There's Sometimes a Buggy

In this episode of our Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we go from the depths of obscurity, the straight-to-video  Eversmile, New Jersey  (1989, directed by Carlos Sorin), to the heights of box office success, with Day-Lewis's first, and only, Hollywood action movie,  The Last of the Mohicans  (1992, directed by Michael Mann).We praise the hilarious slice of madness that is  Eversmile, New...

MGM, 1939: the beginning of an era, as the Freed Unit gets started with the first Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musical,  Babes in Arms  (directed by Busby Berkeley), and the end of an era, with Tod Browning's last film, the supernaturally tinged locked room mystery and bid for B-seriesdom,  Miracles for Sale . Reflecting on the role of the blackface number in  Babes in Arms  prompts us to take a...

In this Book Club edition of the podcast, we finally have a chance to explore the work of Friend of the Pod Henry James. We look at James's short novel  Washington Square  (1880) and long short story "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), and two of their adaptations,  The Heiress  (1949, directed by William Wyler) and  The Innocents  (1961, directed by Jack Clayton). We focus on the arcs of the heroines...

We start off 1939 with a bang with two Paramount movies that gave us a lot to discuss. First, Cafe Society  (directed by Edward H. Griffith), the first of several pairings of Fred MacMurray with early Hitchcock blonde Madeleine Carroll, with an original screenplay by future Columbia Pictures producer Virginia Van Upp, takes the screwball (for the most part) out of class-conscious 30s romantic come...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we're still in the early stages of Daniel Day-Lewis's career, and once again the utterly obscure (Pat O'Connor's quirky comedy  Stars and Bars  (1988)) is paired with a much better-known film (Jim Sheridan's  My Left Foot  (1989), based on the life of disabled writer and painter Christy Brown). We discuss Stars and Bars ' attempt to achieve a tone like Scorses...

For this Universal 1938 episode, we begin by again discussing the relationship between comedy, tragedy, and horror, courtesy of John M. Stahl's  Letter of Introduction , featuring famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his alter ego, Charlie McCarthy. Edgar rises and Adolphe Menjou falls in a kind of Tolstoyan double plot. Then we watch as Universal's new banker overlords do their best to launch ano...

For our Valentine's Day 2022 episode, we examine Leos Carax's unique take on romantic love, from the adolescent autocritique of  Boy Meets Girl  (1984) to the anarchy and ecstasy of  Les amants du Pont-Neuf  (1991) to the abyss-gazing of his mind-boggling musical,  Annette  (2021). We discuss Carax's repeated association of love with abjection; his critique of the artist; and the many links betwee...

For RKO 1938, a Ginger Rogers double feature:  Having Wonderful Time  (directed by Alfred Santell - and George Stevens?), based on the play by Arthur Kober (the ex-Mr. Lillian Hellman), and  Vivacious Lady  (definitely directed by George Stevens), one of the best Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, but not one of the best known. We discuss the consequences of the de-ethnicizing of Kober's play; Steve...

Our second Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view introduces us to the little-known, but very worthy, Nanou  (1986), Conny Templeman's first and seemingly only feature, which we liked enough to discuss it in detail even though Day-Lewis's part is very minor. We draw comparisons between the film and Joanna Hogg's  The Souvenir , and between Day-Lewis's part in it and Ben Stiller's in  Reality Bites...

In this 20th Century-Fox 1938 episode we look at two Tyrone Power-starring historical disaster spectacles,  Suez  (directed by Allan Dwan), about the construction of the Suez Canal and various sorts of post-Napoleonic idealism, and  In Old Chicago  (directed by Henry King), a heavily fictionalized account of how Mrs. O'Leary's cow started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Dave and Elise respectively...

In Part 1 of our Anna Magnani Sampler, we explore a range of the legendary Italian actress's modes and moods: from the neorealism of Rossellini's  Rome, Open City  (1945) to the postmodernism of Renoir's  The Golden Coach  (1952); from a working-class mother's tragi-comic attempt to make her daughter into a neorealist child star in Visconti's  Bellissima  (1951) to an ex-prostitute's tragi-heroic...

Our Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view gets started with the two 1985 films that established his range, giving a naturalistic portrayal of a working-class youth in the one and a caricature of an upper-class aesthete in the other: Stephen Frears'  My Beautiful Laundrette , Hanif Kureishi's Oscar-nominated dark comedy about race, class, and sexuality in Thatcher-era England, and Merchant-Ivory's...

