There's Sometimes a Buggy

For this Universal 1946 episode, we chose a B-movie double bill,  The Cat Creeps  (directed by Erle C. Kenton, best known for Island of Lost Souls ) and  She-Wolf   of London  (directed by Jean Yarbrough, Abbott and Costello specialist), hoping for hidden gems. But did we find any? And in the Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, our Powell and Pressburger retrospective viewing continues with  B...

In this week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we encounter more Nazis in a couple of movies very loosely based on real WWII incidents: Disney's Miracle of the White Stallions  (1963), based on Operation Cowboy (but with the equine eugenics shoved into the subtext), and  Operation Crossbow  (1965), about the attempt by British Intelligence to stop the threat of Nazi rockets. Sophia Lor...

This week we have a whopping big episode for you: Part 2 of our look at Samuel Goldwyn Productions, dealing with the 1940s; and, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, brief discussions of three Powell and Pressburgers, kicking off TIFF's May retrospective. For this episode we watched The Little Foxes  (directed by William Wyler),  The Pride of the Yankees  (directed by Sam Wood),  The Bes...

In this RKO 1946 episode we discuss Crack-Up  (directed by Irving Reis), an eerie noir with a couple of great Expressionist set pieces. Pat O'Brien oozes vulnerability as a WWII vet and populist art critic who has to find out who's trying to make him look, or go, insane; Claire Trevor plays the love interest who's trying to help him (or is she?). Oh yeah, and we also watched  Step By Step  (direct...

This week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is a George Seaton double feature that once again gives us Lilli the sophisticate and Lilli the saint: in The Pleasure of His Company  (1961), she plays the ex-wife of Fred Astaire, an absentee father whose plan to recapture his youth by seducing their daughter into becoming his travelling companion she sets out to foil; while in  The Counterf...

This week's Fox 1946 Studios Year by Year episode features the strange bedfellows of Henry Hathaway's The Dark Corner , a curiously feminist film noir in which the tormented protagonist is saved by the persistence of a good woman (played by Lucille Ball), and Edmund Goulding's The Razor's Edge, based on a Somerset Maugham novel about spiritual enlightenment and bourgeois ennui, featuring Gene Tier...

Our examination of the film career of Lilli Palmer continues with a couple of excellent films that show us Palmer's range when playing "loveable": But Not for Me , in which she gives a comedic performance as the ex-wife of a Broadway producer played by Clark Gable, benevolently interfering in his budding relationship with young actress Carroll Baker; and  Conspiracy of Hearts , in which Palmer pla...

For this Warner Bros. 1946 episode we watched two fantastical biopics, Devotion  (directed by Curtis Bernhardt), starring Ida Lupino and Olivia de Havilland as Emily and Charlotte  Brontë, and  Night and Day  (directed by Michael Curtiz), starring Cary Grant as Cole Porter and Monty Woolley as himself.  We found them to be like night and day in terms of their quality, but you'll have to listen to...

In our April Special Subject, Part 1 of our look at the films of Samuel Goldwyn, we discuss Dark Angel  (1935),  These Three  (1936),  Dodsworth  (1936), and  Wuthering Heights  (1939), a selection heavy on Dave favourites Merle Oberon, William Wyler, and Gregg Toland. We ask in what sense these are "quality" films, and in what ways they escape our expectations of that category, calling attention...

For this week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we watched Jacques Becker's  The Lovers of Montparnasse  (1958), in which Palmer, playing Modigliani's rejected lover Beatrice Hastings, p erfects her persona of b rittle dissociation; and   Mädchen in Uniform , the 1958 remake of the famous Weimar-era film about a teenager at an all-girls' boarding school who falls in love with her teach...

This MGM 1946 Studios Year by Year episode is a Jules Dassin double feature that shows the range of the famed blacklistee even during his most constrained studio period: the noirish romantic drama  Two Smart People , about two con artists (Lucille Ball and John Hodiak) and a cop who are all out to con each other; and the remarkable  A Letter for Evie  (starring Marsha Hunt and Hume Cronyn),   a ve...

For this Lilli Palmer episode of our Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we watched another West German movie, Devil in Silk  (directed by Rolf Hansen), and  Life Together  (directed by  Clément   Duhour ), a tribute to famed French playwright, screenwriter, and film director Sacha Guitry with an all-star cast. We analyze the surprisingly sophisticated structure of Duhour and Guitry's horned-up middlebr...

