There's Sometimes a Buggy

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we follow Margaret Sullavan to MGM, watching two films from 1938,  Three Comrades  and  The Shopworn Angel . Borzage's film, based on Erich Maria Remarque's Lost Generation novel about Germany between World Wars, could not be more different in tone from H. C. Potter's love triangle melodrama, but both centre on a love that transcends the conventional,...

For this pass at Warner Bros. 1937, we have two more vehicles for Dave's favourite actress, Kay Francis:  Confession , Joe May's scene-for-scene remake of the German melodrama  Mazurka ; and Michael Curtiz's Stolen Holiday , a version of the Stavisky affair with Francis, Claude Rains, and Ian Hunter making up the Curtiz Triangle and Orry-Kelly, as usual, fearlessly emphasizing the outré bodies of...

Our Summer in France series concludes with a look at the dynamic duo of poetic realism, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. We discuss their first collaboration,  Jenny  (1936), and two noirish Oedipal fever dreams,  Le quai des brumes  (1938) and  Le jour se lève  (1939). We also look at a Carné film from the period in which Prévert was not involved,  Hôtel du Nord  (1938), an...

In this MGM 1937 episode, we look at two star-studded historical romances about charismatic political leaders and their mistresses:  Conquest  (directed by Clarence Brown), with Charles Boyer's Napoleon Bonaparte and Greta Garbo's Marie Walewska, and  Parnell  (directed by John Stahl), with Clark Gable's Charles Stewart Parnell and Myrna Loy's Katharine O'Shea. Despite the poor-to-terrible reputat...

Our third Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode features another odd juxtaposition:  Next Time We Love  (1936), a melodrama of ideas that pairs Sullavan with Jimmy Stewart for the first time; and  The Moon's Our Home , a (flat) screwball comedy in which she co-stars with ex-husband Henry Fonda (1936). We do some deep reflecting on love, gender roles, and human potential, and try to get a...

For our Paramount 1937 episode, we look at two movies starring Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray: Mitchell Leisen's comedy/melodrama  Swing High, Swing Low  and Wesley Ruggles' screwball comedy  True Confession . Topics include our surprise at Leisen's go-for-broke portrayal of male abjection and MacMurray's risk-taking in  Swing High, Swing Low ; the quiet virtues of Paramount's leading men; the...

Our second Margaret Sullavan Acteurist Oeuvre-view entry delivers emotional whiplash as we move from King Vidor's Civil War drama  So Red the Rose  (1935), in which Sullavan plays a southern belle who's forced to mature when the world she knows collapses around her ears, to William Wyler's comedy  The Good Fairy  (1935), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, in which she plays a naive orphan who c...

In this episode we cover three films from the period of Jean Renoir's flirtation (or fornication?) with Communism:  The Crime of Monsieur Lange  (1936),  The Lower Depths  (1936), and  La Marseillaise  (1938). We discuss how Renoir's depiction of the French Revolution differs from the one familiar to the Anglo-American world, uncover the woman behind the Radical Renoir, and analyze the interaction...

In this Studios Year by Year episode, we witness the changing of the guard at Universal in 1936, in which James Whale's  Show Boat  brings down the Laemmle Era, and Deanna Durbin's first feature, Three Smart Girls , ushers in the Bankers Era. We find good things to say about both, but we're not gonna lie, most of the episode is devoted to Edna Ferber/Kern and Hammerstein/Whale's  Show Boat  and it...

This week on the pod, we get started with our new Acteurist Oeuvre-View series: Margaret Sullavan. We were expecting solid entries from the selective Sullavan, but weren't fully prepared for John Stahl to match his  Back Street  achievement with Sullavan's screen debut,  Only Yesterday  (1933). We discuss its relationship to Opühls'  Letter from an Unknown Woman , with which it shares a source, wh...

RKO, 1936: Anne Shirley and Katharine Hepburn have father trouble. In  Make Way for a Lady  (directed by David Burton), Shirley gets hysterical at the thought of indulgent 20th century dad Herbert Marshall developing a sex life; while in  A Woman Rebels  (directed by Mark Sandrich),   Hepburn blames stern Victorian dad Donald Crisp for her sexual aberrance. We discuss the careers of the source nov...

Dave's first Summer in France Special Subject is devoted to two lesser-known Max Ophüls movies starring Edwige Feuillère that were made just before the Nazis occupied France and Ophüls fled to Hollywood,  Sans lendemain  (1939) and  De Mayerling à   Sarajevo  (1940).   We consider the two films in light of those dire circumstances and Ophüls' oeuvre, arguing that they deserve more attention--espec...

