Screen Test of Time

Double Indemnity is a sexy, fast paced look at the dangerous world of... insurance? Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck star in this hard-boiled noir about life insurance fraud and murder, with Edward G. Robinson as the grizzled old claims investigator that takes them down.

The film for which the term “gaslighting” is named, Gaslight is actually better than the myriad references to it in articles about psychological torment would have you believe. Ingrid Bergman gives a tour de force performance as the naive wife whose husband, played by Charles Boyer, tortures her into questioning her own reality, with Joseph Cotton and Angela Lansbury turning in memorable supportin...

Bing Crosby stars as a hip, crooning priest brought in to pull a New York City church out of financial straits. At least, that’s the proposed arc of Going My Way for the first 20 minutes of this year’s Best Picture winner, but this over long movie careens from one dangling plot thread to another. Despite that, it’s rather pleasant, if you don’t look at it too hard… which, of course, is the whole i...

Our hosts weren’t thrilled with The Song of Bernadette , a largely fictionalized biopic about a saint, but their main complaint is that it’s longer, even, than the Left Behind movies. Also, Suzan thinks it’s not Catholic enough, while David is really annoyed at what watching it has done to his YouTube recommendation algorithm.

Ostensibly a biopic about one of the most important scientists of all time, Madame Curie is more a love letter to her husband, Pierre, than the story of the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in not one but two different categories. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon do their usual comfortable romance thing, and their personal chemistry is fine, while the movie seems entirely disinterested in the che...

The third and final antifascist film of the 1943 nominees, Watch on the Rhine doesn't, in fact, star Bette Davis, despite what the poster would have you believe. Paul Lukas is brilliant as a great dad who is literally antifa, and this is his movie through and through. A great supporting cast and snappy dialogue buttress this movie that, despite interference from the Hays Office, manages to effecti...

Our hosts are finally free of their nemesis, Ernst Lubitsch after this week’s Heaven Can Wait (not to be confused with the film of the same name from 1978)… or are they? Suzan is pretty sure that this awkward shaggy dog story that infuriated David is the last of the Lubitsch nominees, but she’s thought that before.

For Whom the Bell Tolls , on paper, seems to have all the ingredients of a great film: it’s got Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper, and a merry band of anti-fascists, all in Technicolor! What could possibly go wrong? Content note for discussion of sexual assault.

Despite the tagline “Home is where you hang your guests!” The More the Merrier thankfully does not turn out to be the second movie in a row to focus on a hanging. This Jean Arthur vehicle frustratingly restricts its usually brilliant lead in a muddled film that can’t decide if it’s a screwball comedy about a DC housing shortage during World War II or a romantic comedy about the type A career woman...

Signing off last week, our hosts were justifiably nervous about the nooses swinging from the tree in the poster for this week's movie, but The Ox-Bow Incident turns out to be an excellent, if extremely dispiriting film. Henry Fonda turns in another excellent performance as a working class hero, alongside an ensemble of interesting and unique characters.

Our hosts have called a lot of movies weird over the last two and a half years, but The Human Comedy , starring Mickey Rooney and is neither very human nor a comedy, may be the weirdest one, yet. And it’s not even close.

After a longer than expected hiatus, David and Suzan are BACK, with one fantastic movie!

They've watched good movies. They've watched more bad movies. But never have Suzan and David watched a movie as utterly confounding as In Which We Serve.

Starring Greer Garson and Ronald Coleman, both of whom are in better movies nominated this year, Random Harvest features the the rare x2 double amnesiac combo multiplier in a plot that is so ludicrous it strains the bounds of Suzan’s sanity and somehow makes David more resistant to its glaring problems.

Being anti-Nazi is literally the least a film can do. It's also the most The Pied Piper does.

Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman, and Cary Grant star in The Talk of the Town , a screwball comedy about… the nature of criminal justice and worker exploitation? Or, more accurately, an unintentional romantic comedy about two men falling in love with each other, and their wingwoman. You decide!

A propaganda film churned out and into theaters just 8 months after the battle for which it is named, Wake Island is a fascinating historical artifact… but is it a movie?

Suzan and David disagree on just how good (or not) this Lou Gehrig biopic starring Gary Cooper, and featuring Babe Ruth as himself. But they both agree that baseball is… the sweet science? The beautiful game? The President’s apple pie?

In a bit of film history podcast imitating film history, our first shot at recording this week’s episode will forever be lost to history— just like Orson Welles’s intended version of The Magnificent Ambersons.

The winner of the 1942 awards, Mrs. Miniver starring Greer Garson is the quintessential representation of the British “Keep Calm and Carry On” response to World War II.

A musical cum biopic starring James Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy, recycles some of our hosts’ least favorite old Hollywood clichés as it stumbles in its homage to Broadway historical figure George M. Cohan, but manages to pull out some unexpected and nigh on accidental moments of genuinely good film making.

It should say a lot that our hosts found one of the least abhorrent parts of Kings Row to be Ronald Reagan. A jumbled melodrama depicting horrifying and unevenly denounced medical malpractice, murder/suicide, and child abuse, it’s the first movie Suzan has ever considered not even finishing.

Originally released in the UK in 1941 as 49th Parallel , this week’s movie and 1942’s first nominee was released in the US as The Invaders. Starring Laurence Olivier in possibly his most embarrassing role, and Leslie Howard as… well, Leslie Howard, it’s a disjointed bit of pro-war propaganda that’s so all over the place our hosts had to come up with a new way to rate it.

In 1940, our hosts said that Rebecca , while being a fantastic movie, wasn’t necessarily a great Hitchcock film. Is this week’s film, Suspicion , both? Or neither? And wrapping up the 1941 awards, David and Suzan will surprise no one with their assessment of the Academy’s choice and who the winner should have been.

There’s still a week go to, but judging by their review of the winner for 1941, How Green Was My Valley , Suzan and David aren’t going to think much of the Academy’s choice this year.