There's Sometimes a Buggy

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...

Paramount, 1935: we have two very unusual and very different movies, which nevertheless share the theme of private worlds and the possibility of communication between them. First up is Gregory La Cava's  Private Worlds , about the inner lives of psychiatrists and the permeable boundary between sanity and insanity. It stars Claudette Colbert as Dr. Jane Everest and Charles Boyer as her chauvinistic...

It's our epic episode on the three  Imitations of Life ! Hear us discuss Fannie Hurst's massively popular 1933 novel and its two popular film adaptations: John M. Stahl's restrained 1934 version, the first Hollywood movie to look seriously, if cautiously, at the impact of white supremacy and racial inequality in America, and Douglas Sirk's strategically lurid, early civil rights-era version, from...

A stunning episode of The Studios, Year by Year: a great year for Universal, 1934, gives us  The Black Cat , the one big studio success of Edgar G. Ulmer, icon of marginal filmmaking; and James Whale's under-discussed  One More River , based on the novel by John Galsworthy. Elise concocts a reading to justify her early, confused understanding of  The Black Cat  as being about WWII rather than WWI....

Our second Clara Bow episode pairs a couple of sharply contrasting films: a child star comedy,  Helen's Babies  (1924), directed by William A. Seiter, and a didactic melodrama,  Capital Punishment  (1925), directed by James P. Hogan, with a story by producer B. P. Schulberg. Bow has supporting roles in both; but has occasion to display her lack of inhibition as a comedian in both and her emotive s...

For 2020, we're dreaming of a Noir Christmas! First up, a quick and dirty discussion of the 1988 remake of  D.O.A. , directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel of Max Headroom fame and starring Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. It's sort of like  American Psycho  with English professors. A comparison we didn't make in the episode, but wish we had. Next: the art noir no one talks about, Robert Montgomery...

For RKO 1934, we take an appreciative look at two unloved Katharine Hepburn movies (now, although the public liked them well enough at the time): John Cromwell's  Spitfire  and Richard Wallace's  The Little Minister , based on a novel by J. M. Barrie of  Peter Pan  fame. Dave suggests an alternate trajectory for Hepburn's 30s box office decline. Elise rambles on about Barrie's tragic and sinister...

In the inaugural episode of our Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we discuss the general outline of Bow's life and career, consider her two first major film roles, and venture a few working hypotheses. She's easily the best thing in  Down to the Sea in Ships  (1922), the film that introduced her to the public, as a playful tomboy. Directed by D. W. Griffith alumnus Elmer Clifton, it starts t...

This episode's Studios Year by Year: Fox, 1934. A Kern and Hammerstein musical with only one song and a Will Rogers comedy with many: Joe May's  Music in the Air  sees the beginning of Bill ie  Wilder's Hollywood career and the end, for a while, of Gloria Swanson's (they will come together again). For Judge Priest, Dave goes long on Civil War history and Confederate imagery. We're not sure whether...

In a curious finale to our Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we briefly examine a couple of epics by Hiroshi Inagaki surrounding Hara cameos:  The Three Treasures , a.k.a.  The Birth of Japan  (1959), based on the Yamato Takeru legend, in which Hara plays a Shinto goddess, and  Chūshingura: Hana no Maki, Yuki no Maki  (1962), based on the frequently dramatized historical incident of the forty-se...

A proleptic episode in which we anticipate our future Acteurist Oeuvre-view of the career of (retired) Greatest Living Actor, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis. The foretaste comes in the form of two films in which Day-Lewis plays men willing to do anything to preserve a vision that ultimately comes down to taste, and inspires homicidal impulses in the women who love him:  Phantom Thread  (2017), written and d...

For our Warner Bros. 1934 episode, two tragicomic movies in which Aline MacMahon plays a lovable small business owner with man problems:  Side Streets , directed by Alfred E. Green, and  Heat Lightning , directed by Mervyn LeRoy. The latter in particular, we conclude, could only have been made by Warner Bros., and gives us the best and the worst of that studio on gender.  Bonus: it's also an Ann D...

Our penultimate Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode sees us examining Ozu's antepenultimate and penultimate films,  Late Autumn  (1960) and  The End of Summer  (1961), in both of which she plays a character named Akiko. We then launch into an extended consideration of the meaning of her Noriko/Akiko character in Ozu's films, including a discussion of the effect of Hara's absence on Ozu's fi...

We went long for our Hallowe'en Special Subject for 2020: Ominous Omnibi, featuring two eerie anthology films of the 1940s, Universal's star-studded  Flesh and Fantasy , directed by Julien Duvivier during his WWII Hollywood sojourn, and Ealing Studios'  Dead of Night , best   remembered for its crowning tale,  The Ventriloquist's Dummy , starring Michael Redgrave as a man in an agitated relationsh...

MGM, 1934, and our most mismatched pair of films yet: Sidney Franklin's tale of overheated Victorian repression,  The Barretts of Wimpole   Street , and Lubitsch's lavish, Hollywood-transposed Austro-Hungarian operetta,  The Merry Widow . We discuss Laughton vs. Gielgud, Lubitsch vs. Mamoulian, innuendo in the Year of the Code, and more.   Time Codes: 0h 01m 00s: The Barretts of Wimpole Street (di...