There's Sometimes a Buggy

Our final Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is an odd one, with Dave arguing for the value of John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant  (1985), a Nazi conspiracy thriller from a novel by Robert Ludlum, and Elise arguing for the value of  The Other Side of the Wind  (2018), Orson Welles' startling comeback film-that-never-was. Then we give our favourite Lilli Palmer films, with rationale...

This Fox 1947 Studios Year by Year episode looks at two examples of the docu-noir: Boomerang!  (directed by Elia Kazan), starring Dana Andrews as a prosecuting attorney who has to decide between morality and political expedience; and  Kiss of Death  (directed by Henry Hathaway), in which Victor Mature's sympathetic gangster is menaced by Richard Widmark's psychopathic gangster and the legal system...

Our penultimate Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode brings us Lilli as a protagonist again at last, in Lotte in Weimar  (1975), based on the Thomas Mann novel, and Lilli Lite in  The Boys from Brazil  (1978), an outrageous anti-Nazi sci fi story in which Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck wage an epic battle (and also get into a very brutal girl-fight). And this week's Fear and Moviegoing in...

This Warner Bros. 1947 Studios Year by Year episode features two gems that put their own particular slant on noir's familiar theme of murderous conflict between women and men: Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed , starring a more-than-usually deranged Joan Crawford, with Van Heflin as the rakish object of her obsession, and Delmer Daves'  Dark Passage , starring an unusually passive Humphrey Bogart as a...

Our second Anna Magnani Sampler includes three Hollywood films, two with parts written for her by her friend Tennessee Williams, as well as the second film directed by Pasolini: The Rose Tattoo  (1955),  Wild is the Wind  (1957),  The Fugitive Kind  (1960), and  Mamma Roma (1962). Paired with a wacky Burt Lancaster, a bullying Anthony Quinn, a quietly intense Brando, or a nihilistic teenager, Magn...

In this episode of our Lilli Palmer Acteur-ist Oeuvre-view series, we watched a couple of 1969 movies somewhere on the horror spectrum:  De Sade , a movie of ideas that doesn't live up to them, written by famed horror/sci fi author Richard Matheson; and  The House That Screamed , an Italian slasher with a twist or two to recommend it. Good parts for Lilli Palmer in a couple of seriously silly movi...

For this MGM 1947 Studios Year by Year episode, we discuss Cynthia , a gentle family melodrama starring a luminous 15-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as an over-protected teenager, and  High Wall , a psychiatric film noir with great roles for Robert Taylor and Herbert Marshall as sweaty noir protagonists at cross purposes. Our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, meanwhile, features discussion of two...

After some rocky episodes, our Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view uncovers a couple of gems: Nobody Runs Forever  aka The High Commissioner  (1968, directed by Ralph Thomas), a spy thriller bursting at the seams with the charms of Rod Taylor and Christopher Plummer, and  Hard Contract  (1969, the only feature film made by writer-director S. Lee Pogostin), one of the most eccentric movies we've eve...

For this Paramount 1947 Studios Year by Year episode we watch a couple of films by producer/director team of Seton I. Miller and John Farrow:  California , starring the belligerent sexual tension of Barbara Stawyck and Ray Milland in a left-leaning fable about the establishment of law and order in the West Coast, and  Calcutta , a terrific Alan Ladd/Gail Russell noir, stylishly shot by Billy Wilde...

For our June Special Subject we revisit the work of Kenji Mizoguchi, looking at two films from earlier than his best-known (in the West) period: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums  (1939), about cross-class lovers and what it takes to become a great artist, and  The 47 Ronin  (1941), based on a true story that became emblematic of samurai values. Topics discussed include King Vidor parallels, fe...

This week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view sees Lilli in two small but crucial roles: Sebastian  (1968), starring Dirk Bogarde as a Cold War cryptanalyst of divided political loyalties, and  Oedipus Rex  (1968), starring Christopher Plummer as Freud's favourite plaything of the gods. We discuss Cold War politics, the Swinging Sixties New Woman, free will, and the perils of adapting ancient Gre...

For this Universal 1946 episode, we chose a B-movie double bill,  The Cat Creeps  (directed by Erle C. Kenton, best known for Island of Lost Souls ) and  She-Wolf   of London  (directed by Jean Yarbrough, Abbott and Costello specialist), hoping for hidden gems. But did we find any? And in the Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, our Powell and Pressburger retrospective viewing continues with  B...

In this week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we encounter more Nazis in a couple of movies very loosely based on real WWII incidents: Disney's Miracle of the White Stallions  (1963), based on Operation Cowboy (but with the equine eugenics shoved into the subtext), and  Operation Crossbow  (1965), about the attempt by British Intelligence to stop the threat of Nazi rockets. Sophia Lor...

