There's Sometimes a Buggy

In this Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we discuss Tay Garnett's Main Street to Broadway  (1953), a pleasant curiosity with an all-star New York theatre cast, including Palmer and Rex Harrison in a brief sandwich-themed couple cameo, but nearly stolen by Lynchian radio humourist Herb Shriner; and  Fireworks  (1954), Palmer's first German film, in which she plays a circus performer poss...

For this RKO 1945 episode, two beautifully filmed noirs (by Harry J. Wild), Edwin L. Marin's  Johnny Angel , another noir with a femme fatale (Claire Trevor) who loves too much (and gets a very unexpected - and gory - redemption) ,  and Edward Dmytryk's  Cornered , in which Dick Powell learns why you shouldn't hunt down Nazis and kill them with your bare hands, but doesn't seem very interested. An...

  For our Valentine's 2024 episode we looked at two movies about obsession that interrogate the notion of romantic love: Alfred Hitchcock's  Marnie  (1964) and Chantal Akerman's  La Captive  (2000). If you think an extensive discussion of sexual assault and of what it would mean to be "pressed to death" by your partner's love sounds like essential Valentine's Day content, this episode is for you....

Our Fox 1945 episode features two of the greatest and greatest-looking film noirs: Otto Preminger's  Fallen Angel  and John M. Stahl's  Leave Her to Heaven . We unpack the movies' love triangles, in which two strong-willed women exert their influence over a passive man; their treatment of the topics of love and obsession; the unique cinematic qualities of Alice Faye's presence and Gene Tierney's f...

For this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched two films pairing acteur Lilli Palmer with then-husband Rex Harrison. We discuss the potential relationship of thriller/courtroom drama  The Long Dark Hall  (1951) to the scandal plaguing their marriage at the time and consider  The Four Poster  (1952) as a "marriage film," and what it has to say about that social and spiritual state. And in...

For our January Special Subject, we look at three silent "family comedies" by Ozu, Tokyo Chorus  (1931),  I Was Born, But...  (1932), and  Passing Fancy  (1933), although we argue that "comedy" doesn't entirely encompass the emotional range of these films. We argue that the melancholy of late Ozu is already discernible in these tales of father-son conflict and confrontation with life's disappointi...

This Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode tackles two more films made with leftist colleagues, Elliott Nugent's My Girl Tisa , a Popular Front-style tale of early 20th century immigrants and the American Dream, and Lewis Milestone's quirky, stylistically inventive comedy  No Minor Vices  (written by Arnold Manoff). We also watched  François Villiers' fascinating   Hans le Marin  (also known...

For this round of Warner Bros. 1945, we take on a very successful movie with two very big stars and one very terrible reputation,  Saratoga Trunk , with Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, and a fascinating little B noir,  Danger Signal , with Zachary Scott being his usual cheeky self and getting women upset. We discuss the stylistic risks of  Saratoga Trunk , the genius of Ingrid Bergman, the subtlet...

In this Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we discuss Palmer's first two Hollywood films, Fritz Lang's anti-fascist spy drama, Cloak and Dagger  (1946), and Robert Rossen's socially critical boxing noir,  Body and Soul  (1947). We dig into the social context of these films, asking why these progressive writers and directors wanted to tell these stories at this moment, and how their politi...

For our December 2023 Special Subject, we're having ourselves a Monty Woolley Christmas! We look at three Christmas-adjacent movies from the 1940s featuring the anti-Santa in roles big and small:  The Man Who Came to Dinner , in which he stars as  waspish radio personality Sheridan Whiteside, who takes over the home of a bourgeois Middle American couple;  Life Begins at Eight-Thirty , in which he...

In this week's MGM 1945 episode, a Vincente Minnelli double feature: The Clock , a wartime romantic drama with two very intense stars, Judy Garland and Robert Walker, that doubles as a love poem to New York City; and a Technicolor musical fantasy about, in Dave's words (more or less), "A woman who wants to bleep an angel," starring Lucille Bremer as the woman and Fred Astaire as the angel. And in...

In this Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we take a look at a Lilli Palmer who's (mostly) new to us, Lilli the victim: the victim of self-destructive womanizer Rex Harrison (Palmer's real-life husband) in Launder and Gilliat's enigmatic social satire  The Rake's Progress  (1945), and the self-destructive paralysis victim of  Beware of Pity (1946), based on the Stefan Zweig novel. Which of...

