Have You Ever Seen

Wait, Ryan O'Neal again?! Yup! What's Up, Doc is our 3rd O'Neal movie this year. And they all came out in the '70s, which was not just the man's peak. That was director Peter Bogdanovich's most-productive time in Hollywood too. They and the Bugs Bunny-ish Barbra Streisand (who's, of course, still a massive star over 50 years later) came up with a screwball comedy that pays homage to the old master...

Ida Lupino was an actor in some classic movies for close to 50 years, but she directed a few classic thrillers in the '50s too. The Hitch-Hiker is her crowning achievement, with William Tallman doing a wonderfully sinister job in the titular role. He's one of the underrated great villains in cinema history. Edmond O'Brien & Frank Lovejoy are the men he kidnaps and forces them to drive him to Mexic...

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin tells a very complete story in only about 70 minutes. The black-and-white, silent flick is based on a real-life mutiny aboard a ship in the waters of the Black Sea near Ukraine. Of course, the incredibly influential Odessa Steps sequence is what people remember best...and it's the extremely violent result of this "war" against your own oppressive rulers. Eis...

Nearly every Stanley Kubrick film has been featured on Have You Ever Seen now that we're spending about an hour reviewing Barry Lyndon. In this 663rd episode, we analyze the gold-digging, underwhelming dueler played by Ryan O'Neal, an Irish soldier (turned gambler) who also turns out to be a terrible stepfather. Even though he's good as the opportunistic Redmond Barry, he's outshone by Patrick Mag...

Clarence Brown's family classic National Velvet is what's on tap in the 662nd edition of Have You Ever Seen. A pre-teen, horse-obsessed Elizabeth Taylor sheds tears from time to time, but she's remarkably optimistic all the same, especially about her beloved equine chum, "The Pie".  Anne Revere won an Oscar for playing Taylor's preternaturally calm mom, while top-billed Mickey Rooney was starting...

To put a finishing touch on this year's Revenge Month, our 661st episode has some fun with Colin Higgins' feminist comedy where a mediocre man gets major comeuppance for treating the women in his office so badly. If only Nine To Five was as funny as its reputation says it is. The tonal problems are partly because this started out as a serious look at how hard women have it in the workplace. Flawed...

As Easter weekend comes to an end, Ryan posts a solo show about another intense blood-feud here in Revenge Month. Leonardo DiCaprio went through hell and finally won his Oscar while auteur Alejandro G. Iñárritu won his 4th in 2 years for their work on The Revenant, a violent, gory, grueling and beautifully-photographed survival story. There's a running theme of racism against Native Americans in h...

Posting a podcast about Munich on Easter Weekend wasn't a deliberately provocative choice. Posting this mostly-effective "you'll pay for that" procedural during Revenge Month WAS intentional. Episode #659 of Have You Ever Seen is a Ryan monologue about Palestinian terrorists kidnapping and then assassinating Jewish athletes at the 1972 Olympics...and then the Israelis siccing a hit squad on those...

We reach the mid-point of Revenge Month with a French crime classic that features one of the greatest heist scenes in cinema history. Which has arguably never been topped, with its use of clever thieving techniques, intricate teamwork between the 4 main characters…and silence. Rififi is violent, many people die, it even has a drug addict and it has that brilliant break-in sequence where our "heroe...

The blood-soaked Blood Simple represents the debuts of not only auteurs Joel & Ethan Coen, but also their star (and Joel's future wife) Frances McDormand. They don't seem to agree though with the widely-shared view that their first film was an expertly-plotted noir. It's one of their best movies, in fact. When the Coen Brothers go down to Texas to shoot a nihilistic movie about death and contract...

Have You Ever Seen's 656th podcast begins our 3rd (Annual, probably?) Revenge Month and Oldboy's plot o' vengeance is particularly sinister. Park Chan-wook's sadistic South Korean thriller has several unforgettable moments, including the one-take hallway hammer fight and the shocking, blood-soaked climax. Choi Min-sik is quite terrific in the lead role, an ordinary man who's forced to live in the...

Play your flame guitar as you cue up the 655th edition of Have You Ever Seen to hear us jaw about the loner known as Max Rockatansky, but stay for the Imperator known as Furiosa. George Miller's 6-time Oscar-winner was the 4th in a series that already featured one of the greatest stunt movies ever made (The Road Warrior), but then he and his team managed to easily top it with Fury Road. And just a...

