There's Sometimes a Buggy

For our Universal 1931 Studios Year by Year episode we took in a Sidney Fox double feature, Bad Sister  (adapted from a Booth Tarkington novel, with an early role for Bette Davis as the good sister) and  Strictly Dishonorable  (adapted from Preston Sturges' only successful play and directed by John Stahl). Laemmle Jr.'s protegée uses her ingenue quality to good effect whether she's playing an unsy...

Our final Oscar Levant Special Subject episode covers his contribution to two of the greatest MGM musicals, Vincente Minnelli's  An American in Paris  (1951) and  The Band Wagon  (1953), plus a 20th Century Fox curiosity,  The I Don't Care Girl  (1953) in which Mitzi Gaynor supposedly plays early 20th century vaudeville wild woman Eva Tanguay. Levant reaches new heights as a cinematic presence in ...

The movies we viewed for this RKO 1931 Studios Year by Year episode couldn't be more different: the sprawling Cimarron  (starring Richard Dix as America's psychotic inner conflict) prompts us to speculate about Edna Ferber as a source auteur and the intertwining of her vision of America with Hollywood across three decades; while the tight, play-like  Traveling Husbands  (starring Evelyn Brent as a...

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view continues with A Woman's Secret  (1949), an oddball psychological drama with a screenplay by  Citizen Kane  writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and directed by Grahame's new husband Nicholas Ray; and  Roughshod  (1949), a consciously feminist Western written by a bunch of leftists. Proving her versatility-within-typecasting yet again, Grahame moves easily from the...

A curious pairing for this Fox 1931 Studios Year by Year episode: an unsung WWI drama, but as good as any, William K. Howard's Surrender , starring Warner Baxter, Leila Hyams, and an almost unrecognizable (both his appearance and his performance) Ralph Bellamy; and the Will Rogers version of  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , which mainly seems to exist so that Rogers can lasso a lance...

We say farewell to Farrow and Allen (for now, although we'll probably encounter them individually on the podcast again) with this final episode on their cinematic collaboration, covering Alice  (1990),  Shadows and Fog  (1991), and one of their very best, the ill-fated  Husbands and Wives  (1992). In the first two, two more Allen characters struggle to live the good life in what couldn't be more d...

In this Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we get to see more of what MGM was (not) doing with our acteur's career. Underused in Song of the Thin Man (1947), in which she brings the only real noir energy to the final Thin Man film, she gets a similarly brief but memorable role in the Red Skelton vehicle Merton of the Movies  (1947), playing the most innocent nymphomaniac in cinematic his...

This round of Warner Bros. 1931 brings us two gems by a couple of Pre-Code masters, Roy Del Ruth's Blonde Crazy and William A. Wellman's  Night Nurse , showing off the early star charisma of Jimmy Cagney (oozing vulnerability) and Barbara Stanwyck (spitting fire), ably supported by Joan Blondell in both cases. Bonus: Young Clark Gable shows up for another, even nastier 1931 turn. Dave makes the ca...

Our second Gloria Grahame Acteur-Oeuvre-view episode includes a curious under-use of our acteur in the all-around baffling musical comedy  It Happened in Brooklyn  (nevertheless memorable for the chemistry between Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante), and a judicious use of her by RKO in Edward Dmytryk's anti-fascist noir  Crossfire  (also 1947). We try to work out just what Grahame's ongoing avant-ga...

For this MGM 1931 episode we watched The Easiest Way , a feminist subversion of melodrama tropes by director Jack Conway and screenwriter Edith Ellis, starring Constance Bennett as the fallen woman and a young Clark Gable, verging on stardom, as her judgemental brother-in-law; and possibly the most sentimental movie ever made, King Vidor's  The Champ , starring Wallace Beery as a ne'er-do-well ex-...

Our Farrow v Allen series continues with four more collaborations: September  (1987),  Another Woman  (1988),  Oedipus Wrecks  (1989, part of the anthology movie  New York Stories ), and  Crimes and Misdemeanors  (1989). We count the ways in which Allen mashes up his favourite playwrights, filmmakers, and Russian novelists, trace the development of Allen's "survivor" theme through these movies, an...

Welcome to our inaugural Gloria Grahame episode, which is also our final Acteurist Oeuvre-view! In this episode we consider Gloria's first significant movie role, as the cause of  Blonde Fever  (1944), in which she and Philip Dorn confuse each other and provide occasion for Mary Astor's multiple levels of irony. We then turn to Gloria's breakthrough role in one of our very favourite movies,  It's...

