Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

By all accounts a job for hire, The Blue Gardenia nonetheless benefited from having German director Fritz Lang at the helm.  On a tight 21 day shooting schedule, Lang and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca came up with shooting techniques that would save time while also contributing a sense of suffocating paranoia and intensity.  They are aided enormously by an able cast led by Anne Baxter, Richard...

Before Norwegian filmmaker Andre Øvredal found acclaim with his festival fave The Autopsy of Jane Doe and box office clout with 2019's teen horror hit Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, he wrote and directed 2011's Trollhunter which won him acclaim both at home and around the world.  The found footage fantasy follows a group of college journalists getting to the bottom of Norway's best kept secret...

Originally a screenplay titled Nightline, 1980's Don't Answer The Phone was shot under the title The Hollywood Strangler - perhaps a nod to director Robert Hammer's stated purpose to make a film exploring the proliferation of serial killers in the 1970's.  The eventual title was a bid to get the audiences that had made 1979's phone themed thriller When A Stranger Calls a success. Dan and Vicky dis...

Released in 1932, Jewel Robbery flaunted the sexual chemistry between it's two leads, introduced marijuana as a comedic motif and had it's debonair criminal escape police capture at the end -- all things that wouldn't have been allowed only a few years later under the restrictive Hayes code.  The film stars William Powell and Kay Francis - their sixth film appearance together -- and is ably direct...

At 73, Boris Karloff was looking for material that would finally give him the chance to show his range as a performer.  He knew he couldn't escape his reputation as a reliable box office horror star but he hoped for a role that would allow him to play more than the sympathetic monster.  1958's The Haunted Strangler, written for the actor by friend Jan Read, gave him that opportunity -- partly.  Da...

Courtesy of TriCoast Entertainment, Dan and Vicky review By Night's End from director Walker Whited.  The home invasion thriller, co-written by Whited and Sean McCane, stars Michelle Rose and Kurt Yue as a couple in trauma facing financial ruin and deep personal loss.  A violent intruder unknowingly offers them a way out but they must first fend off the intruder's cronies and survive the night.  ...

Your Hot Date hosts travel back in time to 1561 and the tumultuous return of Mary Queen of Scots from France to stake her claim to the English crown from her cousin Queen Elizabeth.  It's a story of sex, religious intolerance, and female empowerment told by two of the world's rising stars in Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronin, fledgling film director with a background in British theater Josie Rourke...

At just under an hour, the 1934 murder mystery The Crime of Helen Stanley hardly overstays it's welcome.  It was the fourth film in the Inspector Steve Trent series with Ralph Bellamy playing the always able and ready gumshoe. This time he's investigating the murder of a famous, and infamous, movie actress who leaves a trail of suspects in her wake. Fitting that the shortest movie they've every di...

SOUND QUALITY ALERT:  THERE WAS AN UNFORTUNATE HUMAN ERROR IN THE RECORDING OF EPISODE 111.  WE'D FIRE THE SOUND TECHNICIAN BUT HE'S ALSO YOUR CO-HOST.  SINCEREST APOLOGIES.  HOPE THE SOUND ISSUE DOESN'T DETRACT TOO MUCH FROM YOUR ENJOYMENT OF HOT DATE 111.      Dan  2013's indie comedy Dealin' With Idiots was a passion project for actor Jeff Garlin (Curb Your Enthusiasm).  Directed, co-written an...

The Me First Decade.  The Decade of Greed.  The Yuppie Decade.  There are many names for the 1980's.  But the decade also represented an eclectic one for movies.  It was the decade that Hollywood really leaned in to the blockbuster after the successes of Jaws and Star Wars in the 70's.  It was the decade of bad hair and bad fashion.  It was the decade the film tastes of your Hot Date podcast hosts...

For 1972's Baron Blood, director Mario Bava brought together the talents of some of the era's greatest genre stars and designers.  German actress Elke Sommer played the female lead and would do so again in Bava's Lisa and the Devil.  Future Oscar winner Carlo Rambaldi provided the gory make-up.  Bava fave Stelvio Cipriani composed the sometimes jaunty, sometimes dramatic music.  And American Josep...

For it's assured visual style and performances from Ray Liotta and Jason Patric, Joe Carnahan's Narc was the talk of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and putting Carnahan securely on Hollywood's radar.  The film, co-produced by Liotta and his wife and snapped up by Tom Cruise and partner Paula Wagner for distribution, was set in Detroit but shot mostly in Toro...

