There's Sometimes a Buggy

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...

Our Universal 1935 Studios Year by Year episode examines two movies about the shenanigans of the idle rich, but that's where the resemblance ends. James Whale's  Remember Last Night?  (1935) is a  Thin Man  parody heavy on the class satire and absurdism, while Lowell Sherman's swan song,  Night Life of the Gods , is about a wealthy scientist who discovers how to turn his straitlaced family into st...

Our first Clara Bow movie of this episode,  Kid Boots  (1926) allows Bow to show off her slapstick skills again in a surprisingly compatible pairing with Eddie Cantor. Then we turn to the second masterpiece of the series so far, the famous-but-somehow-still-underrated  It  (1927), directed by Clarence G. Badger. We marvel at the full flowering of the Bow persona, including its feminist modernity,...

RKO 1935: we look at a couple of starring vehicles for two of the Queens of the Lot. First up is Anne Shirley in the deliberately slight and quietly charming  Chasing Yesterday , paired with another father figure, O. P. Heggie (also her kindred spirit in the previous year's  Anne of Green Gables , from which she took her screen name and which was also directed by George Nicholls Jr.). Then, the no...

In Part 1 of our look at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' cinematic pairings (part 2 is penciled in for January 2023), we discuss Mark Sandrich's  The Gay Divorcee  and  Top Hat , William A. Seiter's  Roberta , and George Stevens'  Swing Time . What formula does Sandrich set up for the stars, and how do the other films acknowledge and/or depart from it? What does RKO contribute to the 30s musical?...

For our Fox 1935 episode of The Studios Year by Year, we look at two films about forming idyllic communities within a nightmare society: Henry King's  One More Spring , Fox's version of a Depression movie (based on a novel by Portrait of Jennie author Robert Nathan); and John Ford's  Steamboat Round the Bend , another Will Rogers satire of Southern mores. Plus Dave reports on the reaction in South...

This week's Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode sees our star's debut at Paramount, in a supporting role in  Dancing Mothers , followed by a starring role in what is sometimes considered her best silent film, Victor Fleming's  Mantrap  (both 1926). Bow plays two versions of an amoral child-woman, one irritating and one dazzling. We contemplate the Flemingesque woman (so much better than the Ha...

**Originally released February 26, 2021**   A Warners, 1935 Borzage/Kay Francis/George Brent double feature:  Stranded , in which Francis plays a sort of socialite social worker who's romanced by Brent's conservative he-man construction boss; and  Living on Velvet , in which Francis is determined to overcome Brent's insouciant death-wish. As usual, Borzage delivers romance with a difference. We di...

This week, we get closer to Clara Bow's Mature Period with her first big hit, the college movie  The Plastic Age  (1925). But first, another 1925 pairing with the stalwart Donald Keith.  My Lady of Whims . The two films show the flexibility of the flapper archetype, with Clara as a socialite-turned-bohemian in the first and as a hard-partying college girl in the second. Frustratingly, Keith is our...

Our Valentine's 2021 episode has something for everyone, couples and singles. Something to make everyone feel deeply unsettled, that is. The subject of these two John Cassavetes movies,  Minnie and Moskowitz  (1971) and  Love Streams  (1984), is the difficulty of making any kind of meaningful human connection. Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' wife and frequent collaborator, plays a woman who's having tr...

MGM, 1935, and two David O. Selznick Dickens adaptations: George Cukor's  David Copperfield  and Jack Conway's  A Tale of Two Cities . Hollywood invents a cinematic language for Dickens, using a mixture of American and British actors, and miraculously pulls it off, in what Dave considers Selznick's finest hour as a producer. (We know he means with the exception of  Portrait of Jennie .) We discuss...

In this Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, two crime films from 1925:  The Primrose Path , directed by Harry O. Hoyt and produced by Hunt Stromberg for Arrow Film Corporation (which folded the following year); and  Free to Love , another Schulberg production, directed by Frank O'Connor.  The Primrose Path , a bizarre mishmash of Griffith and gangsters, gives us Clara as a showgirl with a hea...