There's Sometimes a Buggy

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...

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...