It's 1938 and Warner Bros. is in its prime, and so is Bette Davis, just now moving into the kind of top-quality romantic melodramas in which she'd excel. No longer the studio of James Cagney, Joan Blondell, gangster heroes and Busby Berkeley spectacles, it's now the studio of Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, glossy melodramas and action-adventure heroes; or at least, these stars and genres are co-existin...

For our Xmas 2021 episode, two bittersweet intellectual soap operas about forbidden love and sexual non-conformity in mid-20th century America, Douglas Sirk's  All That Heaven Allows  (1955), starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and Todd Haynes'  Carol  (2015), starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blachett. We talk about the interplay of satire and sincerity in Sirk, romance as a vehicle for self-actuali...

We bid Margaret Sullavan a sad farewell with her two final films, Cry 'Havoc' (1943), a very dark WWII propaganda film with an all-female main cast in which the Battle of Bataan meets  Stage Door , and  No Sad Songs for Me  (1950), a peak-crazy woman's picture in the mode of  The Shining Hour  with a slyly progressive screenplay by Howard Koch. Sullavan manages to make having your man stolen from...

For this week's Studios Year by Year, it's MGM 1938 and two aviation movies starring the King and Queen of Hollywood, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. In Jack Conway's wildly entertaining  Too Hot to Handle , Loy is a daredevil aviator with a sentimental mission and Gable an unscrupulous journalist who doesn't know whether he wants to exploit or worship her. It's all in good fun until the movie decides...

For our penultimate Sullavan episode, two movies widely disparate in tone: John Cromwell's  So Ends Our Night  (1941), the fourth and final Sullavan appearance in an anti-Nazi film (and the second based on an Erich Maria Remarque novel); and  Appointment for Love  (1941), a less bitter  Woman of the Year in which Sullavan revisits her Even  Newer  Woman character from  Next Time We Love  and direc...

For Paramount 1938 we have two semi-comedic, quasi-historical tales of charming rogues,  If I Were King  (directed by Frank Lloyd, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges), starring Ronald Colman as medieval bohemian poet Francois Villon, and  The Buccaneer  (directed by frenemy of the podcast Cecil B. DeMille), starring Fredric March as Louisiana pirate and key figure in the Battle of New Orleans, J...

For our Noirvember episode, we look at four Anthony Mann noirs,  Railroaded!  (1947),  T-Men  (1947),  Raw Deal  (1948), and  Side Street  (1950). We follow Mann as he ascends from Poverty Row to a collaboration with one of film noir's most distinctive cinematographers, John Alton, to the big-time at MGM, with his protagonists only getting more sweaty and desperate and his underworld brutes remain...

This Universal 1937 episode stays paused on the pivotal moment in the studio's history, with another James Whale/Deanna Durbin pairing: Whale's last hurrah, The Road Back , and Durbin's second outing,  One Hundred Men and a Girl . Whale's film, based on a Remarque novel about Germany between the wars (familiar territory for the pod), compromised by Nazi censorship, and mutilated by the studio, may...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Margaret Sullavan takes on the Nazis in Frank Borzage's  The Mortal Storm  (1940) and Fannie Hurst in Robert Stevenson's  Back Street  (1941). We discuss the subtleties and broad strokes of this early Hollywood depiction of Nazi Germany, Borzagean heroism, and performative fascism. Turning to  Back Street , we consider what this Code-era remake of a cl...

Halloween is always a good time to ponder the horror of incarnation, familial feeling, and our alienation from God. While there are strict horror movies that tackle these subjects, Ingmar Bergman definitely puts his own twist on them, and so we bring you Halloween with Bergman. In The Silence (1963), a woman dies in a hotel room in a foreign country where the people speak no known language, abando...

For RKO 1937, Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from effervescent-but-repressed to robot-with-a-heart-of-gold in the last entry in her latest series of box office bombs, the J. M. Barrie dual-identity farce  Quality Street  (directed by George Stevens), and her brief return to critical and commercial viability,  Stage Door  (directed by Gregory La Cava), with Ginger Rogers. Two films th...

In this week's episode of our Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we look at a couple of thirds: Sullavan's third film directed by Frank Borzage - the crazed melodrama The Shining Hour (co-starring Joan Crawford) - and third (and most famous) pairing with Jimmy Stewart: the melancholy romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner (directed by Ernst Lubitsch). We consider The Shining Hour...

In our Fox 1937 episode this time around we cover a couple of oddities that nevertheless provide a good snapshot of the studio's latter 30s.  Charlie Chan at the Olympics , starring Shakespearean-trained Swedish-American Warner Oland in his final year as Honolulu's Chinese Sherlock Holmes, flaunts racially integrated American Olympic teams at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, while failing completely...