For this Paramount 1945 episode, we look at a couple of male melodramas: The Man in Half Moon Street , a Gothic B-movie starring Nils Asther, "the most beautiful man who ever lived," according to Elise, as a scientist who becomes unscrupulous in his pursuit of eternal youth, and Salty O'Rourke , a Raoul Walsh-directed hit starring Alan Ladd as a racetrack gambler who manipulates an unruly young jo...

For our Ozu Noir-vember Special Subject, we look at three silent films by Yasujirō  Ozu ,  Walk Cheerfully  (1930),  That Night's Wife  (1930), and  Dragnet Girl  (1933), that not only bear a fascinating relationship to each other but also seemingly inaugurate the gangster film in Japan and anticipate (we argue) American film noir more closely even than French poetic realism, as well as the Nouvel...

We dig into some substantial British cinema offerings in a Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode that's heavy on wartime themes: Thunder Rock  (1942), a philosophical examination of the disillusionment of a leftist; dramatically illustrated in a surprising way;  The Gentle Sex  (1943), Leslie Howard's eccentric and affecting semi-documentary about women in the British Army; and  English Witho...

We weren't sure what to expect with our Universal 1944 "scary woman"-themed episode, but Cobra Woman , starring the riveting Maria Montez, delivered, and the completely unknown  Weird Woman , starring the less-than-riveting Lon Chaney Jr., was a surprise gem that seems to be nodding to Val Lewton's work at RKO. This episode causes us to ask such questions as: what is acting? Can anyone in these mo...

This week's Acteurist-Oeuvre-view shows us two sides of Lilli Palmer: Bad Lilli in a comic supporting role, brawling with fellow chorus girl Ren é e Houston and competing with a demure Margaret Lockwood over wealthy patrons in Carol Reed's  A Girl Must Live  (1939); and Good Lilli assuming the lead in B-mystery  The Door with Seven Locks  (1940), seeking adventure with comic sidekick Gina Malo. It...

For our Halloween 2023 episode, we take you on a tour of  Peyton Place —the 1956 novel by Grace Metalious, 1957 Fox movie starring Lana Turner, and the mid-late-60s TV series starring Dorothy Malone and Mia Farrow (among many others) that reinvented television. We discuss the strange journey of Metalious's scabrous and scathing vision from satire to soap opera, in the course of which the story of...

This week's RKO 1944 episode brings a Hollywood slant to an English working-class perspective on the war. In her only first-billed feature film role, in Passport to Destiny , Elsa Lanchester plays an indomitable charwoman who embarks upon a self-appointed mission to assassinate Hitler after coming to believe that she's magically protected, while in  None But the Lonely Heart , American playwright...

Our second Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode sees the rising young star second-billed as the love interest in a couple of strange enterprises:  Command Performance  (1937), a vehicle for popular American tenor Arthur Tracy, and  Crackerjack  (1938), an unhinged crime comedy starring Aldwych farces alumnus Tom Walls as a criminal superhero. As Lilli tries to orient herself in film acting,...

Our Fox 1944 episode features a prestige production,  The Eve of St. Mark , based on a Maxwell Anderson play and directed by John Stahl, and a modest marital drama,  In the Meantime, Darling , directed by Otto Preminger just before he makes a name for himself in noir with  Laura . Between the two, the problems facing the men at the front and the women who love them are covered, as well as the kind...

In our first Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we spend some time with Lilli in England and take in her screen debut, in the "Quota Quickie" Crime Unlimited (1935); her small role in Hitchcock's eccentric  Secret Agent  (1936), in which she gets to play with an unhinged Peter Lorre; and a thankless role in a lyrical ode to Canadian nation-building a.k.a. labour exploitation,  The Great B...

This Special Subject is something extra-special: we discuss philosopher Stanley Cavell's idiosyncratic classic of film criticism,  Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage  and three classic comedies that are the subjects of essays in that book, Leo McCarey's  The Awful Truth , Howard Hawks'  His Girl Friday , and George Cukor's  Adam's RIb . What is Cavell's "comedy of remarriage...

This Warner Bros. 1944 episode makes good use of Warner Bros.' A-list stars, A-list character actors, B-list stars, and B-list character actors.  Casablanca  and  Maltese Falcon  alumni converge in both Michael Curtiz's  Passage to Marseille , starring Humphrey Bogart as a morally compromised hero, with Claude Rains and Sydney Greenstreet as the patriotic and pro-fascist alternatives for occupied...

Warning: our final Dorothy McGuire episode contains very little Dorothy McGuire in our discussion of the films, although we also compare our Top 10 performances and give a final analysis of how her career was shaped by its cultural moment. However, we still find lots to talk about in the oddball final feature films in which she appeared, particularly George Stevens'  The Greatest Story Ever Told ...