There's Sometimes a Buggy

In this Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we take a look at a Lilli Palmer who's (mostly) new to us, Lilli the victim: the victim of self-destructive womanizer Rex Harrison (Palmer's real-life husband) in Launder and Gilliat's enigmatic social satire  The Rake's Progress  (1945), and the self-destructive paralysis victim of  Beware of Pity (1946), based on the Stefan Zweig novel. Which of...

For this Paramount 1945 episode, we look at a couple of male melodramas: The Man in Half Moon Street , a Gothic B-movie starring Nils Asther, "the most beautiful man who ever lived," according to Elise, as a scientist who becomes unscrupulous in his pursuit of eternal youth, and Salty O'Rourke , a Raoul Walsh-directed hit starring Alan Ladd as a racetrack gambler who manipulates an unruly young jo...

For our Ozu Noir-vember Special Subject, we look at three silent films by Yasujirō  Ozu ,  Walk Cheerfully  (1930),  That Night's Wife  (1930), and  Dragnet Girl  (1933), that not only bear a fascinating relationship to each other but also seemingly inaugurate the gangster film in Japan and anticipate (we argue) American film noir more closely even than French poetic realism, as well as the Nouvel...

We dig into some substantial British cinema offerings in a Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode that's heavy on wartime themes: Thunder Rock  (1942), a philosophical examination of the disillusionment of a leftist; dramatically illustrated in a surprising way;  The Gentle Sex  (1943), Leslie Howard's eccentric and affecting semi-documentary about women in the British Army; and  English Witho...

We weren't sure what to expect with our Universal 1944 "scary woman"-themed episode, but Cobra Woman , starring the riveting Maria Montez, delivered, and the completely unknown  Weird Woman , starring the less-than-riveting Lon Chaney Jr., was a surprise gem that seems to be nodding to Val Lewton's work at RKO. This episode causes us to ask such questions as: what is acting? Can anyone in these mo...

This week's Acteurist-Oeuvre-view shows us two sides of Lilli Palmer: Bad Lilli in a comic supporting role, brawling with fellow chorus girl Ren é e Houston and competing with a demure Margaret Lockwood over wealthy patrons in Carol Reed's  A Girl Must Live  (1939); and Good Lilli assuming the lead in B-mystery  The Door with Seven Locks  (1940), seeking adventure with comic sidekick Gina Malo. It...

For our Halloween 2023 episode, we take you on a tour of  Peyton Place —the 1956 novel by Grace Metalious, 1957 Fox movie starring Lana Turner, and the mid-late-60s TV series starring Dorothy Malone and Mia Farrow (among many others) that reinvented television. We discuss the strange journey of Metalious's scabrous and scathing vision from satire to soap opera, in the course of which the story of...

This week's RKO 1944 episode brings a Hollywood slant to an English working-class perspective on the war. In her only first-billed feature film role, in Passport to Destiny , Elsa Lanchester plays an indomitable charwoman who embarks upon a self-appointed mission to assassinate Hitler after coming to believe that she's magically protected, while in  None But the Lonely Heart , American playwright...

Our second Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode sees the rising young star second-billed as the love interest in a couple of strange enterprises:  Command Performance  (1937), a vehicle for popular American tenor Arthur Tracy, and  Crackerjack  (1938), an unhinged crime comedy starring Aldwych farces alumnus Tom Walls as a criminal superhero. As Lilli tries to orient herself in film acting,...

Our Fox 1944 episode features a prestige production,  The Eve of St. Mark , based on a Maxwell Anderson play and directed by John Stahl, and a modest marital drama,  In the Meantime, Darling , directed by Otto Preminger just before he makes a name for himself in noir with  Laura . Between the two, the problems facing the men at the front and the women who love them are covered, as well as the kind...

In our first Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we spend some time with Lilli in England and take in her screen debut, in the "Quota Quickie" Crime Unlimited (1935); her small role in Hitchcock's eccentric  Secret Agent  (1936), in which she gets to play with an unhinged Peter Lorre; and a thankless role in a lyrical ode to Canadian nation-building a.k.a. labour exploitation,  The Great B...

This Special Subject is something extra-special: we discuss philosopher Stanley Cavell's idiosyncratic classic of film criticism,  Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage  and three classic comedies that are the subjects of essays in that book, Leo McCarey's  The Awful Truth , Howard Hawks'  His Girl Friday , and George Cukor's  Adam's RIb . What is Cavell's "comedy of remarriage...