Our streak of finding gynocentric crime film gems continues with our second Paramount 1931 episode, featuring two movies directed by Sylvia Sidney specialist Marion Gering.  24 Hours  pairs a despairing Clive Brook and Miriam Hopkins, haunted by marriages they can't escape in one way or another. And  Ladies of the Big House , starring a radiant Sidney as a hapless shopgirl who (like Hopkins' night...

Our final Diana Wynyard episode has arrived all too soon! We look at her two final key roles, in Alexander Korda's film of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband  (1947) and  The Feminine Touch  (1956), a nurse drama that's better than its silly title. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we cover the 2025 Toronto Silent Film Festival, focusing on three films built around miraculous performances, Victor...

**** [Retro Re-issue Alert!] **** Turns out it wasn't such a great idea to use Le Tigre's "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?" as our podcast's theme song in 2019 and 2020! Anyway, Spotify (and presumably Le Tigre) don't seem to think so.  Accordingly, please find the attached re-issue of one of our foundational episodes, minus the intro music + a couple of words of greeting from Elise.  Consider it a...

In this Farrow vs. Allen Special Subject episode we dig into a strong set of films, The Purple Rose of Cairo  (1985),  Hannah and Her Sisters  (1986), and  Radio Days  (1987), united by their examination of art, popular culture, and fantasy, the possibilities they offer for transcendence, and the conditions of that transcendence. We also, of course, particularly examine Mia Farrow's role in these...

We complete our second round of 1930 on Studios Year by Year with Universal. This time around we've got two auteur entries, Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front , and a much deeper cut, Tod Browning's eccentric crime drama  Outside the Law . We discuss  All Quiet  as emblematic of the Laemmele Jr. era before turning to Browning's tense, messy melodrama, with a powerhouse performance by...

In our penultimate Diana Wynyard Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, our acteur supports two of the greats of her age, John Gielgud as Benjamin Disraeli in Thorold Dickinson's  The Prime Minister  and Michael Redgrave as the titular innocent of Carol Reed's  Kipps , based on the novel by H.G. Wells. We discuss 19th century British politics (enfranchisement vs. empire), Wells' hope and despair for human...

In this week's RKO Studios Year by Year episode, we discuss our favourite movies from our first round with the studio and how that round shaped our impression of RKO, and then turn to two new 1930 movies: Framed  (directed by George Archainbaud), a gangster movie focused on Evelyn Brent's tough/tender mixed-up moll, and  The Runaway Bride  (directed by Donald Crisp), a shaggy showcase for Mary Ast...

We've got a big one for you this week: four main movies plus four Fear and Moviegoing viewings. Our main feature is Stanning for Sten: Anna Sten's three movies for Samuel Goldwyn,  Nana  (1934), based on (more like inspired by) the Zola novel,  We Live Again  (1934), with a Tolstoy source, and  The Wedding Night  (1935), plus a glimpse at one of her later supporting roles in  Let's Live a Little  ...

In this Diana Wynyard Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at probably her best-known film,  Gaslight (directed by Thorold Dickinson), and consider its pros and cons relative to the Cukor/Selznick Hollywood version of a few years later, as well as the question of how "gaslighting" became an internet meme and how well the source fits the popular meaning. Then we turn to an oddball film with an an...

The first episode of our second Studios Year by Year round with Fox, the "Rube" according to Ethan Mordden, is a real ridiculous/sublime contrast: the sci-fi musical comedy  Just Imagine  (directed by David Butler), a vehicle for vaudevillian El Brendel, in whom Dave may have found his comedy bête noir; and the F. W. Murnau masterpiece  City Girl , which reworks  Sunrise  with (we speculate) a Bor...

In this Diana Wynyard Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we finally come to the source, James Whale's  One More River  (1934), the movie that inspired Dave to schedule this series, and don't worry, we still think it's a masterpiece. We recap how we've watched the Wynyard onscreen persona evolve and how Whale's new context for it gives it an unforgettable impact. And then we watch Wynyard discard that p...

For the first episode of our second round of Warner Brothers 1930, we've got a thoughtful, ambitious gangster movie from the mind of little-known auteur Rowland Brown, The Doorway to Hell  (directed by Archie Mayo), and a truly dismal melodrama,  A Notorious Affair  (directed by Lloyd Bacon), rescued from total worthlessness by Kay Francis's turn as a maneating countess. ( Doorway to Hell  is also...

For our Valentine's Day 2025 episode, we plunge deep into the nature of relationships by discussing two films whose romantic pairings are arguably not relationships at all: Spike Jonze's Her  (2013) and his sometime collaborator, Charlie Kaufman's  I'm Thinking of Ending Things  (2020). Isolation, loss, misogyny, male fantasies, hope and despair: we've got all of the Valentine's goodness for you....