Note: this episode might be listed as "E" on your app, but there's no bad language in this one. Tomorrow will mark the beginning of our 13th year of podcasting, so we end #12 with another one-Ryan show...this time about a 7-time Oscar-winner. Along with a slew of technical awards, Out Of Africa won Best Picture and Sydney Pollack was rewarded for his direction. His romantic epic, with all those sc...

Many boxing movies have surpassed what Robert Wise and Paul Newman brought to the screen in Somebody Up There Likes Me, but their biopic DID win 2 technical Oscars. Newman is not at his best playing Rocky Graziano, an angry young delinquent who turned a life spent in various forms of trouble into a championship boxing career. He was still new to movies though and wasn't to be laconic and cool as h...

It's St. Patrick's Day, so Have You Ever Seen #652 gets into an IRA frame of mind, puts on some green and talks about John Ford's The Informer. The legendary director and leading man Victor McLaglen won Oscars, but the set-bound film itself lost out to the epic grandeur of Mutiny On The Bounty for Best Picture. McLaglen plays a pathetic liar who betrays and rats out a fellow Irishman to British au...

Oscar Month continues! Bev's couple of weeks off begins! She's not here to talk about The King's Speech, which is a classy movie that ended up being a huge hit, even though it's about a group of people that Ryan has never liked: the royals. A monarchy? In a democracy? Come on! Yet, credit where it's due, Tom Hooper does an admirable job of making a non-fan care about the king of England and his en...

All The King's Men is a political movie, so Ryan decided to get very political in this one-man show. In fact, warning: don't listen to the 650th edition of Have You Ever Seen if you're a Trump supporter...because he gets lambasted. As for the movie in question, it's a good one. A man who saw into the future, Robert Rossen, writes and directs a film that's effective at showing a cruel and corrupt g...

The Ellises have a next-day chat about the 97th Academy Awards in our 2025 Oscars Post-View. The year 2024 was not a banner 12 months for film, but, in the end, the voters pointed at independent film Anora the most often, giving it 5 trophies…including Best Picture. Sean Baker set a record by winning 4 Oscars (at least, in the types of categories in which he won), with 2 of those being for his scr...

One of the most-legendary filmmakers of all time only directed one movie to a Best Picture Oscar…and Rebecca was it. Alfred Hitchcock slickly portrays the brutal treatment of the victimized newlywed Joan Fontaine. She's a target for everyone in the film, especially a vicious housekeeper played by Judith Anderson and a neglectful and possibly homicidal husband played by Laurence Olivier. But did Hi...

Our 10th Annual Oscars Preview podcast is the 647th chat on Have You Ever Seen...and it's an in-depth look at the controversial 97th Academy Awards. First-time host Conan O'Brien will probably riff on the dirt, but also how this is one of those "who are you people" Oscars. Yeah, it just wasn't a terrific year for film and the nominations reflect that...particularly in major categories like Best Pi...

As you'll hear in this 646th dose of Have You Ever Seen, The Postman Always Rings Twice is thought of by many to be the epitome of film noir. Tay Garnett's sexy thriller based on James M Cain's book gives us passion, lust, deceit, betrayal and death, so it hits those vital marks to be a key part of this genre. Lana Turner is the lady in white who gets her employee John Garfield to kill for her. Sh...

Cinderella is on the shortlist for the most famous fairy tales of 'em all. And, after a rough stretch in the '40s, Walt Disney's genius animators beautifully adapted this legendary story to help bring the struggling studio back into the black. Trouble is, the cutesy mice sidekicks aren't nearly as funny as other Disney sidekicks were (or have been since) and some plot elements border on the stupid...

No one has to think Love Story is a good movie to acknowledge that it's a beloved romance that made an absolute killing at the box office 55 years ago. The AFI remembers Arthur Hiller's film fondly too. It's just that we Ellises aren't at all sorry to say that we aren't as enamored as millions of other people have been. It feels rushed and story beats aren't allowed to breathe, plus---Oscar nomina...

Witness is a tense thriller as much as it is a sweet love story, but Peter Weir's typically sensitive direction balances those elements very well. He also led Harrison Ford to his only Oscar nomination, which seems hard to believe for a guy who's been such a big movie star for such a long time. Lukas Haas plays a young Amish Pennsylvanian who witnesses a vicious murder in the washroom of a train s...

1950 was a year in which legendary classics like All About Eve and Sunset Blvd were released, but one of their competitors for the Best Picture Oscar was Vincente Minnelli's light comedy...which is itself a low-key classic. Father Of The Bride is well-written and it has more laughs than most movies that came out in that era, largely because Spencer Tracy knew how to be funny in a dignified way. He...