There's Sometimes a Buggy

On this Acteurist Oeuvre-view Setsuko Hara episode: a tight, noirish family melodrama by Ozu,  Tokyo Twilight  (1957),   paired with a loose, sprawling family melodrama by Naruse,  Daughters, Wives and a Mother  (1960). The first gives us the bitterest Hara we've seen since  The Idiot , while the second challenges her persona in subtler ways. Vacuum cleaners have never been sexier, nor peeing dogs...

A new year, 1934, and our first studio, Paramount, shows its ability with satire and sympathy for the underdog. It's the Year of the Code, but that doesn't seem to have much applicability to our two films, Cecil B. DeMille's feminist jungle adventure comedy  Four Frightened People  and Mitchell Leisen's occasionally noirish revenge drama,  Behold My Wife!  Warning : If you don't want to hear a cou...

In this Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view, two films by Mikio Naruse, The Sound of the Mountain (1954) and Sudden Rain (1956). We discuss the ways that the casting of Setsuko Hara in the first film seems to respond to Ozu's "Noriko trilogy" (especially Tokyo Story, although it was released only two months later), and the overt feminism of the subtle, comic, and ambiguous Sudden Rain. Hara, as usu...

Universal, 1933: Two little-known James Whale Pre-Codes that adopt divergent attitudes toward adulterous wives. First, treated as farce, in By Candlelight: Paul Lukas plays a butler who gets himself in trouble by masquerading as his playboy boss in order to have more refined erotic adventures. Then, treated as tragedy, in The Kiss Before the Mirror: Frank Morgan and Nancy Carroll get themselves in...

This week we've got a big one for you: the five films that Frank Capra and Barbara Stanwyck made together. Starting with LADIES OF LEISURE (1930), we interpret the Stanwyck character as the Capra stand-in, which leads to some interesting results. MEET JOHN DOE (1941) becomes LADIES OF LEISURE inverted (Stanwyck as artist, Cooper as model—but Stanwyck as stand-in either way); while MIRACLE WOMAN (1...

RKO 1933: We look at a movie starring one of the hottest female stars of the day, Constance Bennett, George Cukor's Our Betters, and a movie starring an up-and-coming (and down, and up, and down again) RKO star, Katharine Hepburn, Lowell Sherman's Morning Glory. Elise deems both Hepburn's frantically vulnerable performance and Cukor's unsentimental sex comedy "punk rock." We decide that Our Better...

A strange back-to-school episode for a strange back-to-school year: we look at Amy Heckerling's LOSER (2000) and Whit Stillman's DAMSELS IN DISTRESS (2011), two comedies with very different, but equally dark, visions of class and university life in America, neither of which fared well with audiences or critics at the time. Dave defends the former as a blending of Capra and Wilder romantic comedy m...

This episode of our Acteurist Oeuvre-view of Setsuko Hara (with English subs) features our first Naruse, REPAST (1951), and the movie generally considered "Ozu's masterpiece" (as if there were only one), TOKYO STORY (1953). We debate whether REPAST is housewife propaganda or the STARSHIP TROOPERS of domestic reunion dramas, and ask whether a cat can be like a husband, or a husband like a cat. Then...

Fox, 1933: we watch a couple of movies that complicate Ethan Mordden's characterization of Fox as "The Rube," Henry King's  State Fair  and William (billed as Wilhelm) Dieterle's  The Devil's in Love  (both beautifully shot by Hal Mohr). The first is a sophisticated movie about simple people that doesn't make fun of them or take unsophistication as its ideal, while the second is Fox's attempt at a...

Our August Special Subject is one of Dave's favourite film books, Elizabeth Kendall's The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s . We discuss Kendall's vision of romantic comedy from this era (it's powered by an auteur/acteur synergy between erstwhile "gag man" directors and a new type of female star) and consider how each of the films she discusses fits her thesis (or fails to). We...

Prepare for Pre-Code shenanigans galore! In our Warner Bros. 1933 Studios Year-By-Year episode, the socialist studio shows us capitalism at its nastiest and sexiest. In Baby Face and Employees' Entrance, Barbara Stanwyck and Warren William, respectively, "crush" and "smash" in the name of surviving and triumphing in the capitalist system, and make it a lot of fun to watch—that is, when William isn...

This time on our oeuvre-view of Setsuko Hara's (English-subtitled) career, Kurosawa's The Idiot/Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky, is paired with Ozu's Early Summer for maximum tonal dissonance. Our heroine proves her range again—even with her Noriko roles. Join us for a discussion of sexual psychosis and tragic caritas in The Idiot and the perverse obsession with normalizing Noriko in Early Summer. Ti...