Our original episode 107 was lost to the sound gods so we've kept the Hot Date chosen at the end of that podcast and move forward with the Vanity Fair adaptation Becky Sharp from 1935 starring Miriam Hopkins and directed by Rouben Mamoulian.  The film was the very first to employ the three strip Technicolor process which allowed for the full spectrum of color to be represented on film.  Your podca...

Please excuse our sound issues during this episode.  We hope it doesn't detract from your enjoyment of it. Not your typical romantic comedy, director Goran Dukic's Wristcutters: A Love Story, based on Etgar Keret's short story "Kneller's Happy Campers," imagines an afterlife reserved for suicide victims trying to find meaning and acceptance.  Starring Patrick Fugit, Shea Whigham, Shannyn Sossaman...

Despite the success of his Daphne Du Maurier adaptation Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock thought the film too sentimental and romantic and longed to return to the type of sharp thriller that had made his reputation around the world.  With 1940's he found that film in Foreign Correspondent, a globe hopping World War II adventure that starts with a horrifying murder on the steps of the Amsterdam Parliament...

It's hard to imagine any cast being better than the one director Jean Cocteau eventually assembled for his 1950 loose film adaptation of the Orpheus myth.  But there are stories that Cocteau offered the part of the princess, played to icy perfection by Maria Casares, to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Both turned him down.  French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont also claimed that Cocteau had him and hi...

NOTE:  In trying to accommodate necessary social distancing, this week's podcast was recorded with Vicky calling in via Zoom.  We apologize in advance for the sound quality and hope to get better at remote recording!  Enjoy and stay safe everyone.  The work of Daphne du Maurier has been adapted many times for the screen, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940's Rebecca and 1964's The Birds. Less...

Please note that Hot Date 102 was recorded BEFORE the Covid-19 pandemic hit crisis levels. Our discussion of it reflects that moment in time.  We encourage all our listeners to follow the guidelines set forth by health officials about washing hands thoroughly and often, social distancing and staying home if you feel sick.  Safe and healthy listening everyone! Based on a Japanese comic of the same...

1941's Cottage To Let started life as a play in London's West End.  It was a huge hit and film director Anthony Asquith (Browning Version, Pygmalion, The Importance of Being Earnest) did well to cast young actor George Cole and former Scrooge Alistair Sim who had appeared in the play -- they're the two most interesting characters.  But the cast is full of British screen and theater pros including...

Hot Date with Dan and Vicky hits it's 100th episode with a look back at the podcasts that made us.  Your hosts choose their ten favorite films discovered (or rediscovered) doing the podcast for the last almost five years!  It's a trip down memory lane with some amazing titles from filmmakers like J. Lee Thompson, Akira Kurosawa and Sidney Lumet!  Also on hand are two VERY special guests, Hot Date...

French provocateur Francois Ozon's uses the frame work of fairy tale Hansel and Gretel to tell his violent and twisted story of Luc and Alice, a young murderous couple on the run who find more than they bargained for in an isolated cabin in the woods.  The homophonically named Natacha Regnier and Jeremy Renier play the doomed lovers. Dan and Vicky discuss the intense and difficult Criminal Lovers...

There were so many variables in bringing the nearly two hour Marx Brothers classic A Day At The Races to the screen -- translating tried and tested vaudevillian acts while maintaining a satisfying story arc, shooting on a real racetrack with real horses, keeping the peace between novice comedy director Sam Wood and the cast -- that lawsuits were almost a given.  The one that actually went to court...

Ernst Lubitsch left his native Germany in 1922 as an ambitious 30 year old looking to make his mark in American movies.  With the help of Hollywood royalty like Mary Pickford, he was soon embarking on an eclectic career directing everything from musicals to serious dramas.  With the comedy To Be Or Not To Be, Lubitsch had a chance to comment on the horrors of Nazism in his homeland while making pe...

Young actress Royalty Hightower had never acted before being cast in director Anna Rose Holmer's drama The Fits.  She was, however, an experienced dancer; a skill she then had to unlearn to play the tomboy Toni who discovers a love of dance in the film.  Director Holmer was also taking on a new skill; The Fits was her narrative storytelling debut although her extensive background in documentary fi...

1951's The Strange Door had the talents of Charles Laughton in the lead but Universal hung their hopes on Boris Karloff to bring audiences in despite Karloff's smaller supporting role.  His name and photo appear prominently in all the advertising as does Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote the short story the film is based on.  Stevenson and Karloff had had a previous success in 1945 with the film T...