Screen Test of Time

A film that tries to justify a husband’s neglectful, sometimes abusive treatment of his wife basically because she wants to go on a vacation he promised her over 20 years ago, Dodsworth is a misogynistic polemic masquerading as the unholy marriage of a grand tour narrative and the slow, agonizing story of a couple’s divorce.

With Leslie Howard (41) and Norma Shearer (34) as the titular characters, Romeo and Juliet begins the long Hollywood tradition of casting extremely age inappropriate actors as teenagers. An obvious cash grab after the success of 1935’s Midsummer Night’s Dream , this movie’s best quality is that it reminded our hosts how good the Baz Luhrmann version actually is.

Never before have our hosts said, “But whatever,” as many times as in this episode (please do not turn this into a drinking game— you have been warned). Despite SToT favorite Frederic March giving it his all as the titular character, Anthony Adverse is a confusing and confused muddle devoid of character development and made worse by a middle third fraught with all kinds of racism. But it does have...

San Francisco starring Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracey, and Clark Gable, is nearly two and a half hours of muddled confusion. Is it an historical dramedy? A musical disaster film? Or just an historical disaster?

Frank Capra continues his streak of good movies with the best one so far: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It’s a funny, quirky, extremely moving, and socioeconomically progressive gem starring an incredible Gary Cooper as the eponymous Mr. Deeds and a delightfully complex performance by Jean Arthur. A fantastic film and the first 10 to be awarded by David and Suzan!

The winner of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld is absolute Academy catnip: a big flashy musical that’s also a biopic, almost three hours long and lousy with famous stars, and generally a celebration of the entertainment industry— Hollywood loves few things more than a movie about itself. But is it any good?

So far, 1936 holds steady with the totally acceptable biopic, The Story of Louis Pasteur. Telling the somewhat… uh… sanitized version of Pasteur’s proving the existence of microbes and the germ theory of disease, Paul Muni plays the famed chemist as a crotchety genius at odds with the rather sociable and charming members of the medical establishment, personified by Fritz Leiber as the fictional Dr...

It was the best of times, it was the— actually, know what? It’s just the best of times, because 1936 has kicked off with a solidly good movie! A Tale of Two Cities is a dream come true after the slog of 1935, and in many respects is a wish granted to our hosts who have received all the things they wished they’d seen in David Copperfield . Ronald Coleman gives a moving and brilliant performance as...

Captain Blood is the 1930s version of a big, brainless action movie— David suggests Jason Statham would star in this today— and yet Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out how to make a big, brainless action movie. Starring Errol Flynn as a doctor named Peter Blood (which Suzan cannot actually say without laughing) who becomes an indentured servant and then a pirate, with Olivia de Havilland and Basil Ra...

There are a number of movies where Charles Laughton has been acting in an entirely different film than everyone else on screen, but this is the first where that one seems like the better movie. Based on a true story, Mutiny on the Bounty departs radically from history for all the wrong reasons… if you can find a reason at all. Fraught with white washing British colonialism and naval history, not t...

David: Suzan, I might have gotten slightly  drunk watching this movie over the course of like four hours. Suzan: I mean, I didn’t, because I don’t drink, but I definitely felt like I had ingested some bad bread mold and was hallucinating. This week, our hosts Shakespeare-nerd out pretty hard for A Midsummer Night’s Dream . A German expressionistic adaptation of the play, directed by a man who...

Ten episodes ago, David and Suzan told you to hold off on watching The Gay Divorce e, because once they had watched this week’s movie, Top Hat, they would tell you which was the better Oscar nominated Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. We're sorry to report, they still don't know.

1935 has been a rough year for our hosts, but this week, they have a wonderful, if surreal respite, in The Broadway Melody of 1936 ! A totally bonkers plot threads through some truly spectacular musical numbers, starring Eleanor Powell, who was such a phenomenal dancer that Fred Astaire did one movie with her, and then wouldn’t work with her again because she was that much better than he was. Roun...

Happy New Year, Screen Testers! Our intrepid hosts begin their second year of their quest with the Katherine Hepburn vehicle, Alice Adams . Something of a shaggy dog story, it’s a strange little film in which very little happens, with some confused things to say about class struggle and capitalism. On the plus side, Hepburn gives a striking performance as a complicated and largely unlikable Alice,...

They did it! David and Suzan have watched a Best Picture nominated film and released their review every week for a year. The final flick of the year is The Informer , the story of a former Irish Republican Army member turns in a friend for reward money, and the fall out that ensues. Suzan is sick, but powers through; David is just sick of the movie.

Suzan has been waiting this entire first year for the opportunity to geek out about Les Miserables . This week, she also fell in love with Frederic March, who entirely proved she and David wrong when they assumed, last episode, that he couldn’t off Valjean… unfortunately, they were absolutely right about Charles Laughton as Javert. But how good can a 100 minute Les Miserables actually be?

Primary lessons learned from Naughty Marietta: don’t wiggle raw, unrefrigerated shrimp in a woman’s face as a way of flirting. This very loosely adapted version of a wildly confusing operetta stars Jeanette MacDonald as a French… Princess? who runs away to New Orleans to escape marrying some Spanish duke, and ends up falling for a rakish captain played by Nelson Eddy.  Musical numbers ensue,...

The story of an English valet who gets traded away in a poker game to basically the Beverly Hillbillies, Ruggles of Red Gap stars Charles Laughton in the first of three 1935 Best Picture nominations. On its surface, it’s a broad, goofy fish-out-of-water class comedy, but something more insidious flows underneath.

On this week’s episode, Suzan and David recommend half a dozen other adaptations of David Copperfield you could watch instead of this one. David has a hard time remembering names of real life people, Suzan has a hard time remembering names of characters, and there may or may not be evidence of time travel dropped in this movie (and Dickens’s book). Also, they discuss Hugh Dancy’s relationship to t...

If you give thanks for only one thing this holiday, let it be that Suzan and David love you, their listeners, enough not to subject you to this terrible, terrible film.

Whatever you do, do not play a drinking game in which you drink every time our hosts sigh dejectedly this episode. You will be hospitalized. That Flirtation Walk was nominated in the same year as Here Comes the Navy is straight up confounding. Actually, that it was nominated at all is confounding. But David and Suzan wrap up the 1934 nominees and tell you if the right movie was rewarded.

The final Claudette Colbert nominee for 1934, Imitation of Life attempts to deal with issues of racism, passing, and white supremacy in America. The first movie in this project that really had its claws removed by the Hays Code (a full year before it was universally enforced), this is at least a fascinating artifact in the history of Hollywood’s failed attempts to tell stories dealing with racism.

The movie they should have watched this week, The White Parade , is unavailable to watch (outside of the super secret UCLA Film Archives vault that they still haven’t managed to crack), so our hosts chose another movie from 1934 with a spooky Halloween theme! What is it? You’ll have to listen to find out!

Our hosts' first foray into the world of Fred and Ginger, The Gay Divorcee is a bit of a mixed bag, but at least it's an improvement over the last two weeks! The good: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sing and dance a bunch, Alice Brady plays a hilarious one liner machine named Aunt Hortense, and the sets are so beautiful the movie single handedly increased the sales of Venetian blinds (no, really)....

SToT favorites Norma Shearer and Frederic March star in this unfortunately agonizing biopic about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Charles Laughton returns in a brutal role that entirely erases the memory of his jovial and sympathetic-ish Henry VIII in this period drama torture porn. But there is a cute dog.