There's Sometimes a Buggy

This week's 1933 Fox Film Studios Year by Year episode paradoxically digs into the Hollywood beginnings of a couple of Paramount powerhouses via William Dieterle's Adorable , a musical based on a German operetta co-written by Billy Wilder (who'd be writing for Fox directly by 1934), and William K. Howard's  The Power and the Glory , with an innovative screenplay by Hollywood newcomer Preston Sturg...

Our Acteur Spotlight kicks off with six movies starring Delphine Seyrig, beginning this episode with Alain Resnais' Muriel  (1963) and Marguerite Duras' debut as a feature film director,  La Musica  (1967) (co-directed with Paul Seban). We find that these two films about former couples discussing, debating, and negotiating how to live with their past make a good pairing for their existential contr...

This week's Warner Brothers 1933 Studios Year by Year episode brings the studio-as-auteur question back into focus with two highly distinctive Pre-Code musicals with a similarity of style and social outlook that can't be attributed to the directors, screenwriters, source material, or the presence of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic choreographer and stager of musical numbers, Busby Berkeley. We argu...

Our S&xMas episode looks at two provocative, controversial, and not very sex-positive works made by aging auteurs after a long hiatus, Stanley Kubrick's  Eyes Wide Shut  (1999) and Paul Verhoeven's  Elle  (2016). Join us as we trace Tom Cruise's all-American odyssey of sexual paranoia and Isabelle Huppert's very European journey away from sex with men, asking such important questions as "Is Paul V...

It's our final Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, with which we also say goodbye to our comprehensive approach toward attaining a privileged vantage point on an actor's entire oeuvre. Of course, we cheated a little on this one and stopped short of Gloria's exploitation film era. Our oeuvre-view ends with two Westerns, Ride Out for Revenge  (1957) and  Ride Beyond Vengeance  (1966), enti...

For this 1933 MGM episode we focus on rehabilitating John Gilbert's sound-era reputation with a double feature of underrated gem  Fast Workers , a construction worker love triangle melodrama directed by Tod Browning, and Gilbert's most famous sound movie, Rouben Mamoulian and Greta Garbo's very serious (but also very sensual) costume drama  Queen Christina , about a woman whose ideals clash with h...

In this week's episode of our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we explore the unique casting of unmusical Gloria in Fred Zinnemann's film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!  (1955) and follow the thread that leads (through Jud Fry) from the supposedly "wholesome" musical to Charlie Kaufman's dark, experimental  I'm Thinking of Ending Things . Then we switch over to British espiona...

This Paramount 1933 Studios Year by Year episode features two of the studio's defining stars of the era: the Marx Brothers, in their final, most famous, and (maybe) most nihilistic Paramount film,  Duck Soup , directed by Leo McCarey, and Gary Cooper, miscast (or maybe not) in  One Sunday Afternoon  in the role that would go to James Cagney in the Warner Bros. remake,  The Strawberry Blonde . We z...

For our November 2025 Special Subject we watched the Antoine Doinel films of François Truffaut:  The 400 Blows  (1959),  Antoine et Colette  (1962),  Stolen Kisses  (1968),  Bed and Board  (1970), and  Love on the Run  (1979). In addition to the charms of star/auteur avatar Jean-Pierre Léaud, we focus on the films' evolving style and increasing interest in the women in Doinel's life. And in our Fe...

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view continues with two    1955 liberal institutional melodramas: Stanley Kramer's  Not as a Stranger , starring Robert Mitchum as a monomaniacally idealistic doctor, Olivia de Havilland as the wife he takes for granted, and Gloria as the Other Woman; and Vincente Minnelli's underrated  The Cobweb , starring Richard Widmark as a monomaniacally idealistic psychia...

We've got a Halloween Hangover on this week's episode, with two Universal 1932 horror movies, James Whale's The Old Dark House  (based on a novel by J. B. Priestley) and Karl Freund's  The Mummy , starring Karloff. We explore the curious tone, social themes, and stellar cast (including Charles Laughton, Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore, Melvyn Douglas, and the excellent Lilian Bond) of Whale's Gothic od...

Our 2025 Halloween episode is a double feature in the "mentally disintegrating men" genre: in Ingmar Bergman's  Hour of the Wolf , Max von Sydow is beset by some unusual vampires, and in Robert Bierman's  Vampire's Kiss , Nicolas Cage becomes an even more unusual one. If people attempting to bite each other to death without proper vampire fangs is your idea of horror, this is the right Halloween f...