Clara Bow gets a wonderful finale to her (unfortunately foreshortened) career in our final Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode devoted to her. Fox comes through with two excellent vehicles:  Call Her Savage  (1932), directed by John Francis Dillon and brilliantly shot by Lee Garmes, a delightfully lurid Pre-Code that nevertheless contains a critique of white supremacy; and  Hoop-La  (1933), a sweet-natu...

Our studio this week is 20th Century Fox, the year is 1936; two fascinating movies of dubious historicity (in the details, at least) by the ever-reliable Henry King, possibly Fox's most characteristic director. First up, Ramona , a sympathetic depiction of North American settler colonialism from the perspective of Native Americans (unfortunately, as ever, with white actors--Loretta Young and Don A...

Two more Tuttles for our penultimate Clara Bow episode, a couple of odd genre experiments: "musical romance"  Love Among the Millionaires  (1930) combines a star-crossed-lovers melodrama with comedy bits featuring vaudeville and future Broadway child star Mitzi Green and a lot of random songs; while  No Limit (1931) offers gambling dens, stickup men, pratfalls, redemptive romance, New York locatio...

For Warner Bros., 1936, we take a look at two stage-to-film adaptations:  Three Men on a Horse , a Warners-style farce about gangsters, discontented suburbanites, and the power of greeting card poetry, and The Petrified Forest , a drama by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert E. Sherwood about gangsters, disillusioned novelists, and the allure of French poetry. We discuss the studio's handling of suburban...

In this Special Subject episode, we try to get a handle on Andrei Tarkovsky by looking at a couple of our favourites, in which Tarkovsky tries to get a handle on his mother (and faith, and memory, and guilt, and nostalgia, and the nature of womanhood, and the possibility of human connection):  Mirror  (1975) and  Nostalghia  (1983). We talk Tarkovskyan dream and "reality"; the interweaving of auto...

In this week of our (slightly-out-of-order) Oeuvre-view of Clara Bow's career,  The Saturday Night Kid  (1929), directed by A. Edward Sutherland, is paired with  True to the Navy  (1930), directed by Frank Tuttle. We see two starkly contrasting Claras separated by just seven months: in Sutherland's working-class drama, she's heroic but bad-tempered, burdened with a flighty love interest, a manager...

MGM, 1936: the studio of stars, glamour, and conservatism. Or so goes our thesis, which we attempt to complicate by taking a close look at two movies that make romantic rivals of Jean Harlow and Myrna Loy: Clarence Brown's melodrama  Wife vs. Secretary  and Jack Conway's atypical screwball comedy  Libeled Lady . Indubitably the protagonist of the former and top-billed in the latter's star-fest, Ha...

In this week's Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we're finally there: Clara's first two sound films, both from 1929. First, we engage in an extensive analysis of Dorothy Arzner's  The Wild Party , Clara's talkie debut. The star plays a college girl rebelling against the Victorian strictures on campus sexuality, but yearning for the loftier aims of her studious roommate and the handsome new...

We look at four noirish British films distributed in the United States by Eagle-Lion:  Waterloo Road  (1945, directed by Sidney Gilliat),  I See a Dark Stranger  (1946, directed by Frank Launder),  The October Man  (1947, directed by Roy Ward Baker), and  The Blue Lamp  (1950, directed by Basil Dearden). We explore the mental and physical landscape of wartime and postwar England and such subjects...

In this week's Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, two of Clara's best directors, Victor Fleming and Dorothy Arzner, present us with two very different versions of Clara that are both nevertheless logical developments of her persona. In Fleming's  Hula  (1927), Clara is a wild child of nature and a real loose cannon, pitted against "civilized" ladies who are far more destructive, with another...

In this Studios Year by Year episode, 1936 begins with Paramount, and we take a look at two movies about gun-running that star Gary Cooper, but have little else in common (despite using the same cinematographer). We don't find much to love about Cecil B. DeMille's tribute to Wild West mythology,  The Plainsman , starring Gary Cooper as an insufficiently hirsute Wild Bill Hickock and Jean Arthur as...

In this episode of our Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view, two films from 1927, the curious love triangle (quadrangle if you're generous) melodrama Children of Divorce , directed by Frank Lloyd (but maybe really Josef von Sternberg), and William A. Wellman's Andy-Hardy-Goes-to-War aerial spectacle,  Wings . Elise says "Jamesian"! Dave says "Verhoevian"! (Shouldn't it be "Verhoevenian"?!) We contempla...

A four-film Special Subject episode, Joan Harrison, Producer, Part 1 looks at: Phantom Lady  (1944),  The   Strange Affair of Uncle Harry  (1945),  Nocturne  (1946), and  They Won't Believe Me  (1947). These idiosyncratic noirs and Jamesian melodramas by the former Hitchcock screenwriter and honorary family member interrogate gender roles, flip gendered tropes, and deconstruct male resentment of w...