There's Sometimes a Buggy

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'...

Part 1 of our Oscar Levant Special Subject sees us explain our very personal relationship with this singular figure of 1940s/50s Hollywood in preparation to discuss Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue  (1945), great Warner Bros. woman's picture/noir  Humoresque  (1946), Doris Day debut  Romance on the High Seas  (1948), and accidental Fred and Ginger reunion pic  The Barkleys of Broadway  (1949). Jus...

For our penultimate Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched Thornton Freeland's Jericho  (1937), in which Robeson plays a court-martialed WWI officer who takes up a new life as the leader of a group of Saharan herders and traders, and Pen Tennyson's  The Proud Valley  (1940), often cited as the film Robeson was proudest of, about the struggles of a community of Welsh miners. As in ou...

For this 1948 Warner Bros Studios Year by Year episode, we watched a couple of the studio's most prestigious releases for the year, John Huston's  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre  and Jean Negulesco's  Johnny Belinda . We explore some extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Jane Wyman in these tales of capitalist nihilism and rural prejudice.  Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s:    ...

For our 2024 Halloween Special Subject we watched two films in the German Expressionist tradition starring one of the greatest actors to be relegated to Hollywood character actor status, Peter Lorre: Fritz Lang's masterpiece M  (1931),   through   which Lorre came to international recognition playing a child murderer, and Lorre's first Hollywood film, Karl Freund's  Mad Love  (1935), to which he a...

Things are looking up in this week's Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, for which we watched  Big Fella  (directed by J. Elder Willis), in which Robeson is a dockworker who becomes involved in the search for a kidnapped rich kid, and  King Solomon's Mines  (directed by Robert Stevenson), the first film adaptation of the H. Rider Haggard colonial adventure epic. We make our arguments for ...

Our MGM 1948 Studios Year by Year episode is a Freed Unit double feature: the great Irving Berlin musical Easter Parade , starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, and  Summer Holiday , a Mickey Rooney coming-of-age story based on a play by Eugene O'Neill, directed by studio-era "art director" Rouben Mamoulian. We discuss  Easter Parade  as a vehicle for presenting Judy Garland's "problematic" anti-...

In this episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we consider the ways in which Robeson, as acteur, inscribes himself on James Whale's Show Boat  (1936) and J. Elder Wills'  Song of Freedom  (1936). First, we consider the racial themes of  Show Boat , and how both the writing of Robeson's character, and Robeson's playing of him, undermines the stereotype ostensibly being presented;...

In this Paramount 1948 episode we dig deep to get the stories behind the stories of two great film noirs starring Ray Milland:  The Big Clock  (directed by John Farrow), based on a novel by Depression-era poet and Communist Party fellow traveler Kenneth Fearing, and  So Evil My Love  (directed by Lewis Allen),   a historical noir/Gothic melodrama based on a novel by the prolific and many-pseudonym...

For our second Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we watched  The Emperor Jones  (1933), a film by Dudley Murphy loosely based on the Eugene O'Neill play, and the Kordas'  Sanders of the River  (1935), an experience that proved crucial in Robeson's own political education. We discuss the Modernist appropriation of African culture and the figure of the African American, methods of rational...

We devoted our 2024 September Special Subject to American silent film auteur Lois Weber. We discuss four films, the allegorical Hypocrites  (1915), which created a sensation at the time with its full-frontal female nudity, and three films that showcase Weber's progressive Christian social vision,  Where Are My Children?  (1916), which confusedly tackles the subjects of birth control and abortion,...

In this 1947 Universal Studios Year by Year episode, a little Ella Raines never hurt no one: we struggle to understand her role in the intermittently riveting Gothic melodrama Time Out of Mind  (stylishly directed by Robert Siodmak), while Edmond O'Brien struggles to understand her role in Vincent Price's life in  The Web , a white-collar film noir directed by future blacklistee Michael Gordon.  T...

The first episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series has a high context-to-text ratio, as we introduce one of the most important figures in entertainment and political activism of the 20th century. The two movies we look at, Oscar Micheaux's  Body and Soul (1925) and Kenneth Macpherson's Borderline  (1930), by auteurs from radically different backgrounds with radically different aims...

We've been waiting for this episode, a 1947 RKO noir double bill with two of the all-time greats, Jacques Tourneur's  Out of the Past , in which Robert Mitchum's cool detective and Jane Greer's psychopathic moll work at cross purposes in their attempts to escape their shady pasts so that they can be free to love, and Robert Wise's  Born to Kill , in which Claire Trevor's morally flexible social cl...

We went deep for our second King Vidor Special Subject episode, looking at four films from the 1930s:  Street Scene  (1931), adapted by Elmer Rice from his famous stage play about working-class New Yorkers; the little-known  Cynara  (1932), starring Ronald Colman as a kindly upper-middle-class man who stumbles into adultery and the abyss;  Our Daily Bread  (1934), Vidor's eccentric, self-produced...