Screen Test of Time

Grace Moore stars as a helpless aspiring prima donna who runs away to Italy to study with a famously cruel and abusive vocal coach, while consistently rejecting a genuinely good rich guy who just wants her to live her own life in this deeply misogynistic trash fire.

Last week, Suzan predicted this was going to be 100 minute of Claudette Colbert fan service, and for once, her instincts were spot on. An absolute burlesque of a film that specifically pushed the limits the year before the Hays Code was going to be enforced, Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra is gorgeous to look at, but has an absolute mess of a script. But does that matter when there’s so many beautifu...

The aircraft carrier and the airship featured in this movie both figured into horrible accidents after this film was shot. And that's the most interesting thing about Here Comes the Navy. A confusing romantic comedy(?) that seems to center more on two boys making each other miserable than a guy and a girl falling in love, this Jimmy Cagney vehicle is not just nonsensical and filled with unlikable...

The Thin Man is almost perfect: main characters Nick and Nora Charles, are perhaps the world’s most charming detective couple; they have an adorable dog; the banter is fast and witty; and the multiple side characters are fleshed out and fascinating… and yet there’s one little problem. David realizes that a B+ movie frustrates him more than a solid C, while Suzan comes to the disheartening revelati...

Another in a long line of Hollywood white wash casting, Viva Villa! is an absolutely infuriating, stereotypical portrayal of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa by Wallace Beery ( The Champ, Grand Hotel ). Not going to bury the lede— this movie fails the Screen Test of Time hard, but at least this episode will remind you of a minor Looney Tunes character you probably forgot about…? (Editorial corre...

If you're looking for a master class in how well meaning racism is still racism, look no further than The House of Rothschild , a film that tries to indict anti-semitism while reinforcing anti-semitic stereotypes. Non-Jewish actor George Arliss, who played the eponymous character in Disraeli , nominated for Best Picture in 1929, returns to play not one two members of the family of European bankers...

This week, on a very special episode of the Screen Test of Time: it was really a movie! A very good movie! Frank Capra's It Happened One Night  starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is the Ur-romantic comedy, the movie to which most of the tropes in the genre can trace their lineage. It's not perfect, but it's the highest scored movie David and Suzan have watched so far. The first of a d...

The first of many onscreen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel, the Katherine Hepburn starring Little Women is also the first that our hosts have been exposed to the story, at least for Suzan. David thinks he's seen the Winona Ryder one from the 90s but can't quite remember. This week wraps up the 1932/1933 nominees, so tune in to find out which movie they think should have won i...

Lady for a Day is an almost entirely delightful rags-to-sort-of-riches fairytale with a brilliant ensemble cast of at the time relative unknowns. After a quick discussion of the Academy's upcoming addition of the Best Popular Film category, Suzan and David mostly rave about the first Frank Capra movie to be nominated for Best Picture... mostly. But unfortunately, like too many of these 1930s movie...

You know the clichéd portrayal of Henry VIII as an gluttonous, overgrown man child? Charles Laughton's portrayal of the English king with many wives in The Private Life of Henry VIII is where it all began. But does the movie stand the Screen Test of Time when so many other versions of the story have been told since? 

The winner for 1932/1933, Cavalcade is like a season and a half of television that they've just slammed into a hundred and fifty minutes... or the first three seasons of Downton Abbey , with basically the same plot. The sinking of the Titanic? Check. World War I? Check. The Roaring 20s? Check. Well developed characters that we care about? Uh... Romanticism of the British class system? Ch...

On last week's episode, Suzan was certain that this would be amazing and her choice for the 1932/1933 nominees, and her track record on week before proclamations holds steady. The first and only musical featuring Busby Berkeley's choreography to be nominated for Best Picture,  42nd Street has, no question, the best musical numbers of any movie so far featured on the Screen Test of Time,...

In this week's episode, David posits the conspiracy theory that State Fair , remade half a dozen times in various media, is funded by the shadowy State Fair Lobby... but is his assertion as wild as it seems? Suzan believes the sole reason for this movie being made was because the camera operators figured out how to put a camera on a roller coaster. Janet Gaynor returns to the Screen Test of Time f...