This Warner Bros. 1944 episode makes good use of Warner Bros.' A-list stars, A-list character actors, B-list stars, and B-list character actors.  Casablanca  and  Maltese Falcon  alumni converge in both Michael Curtiz's  Passage to Marseille , starring Humphrey Bogart as a morally compromised hero, with Claude Rains and Sydney Greenstreet as the patriotic and pro-fascist alternatives for occupied...

Warning: our final Dorothy McGuire episode contains very little Dorothy McGuire in our discussion of the films, although we also compare our Top 10 performances and give a final analysis of how her career was shaped by its cultural moment. However, we still find lots to talk about in the oddball final feature films in which she appeared, particularly George Stevens'  The Greatest Story Ever Told ...

MGM, 1944 is an odd one. First, MGM's effort to help the war,  Song of Russia  (directed by Gregory Ratoff), prompts us to ask the question, "What were all of these Communist writers doing working for Louis B. Mayer?" And then, William Dieterle's  Kismet , starring Ronald Colman as an amoral magician with misguided plans for his daughter's future, proves to have more to recommend it than just the...

In our penultimate Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, another pair of films in which only one of McGuire's "mother roles" affords her a dramatic opportunity. Find out which is which, between Delmer Daves'  Susan Slade  (1961) and Disney's  Summer Magic  (1963). We also discuss stealth soap opera radicalism, compare Disney and Vincente Minnelli's approaches to femininity as a construct,...

Our special subject this month is The Silent Naruse: four of the five extant silent films of Mikio Naruse,  Flunky, Word Hard! , from 1931,  No Blood Relation ,   from 1932, and  Apart from You  and  Every-Night Dreams , from 1933. We discuss these juvenilia as early examples of Naruse's materialist melodrama, and how much "transcendence" that perspective permits. Then, switching moods drastically...

This week's Paramount 1944 films take the studio's talent of this period in unexpected directions: Mitchell Leisen's  Lady in the Dark  makes a Technicolor extravaganza of the fantasy sequences in this psychoanalytical tale of a woman's (Ginger Rogers') ambivalence about glamour, based on a hit Broadway musical; and Alan Ladd and Raymond Chandler (as star and screenwriter) bring a hardboiled note...

In this Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Dorothy McGuire's string of interesting wife roles gets tangled up by two of the most sexist films Elise has ever seen in her life, Delbert Mann's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs  (based on the play by William Inge) and Disney's  The Swiss Family Robinson .  The Dark at the Top of the Stairs  nevertheless gives us a lot to discuss in terms of psychiatric co...

Universal 1943 is a strange one, starting with  The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler , starring Ludwig Donath as a reluctant Nazi collaborator who's forced to impersonate Hitler, and continuing with Robert Siodmak's  Son of Dracula , with Lon Chaney Jr. as a hapless Dracula who falls victim to femme fatale Louise Allbritton. We discuss WWII AU scenarios, the  Twilight Zone scenario of being a soul tr...

July's special subject is a sampler of noirs by 1950s noir auteur Phil Karlson: Kansas City Confidential (1952), 99 River Street (1953), 5 Against the House (1955), and The Phenix City Story (1955). We discuss one-time Fox musicals leading man John Payne's transformation into the ideal shlubby, haunted noir protagonist, Karlson's take on the hysterical male trope, his use of violence, his delineat...

This week's Dorothy McGuire episode continues the trend of unusual wife and mother roles with two family melodramas from 1959, Henry King's tale of an economically and psychologically troubled viticulture dynasty,  This Earth Is Mine , and Delmer Daves' frank, sex-positive look at sexual mores among the respectable middle classes during the late 1950s, A Summer Place , which had contemporary revie...

For our RKO 1943 episode, we look at two films that exemplify the nascent RKO noir style: Richard Wallace's  The Fallen Sparrow , starring John Garfield as a traumatized Spanish Civil War veteran hunted by Nazis and the Val Lewton production  The Seventh Victim , starring Kim Hunter as a sheltered young woman who wants to find out about the sorrows of the world and does not want to be told to drin...

Our Dorothy McGuire episode this week is guaranteed to give you mood whiplash. We begin with Disney classic and Boomer phenomenon  Old Yeller  (1957), the most hellish depiction of the war of all against all in nature we've seen since  King Kong , with a moving central performance by Tommy Kirk as a boy ungracefully slouching toward manhood with the indispensable assistance of a good dog and a ser...

In this extra-special 20th Century Fox 1943 episode, we stare agog at a couple of dazzling musicals:  Stormy Weather , whose all-Black cast is headlined by Bill Robinson and Lena Horne and boasts an embarrassment of geniuses; and Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here , a Technicolor psychedelic extravaganza that's the pinnacle of Fox's signature variety-style musical. We try to sketch out some of t...