MGM, 1933. Two very different movies: Penthouse, a crime drama and romantic comedy directed by W. S. "One-Take Woody" Van Dyke, and King Vidor's hard-to-find The Stranger's Return, an agrarian family melodrama reputed to have been Ozu's favourite movie. Myrna Loy, as an unflappable and lovable party girl, with her Thin Man director and producer for the first time, and an uncharacteristically relax...

Summer comes even to a virus-ravaged northern hemisphere, and we're here to celebrate with two teen movies that have a surprising amount in common: Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) and Delmer Daves' A Summer Place (1959). The former turns out to be much less about sex than its reputation would have you believe, while the latter is much more about sex than you'd imagine for a movie starri...

Paramount, 1933 (or so): a Charles Laughton and Karl Struss double feature. We start with Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, pitting piety against perversion. Fredric March in a mini skirt, Claudette Colbert in a milk bath, Laughton as a ditzy Nero, and a bunch of Christians bedecked with arrows. But are the Christians really Communists, or are they Mormons? Next, Island of Lost Souls, base...

We get to the first Ozu in our Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view at last, but first we look at Tadashi Ima's two-parter, Blue Mountain Range/Aoi sanmyaku (1949), a surprisingly fun movie that leads us to discuss Allied Occupation liberal propaganda, dating as a recent invention, why all men will want to have sex with Katharine Hepburn or Setsuko Hara in the future, and how a geisha is like John W...

In this week's edition of The Studios Year-by-Year, it's Universal 1932, and we have two horror movies with wildly divergent styles. First, it's Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue, perhaps the sickest and most sadistic of the 30s Universal horror classics (surpassing even The Black Cat) and a probable influence on RKO's King Kong. Then it's John Stahl's Back Street (also shot by Karl Freund...

For June's Special Subject, we look at three films by Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak about the aftermath of the Partition of India: Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), Komal Gandhar/E-flat (1961), and Subarnarekha/Golden Lining (1962). Refugee life, classism, intersectional analysis, melodrama, the confusion of familial and romantic relationships, and the possibility of hope within a d...

RKO, 1932: Selznick has come in as production chief and fired everyone but Pandro S. Berman. We look at the result of this new regime in the form of two La Cava-helmed pictures. First, the white elephant, Symphony of Six Million, based on a short story by Fannie Hurst, shows us how RKO does the Lower East Side. Then, the termite, The Age of Consent, examines the sexual mores of American college li...

In our final episode of "unknown" Setsuko Haras before we get into the Ozus and Naruses, we cover another tonally dissonant double feature, Kôzaburô Yoshimura's TEMPTATION/YUWAKU (1948) and Keisuke Kinoshita's HERE'S TO THE YOUNG LADY/OJOSAN KANPAI (1949). We discuss the way these films—a love triangle melodrama and a strange screwball melodrama seemingly inspired by Hepburn and Tracy movies—seem...

In this Fox 1932 episode of Studios Year by Year, Fox Film Corporation finds its voice despite behind-the-scenes upheaval, and we offer the name "humanism" for that voice. Termite art classic For Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh), a loose and leisurely proto-screwball comedy, stars Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett as a pair of fresh-mouthed but tender-hearted working-class lovers. In Frank Borzage's After...

We devote some meta-theorizing to Setsuko Hara's screen persona and its reception and look at two of her lesser-known films that are available with English subtitles, Kōzaburō Yoshimura's A Ball at the Anjo House (1947), and the very uncharacteristic A Woman in the Typhoon Area (1948, directed by Hideo Ôba), in which she plays a vampy tramp who is nevertheless as caring as her more familiar charac...

This week we talk French Melville—no, not Jean-Pierre, but two temperamentally polar 1999 films by French auteurs based on works by Herman: Claire Denis's Beau Travail and Leos Carax's Pola X, based respectively on Billy Budd, Sailor and Pierre, or the Ambiguities. We ask such questions as: Why fascist aesthetics? Why opera-scored Tai Chi? Why incest? Why unsimulated sex? These are just the kinds...

In this week's Studios Year by Year episode, another studio finds its voice in 1932: Warner Bros. gives us the consciousness-raising prison drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn LeRoy) as well as the weird little maternity ward movie Life Begins (dir. James Flood). They share a harrowing vision of life and Glenda Farrell in uncharacteristically unsympathetic roles. We discuss I Am a...

In the inaugural episode of our Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, the vagaries of foreign film availability lead to an historically illuminating double feature. First up, the fascist propaganda film that made the teenage Setsuko a star, a Japanese-German co-production, melodrama/mountain film/semi-documentary extravaganza, The Daughter of the Samurai (1937), directed by Arnold Fanck and M...