Clocking in at a mere 66 minutes, Mae West's She Done Him Wrong  is the shortest movie ever nominated for Best Picture. Through some kind of manipulation of the space time continuum, however, it manages to have roughly five hours of musical numbers all stuffed in at the end. Cary Grant plays an undercover fed who is posing as a priest, which is maybe the most believable element in this convol...

At the end of last week's episode, David and Suzan were sure that A Farewell to Arms, which stars Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, had to be a good movie. Suzan expected that nothing with these two stars could possibly be bad, and David, for whatever reason, didn't expect it to be so "Hemingway-y." Boy, were they wrong all around. Not that you'd expect a WWI movie to be a bundle of laughs, but th...

The second film nominated for the 1932/1933 awards, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was a ripped from the headlines, based on a true story, adapted from a book smash, and the rare movie that actually made an impact on changing the oppressive system it profiled. Impressive, definitely, but is it any good?

Our hosts start off the 1932/1933 Academy Awards with Smilin' Through . Norma Shearer, short shrifted in The Divorcee as a glamorous doormat, finally gets her due in the role of spitfire Kathleen, and co-stars Frederic March and Leslie Howard match her stellar performance. But does this befuddling blend of gothic horror, WWI movie, Dickensian intergenerational family drama, and light hearted...

At last, we reach the end of the 1931/1932 Oscars with the winner Grand Hotel . Sort of the first Ocean's Eleven , it's chock full of stars: Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery of The Champ fame, Greta Garbo (who delivers her iconic line, "I want to be alone"), and not one but two Barrymores! But does it deserve to be Best Picture? Find out if David and Suzan disagree with the Academy for the first...

Ahhh... there's nothing like the unfettered glee of a true hate watch, and Suzan and David are downright giddy this week. One Hour With You, their third Ernst Lubitsch directed, Maurice Chevalier starring musical turns out to be the most infuriating yet. Full of unlikable jerks cheating on their spouses for no apparent reason, it's a heck of a movie for David to start his new resolution not to swe...

CONTENT WARNING: This week's episode briefly refers to a scene of sexual assault and extensively discusses issues of racism and representation in Hollywood.  Shanghai Express has so much going for it: Marlene Dietrich smolders, the cinematography is gorgeous, the cast is funny, the costumes ravishing, the dialogue smart. So why aren't Suzan and David in raptures and awarding it their first 10...

No, this week's movie is not about the guys who wrote "Love in an Elevator." It is, however, the movie that definitively answers the question, “Can a movie have too much plot?”  Arrowsmith is the sweeping epic that made Suzan finally appreciate that most of them are three hours long, rather than 100 minutes. 

This week, Jackie Cooper is back, baby, and this time in a movie David and Suzan can actually watch! The Champ is kind of Rocky times Dennis the Menace divided by a dysfunctional, alcoholic family drama. Look, your hosts aren’t mathematicians, they’re just two adventurers trying to scale their own screen based Everest. But they like this one despite its sappy sentimentality and bizarre mashups of...

TRIGGER WARNING: This week's episode features extensive discussion about suicide as plot device. Please proceed with caution, and if you or someone you know is at risk for suicide or experiencing suicidal ideation, please contact The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can visit their website at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/  or call them at 1-800-273-8255.  Another nomine...

Our hosts have learned not to judge a movie by its poster this week, but surely they should be able to infer something about it from its title? Not so with Bad Girl , a charming if befuddling picture about... well, a woman who really doesn't live up to the moniker and the man she marries. If you take away nothing else from this week's episode, David and Suzan hope you learn that communication is t...

Suzan and David are finally free of the 1930/1931 nominees! …But not free of Ernst Lubitsch and Maurice Chevalier’s misogynistic musicals. The Smiling Lieutenant is the movie that asks “What did people like about The Love Parade ?” and gets the answer wrong every time. At least there’s a funny song about underwear.