Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

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...

Re-imagined to the American South during the post war era, the film version of Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway musical Carmen Jones was revolutionary to audiences, particularly white audiences, who had never seen a film completely populated by African-American actors.  Director Otto Preminger wanted to use this rare opportunity to convey to a racially divided country that the African-American experie...

From the fertile imagination of Terry Gilliam comes The Adventures of Baron Munchausen from 1989 but it wasn't without it's share of near catastrophes. A Ballooning budget, dangerous working situations and a regime change at Columbia Pictures nearly scuttled Gilliam's attempt to put the much embellished exploits of German adventurer Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen on screen.  Af...

Robert Bresson, director of this week's Pickpocket and numerous films that helped define the French New Wave, was known to be a task master on set.  In his search for absolute separation of art from artifice, he demanded his actors strip away all affectation and just deliver their lines simply and rotely.  This often required as many as fifty takes of a single shot or scene! Dan and Vicky discuss...

Director Walter Hill had his hands full on the set of his 1975 directorial debut Hard Times.  He had cast Charles Bronson in the lead role of Chaney, a boxer who says little but can knock a man out with one punch, only to find that the actor could be angry and reclusive on set. James Coburn took the part of Speed, Chaney's manager, but resented playing second fiddle to Bronson and showed it on set...

Hot Date has reached episode 90 and that means hosts Dan and Vicky come up with another Top Ten movie list.  This time, the topic is psychological thrillers and it's scary how many great films your hosts dig up. You'll hear about movies from classic thriller directors from Hitchcock to Polanski to Fincher and international white knucklers from France, Mexico and England.  Movies guaranteed to send...

Even before director George Sidney and stars Judy Garland, John Hodiak and Angela Lansbury finished shooting 1946's The Harvey Girls, it's signature song, On The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, was burning up the music charts in the summer and fall of 1945. No fewer than six artists recorded the song, the most successful being the version created by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers.  It's no w...