This week we have a whopping big episode for you: Part 2 of our look at Samuel Goldwyn Productions, dealing with the 1940s; and, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, brief discussions of three Powell and Pressburgers, kicking off TIFF's May retrospective. For this episode we watched The Little Foxes  (directed by William Wyler),  The Pride of the Yankees  (directed by Sam Wood),  The Bes...

In this RKO 1946 episode we discuss Crack-Up  (directed by Irving Reis), an eerie noir with a couple of great Expressionist set pieces. Pat O'Brien oozes vulnerability as a WWII vet and populist art critic who has to find out who's trying to make him look, or go, insane; Claire Trevor plays the love interest who's trying to help him (or is she?). Oh yeah, and we also watched  Step By Step  (direct...

This week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is a George Seaton double feature that once again gives us Lilli the sophisticate and Lilli the saint: in The Pleasure of His Company  (1961), she plays the ex-wife of Fred Astaire, an absentee father whose plan to recapture his youth by seducing their daughter into becoming his travelling companion she sets out to foil; while in  The Counterf...

This week's Fox 1946 Studios Year by Year episode features the strange bedfellows of Henry Hathaway's The Dark Corner , a curiously feminist film noir in which the tormented protagonist is saved by the persistence of a good woman (played by Lucille Ball), and Edmund Goulding's The Razor's Edge, based on a Somerset Maugham novel about spiritual enlightenment and bourgeois ennui, featuring Gene Tier...

Our examination of the film career of Lilli Palmer continues with a couple of excellent films that show us Palmer's range when playing "loveable": But Not for Me , in which she gives a comedic performance as the ex-wife of a Broadway producer played by Clark Gable, benevolently interfering in his budding relationship with young actress Carroll Baker; and  Conspiracy of Hearts , in which Palmer pla...

For this Warner Bros. 1946 episode we watched two fantastical biopics, Devotion  (directed by Curtis Bernhardt), starring Ida Lupino and Olivia de Havilland as Emily and Charlotte  Brontë, and  Night and Day  (directed by Michael Curtiz), starring Cary Grant as Cole Porter and Monty Woolley as himself.  We found them to be like night and day in terms of their quality, but you'll have to listen to...

In our April Special Subject, Part 1 of our look at the films of Samuel Goldwyn, we discuss Dark Angel  (1935),  These Three  (1936),  Dodsworth  (1936), and  Wuthering Heights  (1939), a selection heavy on Dave favourites Merle Oberon, William Wyler, and Gregg Toland. We ask in what sense these are "quality" films, and in what ways they escape our expectations of that category, calling attention...

For this week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we watched Jacques Becker's  The Lovers of Montparnasse  (1958), in which Palmer, playing Modigliani's rejected lover Beatrice Hastings, p erfects her persona of b rittle dissociation; and   Mädchen in Uniform , the 1958 remake of the famous Weimar-era film about a teenager at an all-girls' boarding school who falls in love with her teach...

This MGM 1946 Studios Year by Year episode is a Jules Dassin double feature that shows the range of the famed blacklistee even during his most constrained studio period: the noirish romantic drama  Two Smart People , about two con artists (Lucille Ball and John Hodiak) and a cop who are all out to con each other; and the remarkable  A Letter for Evie  (starring Marsha Hunt and Hume Cronyn),   a ve...

For this Lilli Palmer episode of our Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we watched another West German movie, Devil in Silk  (directed by Rolf Hansen), and  Life Together  (directed by  Clément   Duhour ), a tribute to famed French playwright, screenwriter, and film director Sacha Guitry with an all-star cast. We analyze the surprisingly sophisticated structure of Duhour and Guitry's horned-up middlebr...

In this  Paramount  1946 episode we look at two movies featuring Veronica Lake which otherwise could not be more dissimilar:  Miss Susie Slagle's  (directed by John Berry), about the trials of pre-WWI Johns Hopkins medical students living in a boarding house presided over by Lillian Gish; and famous Lake/Ladd noir outing,  The Blue Dahlia  (directed by George Marshall and written by Raymond Chandl...

In this Universal 1945 episode of The   Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year, we look at a couple of noir-adjacent films, Robert Siodmak's  The Suspect , starring Charles Laughton as an abused husband who looks for a way out of his miserable marriage when he meets sweet and lovely Ella Raines, and the comedy/crime film  Lady on a Train , which stars Deanna Durbin as an exuberant and resourceful murder m...