In this week's Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode our heroine reunites with Fritz Lang and Glenn Ford in Human Desire  (1954), based on the Zola novel  La bête humaine , which was more faithfully filmed by Renoir in 1938. We debate the relative merits of the two adaptations as well as the potential weakness that links them. Then we turn to the quirky little noir  Naked Alibi  (also 1954,...

In this RKO 1932 Studios Year by Year episode we discuss a couple of trademark Selznick productions:  What Price Hollywood? , the first iteration of the  A Star Is Born  story, starring Constance Bennett as the rising star Mary Evans, "America's pal," and Lowell Sherman as her tormented director mentor; and  The Animal Kingdom , based on the Philip Barry play, with Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, and...

This week's Gloria Grahame episode sees our acteur making some questionable career decisions: a rare headlining role in Columbia's Orientalist stinker Prisoners of the Casbah  (1953), displaying a phenomenal lack of chemistry with Turhan Bey; and a micro-role in intriguing British heist noir  The Good Die Young  (1954) as a pragmatic actress tormenting husband John Ireland with her indifference. W...

For this 1932 Fox Studios Year by Year episode we watched Frank Borzage's unloved Young America , an idiosyncratic, primitive melodrama starring Spencer Tracy as a wealthy drugstore owner at odds with a disadvantaged delinquent, and  Passport to Hell,  Fox's surprisingly good take on the Sternberg-Dietrich formula, starring Elissa Landi as a woman of ill repute at odds with the colonial authoritie...

In this week's episode of the Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, our heroine battles an organized crime ring in Fritz Lang's classic noir The Big Heat and the Soviets, or in any case her beleaguered circus capitalist husband, Fredric March, in Elia Kazan's  Man on a Tightrope  (both 1953). Dave and Elise are somewhat at odds about the effectiveness of  Tightrope 's anti-censorship messag...

Our Special Subject for September 2025 led us to watch a couple of wartime British films starring Laurence Olivier and his amazing accents: Québécois in Powell and Pressburger's  The 49th Parallel  (1941), which opposes a Platonic Idea of Canada to Nazi ideology, and Russian in Anthony Asquith's  The Demi-Paradise  (1943), an alarmingly Soviet-friendly use of the romantic comedy genre to promote c...

This Warner Bros. 1932 episode is a double feature of Glasmon-Bright scripts directed by Pre-Code wizards: Mervyn LeRoy's  Three on a Match , a tight little melodrama about the cryptic and arbitrary nature of self-destruction with Ann Dvorak as a wealthy housewife beset by ennui; and Roy Del Ruth's  Taxi! , in which Loretta Young has to stand up to James Cagney's hot-headed cab driver, although ne...

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvreview recovers from last week's rough spot with two excellent roles in two excellent films that display her range as a character actress. In Vicente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), for which Gloria won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, she's a sweet but silly Southern belle curiously sacrificed by Kirk Douglas' relentlessly driven movie producer;...

This 1932 MGM Studios Year by Year episode is a Robert Montgomery double feature, although the spotlight is on his leading ladies: an incandescent Marion Davies in Blondie of the Follies  (directed by Edmund Goulding), and a distraught Tallulah Bankhead in  Faithless  (directed by Harry Beaumont). We discuss the strengths and incoherencies of Anita Loos' and Frances Marion's screenplay for  Blondi...

Our August Special Subject is Literature vs. Welles vs. Moreau: we discuss the three finished films that Orson Welles made with Jeanne Moreau, whom he considered "the greatest actress in the world." The Trial  (1962) stars Anthony Perkins in an adaptation of the Kafka novel;  Chimes at Midnight  (1965) stars Welles as Falstaff in an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henriad focused on the Prince Hal/Fal...

In this episode of our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, our protagonist is rudely shoved into the background of the movies, barely appearing in Josef von Sternberg's  Macao  (1950) (she would have liked to have appeared in it even less) and playing a rote schemer in David Miller's  Sudden Fear  (1952). The movies themselves don't make up for her under-use, despite the amiable pairing...

For this round of Paramount 1932, we watched our first Marx Brothers movie for the podcast (hard as that is to believe), Horse Feathers  (directed by Norman Z. MacLeod), alongside Ernst Lubitsch's only sound-era drama,  Broken Lullaby . Lubitsch's batshit WWI melodrama, bursting with intensity and unease, claims our attention first, and then we turn to the detached anarchy of the Marx Brothers. El...

This week in our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view we watched one of her best-known films, In a Lonely Place  (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring Humphrey Bogart, alongside the unpromising Cecil B. DeMille circus drama  The Greatest Show on Earth  (1952). This may be the only time you find these two movies discussed together with roughly equal enthusiasm. Ray's portrait of a romanc...