962),  Stolen Kisses  (1968),  Bed and Board  (1970), and  Love on the Run  (1979). In addition to the charms of star/auteur avatar Jean-Pierre Léaud, we focus on the films' evolving style and increasing interest in the women in Doinel's life. And in our Fe...

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view continues with two    1955 liberal institutional melodramas: Stanley Kramer's  Not as a Stranger , starring Robert Mitchum as a monomaniacally idealistic doctor, Olivia de Havilland as the wife he takes for granted, and Gloria as the Other Woman; and Vincente Minnelli's underrated  The Cobweb , starring Richard Widmark as a monomaniacally idealistic psychia...

We've got a Halloween Hangover on this week's episode, with two Universal 1932 horror movies, James Whale's The Old Dark House  (based on a novel by J. B. Priestley) and Karl Freund's  The Mummy , starring Karloff. We explore the curious tone, social themes, and stellar cast (including Charles Laughton, Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore, Melvyn Douglas, and the excellent Lilian Bond) of Whale's Gothic od...