In this  Paramount  1946 episode we look at two movies featuring Veronica Lake which otherwise could not be more dissimilar:  Miss Susie Slagle's  (directed by John Berry), about the trials of pre-WWI Johns Hopkins medical students living in a boarding house presided over by Lillian Gish; and famous Lake/Ladd noir outing,  The Blue Dahlia  (directed by George Marshall and written by Raymond Chandl...

In this Universal 1945 episode of The   Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year, we look at a couple of noir-adjacent films, Robert Siodmak's  The Suspect , starring Charles Laughton as an abused husband who looks for a way out of his miserable marriage when he meets sweet and lovely Ella Raines, and the comedy/crime film  Lady on a Train , which stars Deanna Durbin as an exuberant and resourceful murder m...

In this Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we discuss Tay Garnett's Main Street to Broadway  (1953), a pleasant curiosity with an all-star New York theatre cast, including Palmer and Rex Harrison in a brief sandwich-themed couple cameo, but nearly stolen by Lynchian radio humourist Herb Shriner; and  Fireworks  (1954), Palmer's first German film, in which she plays a circus performer poss...

For this RKO 1945 episode, two beautifully filmed noirs (by Harry J. Wild), Edwin L. Marin's  Johnny Angel , another noir with a femme fatale (Claire Trevor) who loves too much (and gets a very unexpected - and gory - redemption) ,  and Edward Dmytryk's  Cornered , in which Dick Powell learns why you shouldn't hunt down Nazis and kill them with your bare hands, but doesn't seem very interested. An...

  For our Valentine's 2024 episode we looked at two movies about obsession that interrogate the notion of romantic love: Alfred Hitchcock's  Marnie  (1964) and Chantal Akerman's  La Captive  (2000). If you think an extensive discussion of sexual assault and of what it would mean to be "pressed to death" by your partner's love sounds like essential Valentine's Day content, this episode is for you....

Our Fox 1945 episode features two of the greatest and greatest-looking film noirs: Otto Preminger's  Fallen Angel  and John M. Stahl's  Leave Her to Heaven . We unpack the movies' love triangles, in which two strong-willed women exert their influence over a passive man; their treatment of the topics of love and obsession; the unique cinematic qualities of Alice Faye's presence and Gene Tierney's f...

For this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched two films pairing acteur Lilli Palmer with then-husband Rex Harrison. We discuss the potential relationship of thriller/courtroom drama  The Long Dark Hall  (1951) to the scandal plaguing their marriage at the time and consider  The Four Poster  (1952) as a "marriage film," and what it has to say about that social and spiritual state. And in...

For our January Special Subject, we look at three silent "family comedies" by Ozu, Tokyo Chorus  (1931),  I Was Born, But...  (1932), and  Passing Fancy  (1933), although we argue that "comedy" doesn't entirely encompass the emotional range of these films. We argue that the melancholy of late Ozu is already discernible in these tales of father-son conflict and confrontation with life's disappointi...

This Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode tackles two more films made with leftist colleagues, Elliott Nugent's My Girl Tisa , a Popular Front-style tale of early 20th century immigrants and the American Dream, and Lewis Milestone's quirky, stylistically inventive comedy  No Minor Vices  (written by Arnold Manoff). We also watched  François Villiers' fascinating   Hans le Marin  (also known...

For this round of Warner Bros. 1945, we take on a very successful movie with two very big stars and one very terrible reputation,  Saratoga Trunk , with Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, and a fascinating little B noir,  Danger Signal , with Zachary Scott being his usual cheeky self and getting women upset. We discuss the stylistic risks of  Saratoga Trunk , the genius of Ingrid Bergman, the subtlet...

In this Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we discuss Palmer's first two Hollywood films, Fritz Lang's anti-fascist spy drama, Cloak and Dagger  (1946), and Robert Rossen's socially critical boxing noir,  Body and Soul  (1947). We dig into the social context of these films, asking why these progressive writers and directors wanted to tell these stories at this moment, and how their politi...

For our December 2023 Special Subject, we're having ourselves a Monty Woolley Christmas! We look at three Christmas-adjacent movies from the 1940s featuring the anti-Santa in roles big and small:  The Man Who Came to Dinner , in which he stars as  waspish radio personality Sheridan Whiteside, who takes over the home of a bourgeois Middle American couple;  Life Begins at Eight-Thirty , in which he...

In this week's MGM 1945 episode, a Vincente Minnelli double feature: The Clock , a wartime romantic drama with two very intense stars, Judy Garland and Robert Walker, that doubles as a love poem to New York City; and a Technicolor musical fantasy about, in Dave's words (more or less), "A woman who wants to bleep an angel," starring Lucille Bremer as the woman and Fred Astaire as the angel. And in...