There's Sometimes a Buggy

Our June Special Subject samples the surviving silent cinema of Dave's favorite director (now revealed!), King Vidor. We tease Vidor's auteur preoccupations out of these four early films— The Sky Pilot  (1921),  Peg o' My Heart  (1922),  Wild Oranges  (1924),  and  La Bohème  (1926)—and find a common focus on the successful, frustrated, or warped self-realization of his heroines. We explore the wa...

We continue last week's theme of Hollywood's attitude toward the Soviet Union as our Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode takes us beyond not only the Popular Front era but just a shade beyond the heyday of McCarthyism. We also find that we spoke too soon about McGuire entering her mom-roles era, as in this episode's movies she embodies an unmarried professional woman with a liberal attit...

Our Warner Brothers 1943 episode is a very special one, a Popular Front anti-Nazi double feature, the Stalinist propaganda film  Mission to Moscow  (directed by Michael Curtiz) and Lewis Milestone's drama about Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation,  Edge of Darkness . We attempt (as complete non-experts!) to lay out the stakes involved in the case made by  Mission to Moscow  and discuss the...

Our Dorothy McGuire movies this week occupy two ends of the mid-50s Hollywood spectrum: a low-budget black-and-white noirish crime thriller for Republic,  Make Haste to Live  (1954), and a vibrantly colorful Cinemascope travelogue romance for Fox,  Three Coins in the Fountain  (1954). We find plenty to recommend in both, from  Make Haste to Live' s stylish cinematography (by John L. Russell of  Mo...

Our Special Subject this month is the films of Jacqueline Audry, a fairly recently rediscovered postwar French director. We watched all of the films we could find with English subtitles:  Gigi  (1949),  Olivia  (1951),  Huis clos / No Exit  (1954), and  Les petits matins / Hitch-Hike  (1962). From literary adaptations of some strong and scandalous material to an unusually gentle New Wave comedy, t...

For our MGM 1943 episode, we look at two films that are highly representative of the Mayer ethos,  The Human Comedy  (directed by Clarence Brown), a portrait of WWII-era American small-town life infused with the beatific sensibility of William Saroyan (who provided the story), with Mickey Rooney in a coming-of-age story that's equal parts Andy Hardy and David Lynch; and the children's classic  Las...

Our two Dorothy McGuire movies for this week are wildly different in tone: Samuel Goldwyn's  I Want You  (1951, directed by Mark Robson), about a family's reaction to the Korean War draft, and, for MGM, the Jamesian melodrama  Invitation  (1952, directed by Gottfried Reinhardt). Dave makes the case for  I Want You  as a complex leftist look at early Cold War America, and then we unpack the Jamesia...

For our Paramount 1943 episode, just a couple of typical comedies, as far as John Douglas Eames is concerned: Preston Sturges'  The Palm Beach Story , starring Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea, a comedy of remarriage in which the screwballs are no longer the central couple, and Mitchell Leisen's cross-class comedy with a number of twists,  No Time For Love , with Colbert and Fred MacMurray. We tr...

In the second part of our Joan Harrison: Producer Special Subject, we look at Harrison's Robert Montgomery years and her final films made before turning to television. which include both known and overlooked gems: Ride the Pink Horse  (1947),  Once More, My Darling  (1949),  Your Witness  (1950), and  Circle of Danger  (1951). We identify the various themes and concerns that unite films within thi...

For our Universal 1942 episode, a very odd pairing: The Mad Doctor of Market Street , a mad scientist/ocean liner comedy/island adventure movie directed by low-budget noir auteur Joseph H. Lewis, and Alfred Hitchcock's first fully American movie, Saboteur , a fugitive-on-the-run thriller. We dissect the depiction of the fictional islanders in  The Mad Doctor of Market Street  and the movie's decon...

For this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched two romantic comedies (sort of),  Mister 880  (1950) and  Callaway Went Thataway  (1951), in which Dorothy McGuire assumes a role we haven't seen from her before: the character through whom we register the pathos that the movies explore via the respective plights of Edmund Gwenn's elderly counterfeiter and Howard Keel's TV cowboy impersonato...

Our 1942 RKO episode is a very special one, with films by two of the studio's outstanding auteurs, writer-producer-director Orson Welles, and B-horror unit producer Val Lewton. First, we look at Orson Welles' mutilated (some even say "emasculated"!) masterpiece,  The Magnificent Ambersons , exploring the movie's extraordinary characters and performances and giving our opinion of the ending imposed...

