There's Sometimes a Buggy

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...

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...