There's Sometimes a Buggy

The movies we discussed for our 2022 Christmas Special Subject are a little on the dark side, as all great Christmas movies are, but these ones perhaps more obviously than ever. We paired Mitchell Leisen's Remember the Night  (1940), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, with William Dieterle's  I'll Be Seeing You  (1944), two movies about women who've fallen afoul of the law, and whose experience...

Our penultimate Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode features a couple of sexy romantic comedies, George Stevens'  The More the Merrier  and William A. Seiter's  The Lady Takes a Chance  (both 1943), that Arthur made at the height of her stardom and glamour, when she was in her early 40s - at which point she retired from movies. (Though not quite yet, or permanently, as we'll see in the final...

Our RKO 1941 episode turns out to be well-timed, giving us an opportunity to weigh in on the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics' Poll, canon formation, and the uses (if any) of canons. From there we segue into a discussion of Orson Welles'  Citizen Kane  and its place in the cinematic canon, and then into a discussion of the film itself, and especially Kane's relationship with Susan Alexander Kane. Our se...

This episode of our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view provides us with two examples of Hollywood leftism to discuss: a Norman Krasna department store comedy directed by Sam Wood,  The Devil and Miss Jones  (1941), and a comedy of ideas directed by George Stevens,  The Talk of the Town  (1942). We discuss the way  The Devil and Miss Jones  portrays political radicalism and the difficulty of labor o...

Our November Special Subject is Sirk Noir-vember: four noir or noir-adjacent movies directed by Douglas Sirk in the late 1940s/early 50s:  Lured  (1947),  Sleep, My Love  (1948),  Shockproof  (1949), and  Thunder on the Hill  (1951). We discuss to what extent these films can be considered "auteur" works and in what ways they qualify as noirs; Sirk's use of actor personas and his own "acteur" theor...

American involvement in WWII is imminent at the time of these 20th Century Fox selections from late 1941 for this Studios Year by Year episode, producing what may be the first "true" noir,  I Wake Up Screaming  (directed by H. Bruce Humberstone), and a plea for American solidarity with England, war correspondent movie  Confirm or Deny  (directed by Archie Mayo, from a story co-written by Samuel Fu...

This week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is a directed-by-Wesley Ruggles double feature of disparate genres: the bigamy farce  Too Many Husbands  and the epic Western  Arizona  (both 1940). Although the films, both with screenplays by Ruggles' frequent collaborator Claude Binyon, interrogate marriage and gender respectively, one ends with the reassertion of patriarchal authority, whil...

For our Warner Bros. 1941 episode we watched two Raoul Walsh love triangle movies:  Manpower , in which Edward G. Robinson pines for Marlene Dietrich, who pines for George Raft; and one of Dave's all-time faves,  The Strawberry Blonde , in which Olivia de Havilland pines for James Cagney, who pines for Rita Hayworth. We discuss Walsh's treatment of women as desiring subjects; the productive tensio...

Our Halloween 2022 subject is "The Haunted Mizoguchi," for which we looked at two films made by Kenji Mizoguchi toward the end of his life: the supernatural fantasy Ugetsu  (1953) and a film we agree is a candidate for best movie ever made,  Sansho the Bailiff  (1954). We use Mizoguchi's explicit treatment of ghostly themes in  Ugetsu  as a springboard for discussing the haunting qualities of  San...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we arrive at arguably Jean Arthur's biggest year of stardom, 1939, with her appearance opposite Cary Grant in  Only Angels Have Wings , Howard Hawks' ode to male professionalism, and her iconic performance in  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , opposite Jimmy Stewart. We do our best to get at the essences of Hawks and Capra and consider whether Arthur can e...

For this MGM 1941 episode, we again pair a classic with a rarity: Cukor's  A Woman's Face , starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, and Conrad Veidt, and  The Trial of Mary Dugan , directed by Norman Z. McLeod and starring Laraine Day, Robert Young, and Tom Conway (aka "The Nice George Sanders"). We discuss  A Woman's Face  as a proto-Warner Bros. Crawford noir, the persona of Robert Young, the us...

In our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view this week, we look at two of Arthur's best-known comedies,  Easy Living  (1937), directed by Mitchell Leisen, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, and  You Can't Take It With You  (1938), directed by Frank Capra. Dave explains why Jean Arthur's performance in  Easy Living  is his all-time favourite comedy performance by an actress. (Hint: it involves a pig...