In this Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, a couple of disparate films: Elia Kazan's anti-semitism exposé drama,  Gentleman's Agreement  (1947), and a marital comedy about the hardships of being a doctor's wife,  Mother Didn't Tell Me  (1950). We discuss the qualities that McGuire brings to her most problematic character yet and that help make the character a possible audience identifi...

[[New Improved edition – with restored Home From the Hill content!]]   It's March Minnelli Madness as we watch three melodramas directed by Vincente Minelli, plus one nightmarish comedy:  The Long, Long Trailer  (1954), starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz;  The Cobweb  (1955), starring Richard Widmark and Lauren Bacall (among other big names);  Some Came Running  (1958), based on the novel by Jam...

Our Fox 1942 episode explores two different modes of Betty Grable Fox musical (both choreographed by Astaire collaborator Hermes Pan) that draw on the Hollywood musical modes established in the 1930s:in black and white, the Warneresque backstager Footlight Serenade , shot by Lee Garmes; and the Technicolor farce  Springtime in the Rockies , with comic support by Edward Everett Horton and Carmen Mi...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we look at two very different Dorothy McGuire movies from 1946 that share a striking adultness:  Claudia and David  (directed by Walter Lang), a marital comedy that's surprisingly frank about infidelity, and  Till the End of Time  (directed by Edward Dmytryk), a "post-war readjustment" movie that's surprisingly frank about sexuality in general, as well as Amer...

In this very special Warners 1942 episode we discuss two Dave faves, both starring (and romantically pairing) Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan, that push against the restrictions of the Production Code: Sam Wood's  Peyton Place / Twin   Peaks  forerunner,  Kings Row ,   and Curtis Bernhardt's noirish agrarian socialist drama,  Juke Girl . We dive deep into  Kings Row s' Freud-and-Emerson-steeped adv...

In this week's Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view, two very different roles for our subject: in Elia Kazan's first film,  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  (1945), an imperfect mother in a difficult relationship with her protagonist-daughter; and in Robert Siodmak's Gothic noir,  The Spiral Staircase , (1946) a mute girl targeted by a eugenicist killer. We discuss the unique qualities McGuire brings to...

Our Valentine's Day 2023 episode is all about loves from the past who have inconveniently returned. In  My Favorite Wife  (1940), Irene Dunne is newly remarried Cary Grant's presumed dead wife, while in  Kiss Me Goodbye  (1982), James Caan is Sally Field's actually dead, or undead, husband, interfering with her engagement to the (ostensibly) less charismatic Jeff Bridges. We apply Stanley Cavell's...

Our MGM 1942 episode is a problematic Spencer Tracy double feature in which we're treated to the full range of his persona, from smug saint to semi-demon: George Stevens' brilliant but flawed  Woman of the Year , the first Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedy, and Victor Fleming's Tortilla Flat , in which Tracy co-stars with John Garfield, Akim Tamiroff, and Frank Morgan as John Steinbeck's idea of Monte...

Our Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view begins with  Claudia  (1943) and  The Enchanted Cottage  (1945), in both of which she's paired with Robert Young. We talk about the qualities McGuire imported to the screen from the stage role she made famous, in the 1941 play  Claudia , by Rose Franken, David O. Selznick's marketing of them, and the career vicissitudes that possibly negated this nascent p...

Our January Special Subject is Part 2 of our look at the films of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, for which we watched  Follow the Fleet  (1936),  Shall We Dance  (1937),  Carefree  (1938), and  The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle  (1939). Fred and Ginger's popularity was on the decline in his period, but these movies include some of Dave's favourites. We discuss the ways in which these films adh...

For our Paramount 1942 episode, we hit the road with a comedy with a lot on its mind, Preston Sturges'  Sullivan's Travels , and a comedy without any mind, the Hope/Crosby road movie  Road to Morocco . We debate just how much deep thinking a comedy should do and consider what kind of thinking comedy itself can do without any help from an auteur. We also isolate some of the unusual features of the...

There's Sometimes a Buggy says hello to 2023 and goodbye to Acteur Jean Arthur with three movies by three auteurs (Virginia Van Upp, Billy Wilder, and George Stevens):  The Impatient Years  (1944),  A Foreign Affair  (1948), and  Shane  (1953). Elise decides in real time that  The Impatient Years,  a sour mid-40s comedy of remarriage, is a great comedy because it's not very funny (using another Sh...

For our Universal 1941 Studios Year by Year episode we looked at two films about love and sex by a couple of master filmmakers, Rene Clair's  The Flame of New Orleans , a terrific Bruce Cabot vehicle (Marlene Dietrich is also in it), and Gregory La Cava's  Unfinished Business , a sexually daring romantic drama (with some screwball elements) starring Irene Dunne that manages to seem like a Pre-Code...