There's Sometimes a Buggy

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....

We start off our second round of MGM Studio Year by Year episodes with these 1930 films: the Marion Davies comedy vehicle The Florodora Girl  (directed by Harry Beaumount) and Cecil B. DeMille's  Madam Satan , which Elise decides is something like  Eyes Wide Shut  if it was made by James Cameron (but, alas, not as interesting as that sounds). (It's still pretty interesting, though, if only for the...

For this episode of our Diana Wynyard Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, our featured acteur plays a disillusioned modern woman in two 1934 movies, Where Sinners Meet  and  Let's Try Again , that are cynical about marriage in a way that (we argue) screwball comedy would soon render archaic. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto we give our impressions of three more Marco Bellocchio films, Devil in the...

Our Special Subject this month is the start of a series on the cinematic collaboration of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. In this first episode we look at  A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy  (1982),  Zelig  (1983), and  Broadway Danny Rose  (1984), paying particular attention to the relationship between the Allen and Farrow characters and to the question of what each partner in the collaboration brings t...

It's time for another round of Studios Year by Year, starting over with Paramount 1930! And this time Dave has brought even more nostalgic reading material to give some context for this studio content. We also launch another new series feature: a review of our favourite movies from the previous 1930-1948 round. Turning to the Paramount movies we watched for this episode, we struggle to come to ter...

Our second Diana Wynyard Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode brought two real oddball pre-Codes to our attention: Men Must Fight  (1933), a hardcore pacifist film that predicts the upcoming world war in certain ways, in which Wynyard more or less reprises her  Cavalcade  role; and  Reunion in Vienna  (1933), based on a Robert E. Sherwood play, which could have been the first screwball comedy if Wynyard...

Our first round of Studios Year by Year comes to an end with these Universal 1948 movies: A Woman's Vengeance  (directed by Zoltan Korda with a screenplay by Aldous Huxley, based on his short story "The Gioconda Smile") and  Larceny  (directed by George Sherman). Huxley's philosophical concerns add unexpected dimensions to familiar Gothic tropes and gives great material to Charles Boyer and Ann Bl...

 Our 2024 Christmas episode is devoted to all 312 minutes of Ingmar Bergman's late masterpiece Fanny and Alexander (1982); a phantasmagorical smorgasbord of genres and summary of the writer-director's obsessions. We explore the film's Keatsian and Kierkegaardian implications, its relationship to the Modernist moment, and its oneiric inquiry into the nature of reality... among the many other topics...

Our first Diana Wynyard Acteurist Oeuvre-view presents us with a couple of politically reactionary pre-Codes: Wynyard's Hollywood debut,  Rasputin and the Empress  (1932), which is mostly Rasputin (a very freaky Lionel Barrymore), not much Empress (Ethel B), and almost no Wynyard; and her Hollywood triumph,  Cavalcade  (1933), Noël Coward's version of the Modernist recoil from the 20th century. We...

In this 1948 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at two artefacts from Dore Schary's brief tenure as Head of Production at RKO, Berlin Express  (directed by Jacques Tourneur), an early Cold War curiosity in which Robert Young and Merle Oberon try to save Paul Lukas from the clutches of Nazis in war-torn Frankfurt, and  The Boy with Green Hair (directed by Joseph Losey), the pacifist fantasy, sta...

Sadly, it's time to say goodbye to another acteur after an all-too-short time. For our final Paul Robeson episode, we watched Julien Duvivier's  Tales of Manhattan  (1942), which notoriously brought an end to Robeson's career as a film actor, and two extraordinary socialist documentaries to which he contributed his voice, Leo Hurwitz's  Native Land  (1942) and Joris Ivens'  The Song of the Rivers...

This 1948 20th Century Fox Studios Year by Year episode is a doozy, a doubleheader of psychotic lovelorn men with bad ideas in their heads. First, in Jean Negulesco's rural noir Road House , Richard Widmark's spoiled road house owner selects Ida Lupino's unlikely and unforgettable femme fatale as his reluctant assassin, and then, in Preston Sturges' black comedy  Unfaithfully Yours , Rex Harrison'...