A tonally disparate pair of great films for Paramount 1941: Preston Sturges'  The Lady Eve , starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, one of the greatest movies ever made, according to Elise; and a real rarity, William Wellman's  Reaching for the Sun , starring some important Sturges actors: Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, and Eddie Bracken. We interrogate the strange central relationship in  The Lady...

In this week's entry in our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we look at Alfred E. Green's comedy  More Than A Secretary  (1936) and Frank Borzage's genre-defying screwball melodrama  History Is Made at Night  (1937), pairing Arthur with up-and-coming romantic lead Charles Boyer. We compare  More Than A Secretary  with Green's better-known film about sexual politics in patriarchal office c...

In Part 2 of our look at The German Sirk, the director discovers "cinematic values" with two unhinged melodramas that place a strong emphasis on music,  Schlußakkord  ( Final Chord / Final Accord ), from 1936, and  La Habanera , from 1937. We dig into a couple of Sirk's complicated "villains" in these movies about extra-marital love triangles, and discuss  La Habanera 's Nazi propaganda overtones...

For this Universal 1940 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at a Vincent Price double feature that also features the same director (Joe May), cinematographer (Milton Krasner), and key screenwriter (Lester Cole, who will become one of the Hollywood Ten): The House of the Seven Gables, an adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, and The Invisible Man Returns , the first sequel to James Whale's...

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view cast, we revisit Frank Capra's  Mr. Deeds Goes to Town  (1936) for thoughts old and (hopefully) new, and then look at two minor screwball comedy variations on genre films from 1936, the RKO murder mystery  The Ex-Mrs. Bradford , co-starring William Powell, and a weird little riff on  Mr. Deeds  combined with a crime thriller,  Adventure in Manhattan...

This week's studio is RKO, 1940, and we have two great movies:  Vigil in the Night , starring Carole Lombard as a saintly nurse and Anne Shirley as her flawed sister in George Stevens' noirish medical drama; and Abe Lincoln in Illinois , based on Robert E. Sherwood's play, with Raymond Massey reprising his stage role of Abraham Lincoln. We discuss the latter as an anti-fascist film and argue for b...

Our Special Subject for August is also our first look at German filmmaking under the Nazis, with two mid-1930s films by left-wing director and future Hollywood auteur Douglas Sirk:  The Girl from the Marsh Croft , based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, and  Pillars of Society , based on the play by Henrik Ibsen. We consider the question of how it was possible to make liberal films under these circu...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at 3 Jean Arthur movies:  The Defense Rests  (1934), an excellent corrupt lawyer drama that we were previously unable to find; and from 1935, two very different romantic comedies featuring real or pretend marriages of convenience,  The Public Menace  and  If You Could Only Cook . The simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic young lawyer, screwba...

For this Fox 1940 episode, we look at a couple of films with the same director (Henry Hathaway), same cinematographer (Arthur Miller), and same nominal star (Tyrone Power), but radically different stories.  Brigham Young  tells the story of the persecution of the Mormons and their journey westward from Illinois to the Great Salt Lake, recasting this American epic as an implicit anti-Nazi tale with...

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at two more movies from 1935,  Public Hero No. 1  (directed by J. Walter Ruben for MGM) and  Diamond Jim  (directed by A. Edward Sutherland for Universal, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges). In the first, Arthur injects some screwball swagger into a Code-era gangster drama with an FBI agent hero; in the second, she has a dual rol...

Our Special Subject for this month, Duels in Max Ophüls, covers films from all three decades of the itinerant filmmaker's career:  Liebelei  (1933), made in Germany;  Letter from an Unknown Woman  (1948), made in Hollywood; and  Madame de...  (1953), made in France. We consider the proposition that Ophüls' films are about superficially superficial people, and examine the evolution of a certain set...

Our Warner Bros. 1940 episode this time is a Bette Davis double feature in which Bette plays the Other Woman in two melodramas based on real-life sex-and-murder scandals, but the Wronged Woman in only one. We discuss the combination of sexual repression and critique of colonialism in William Wyler's  The Letter  and Anatole Litvak's study of societal constraints and thwarted romance with the very...

In our second Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Arthur moves into her A-picture period at Columbia with John Ford's curious comedy/crime melodrama,  The Whole Town's Talking , starring Edward G. Robinson in a dual role, and Erle C. Kenton's  Children's Hour -reminiscent  Party Wire . While we see more of the familiar Arthur comedy persona emerge in  The Whole Town's Talking , she gets to...