There's Sometimes a Buggy

MGM, 1944 is an odd one. First, MGM's effort to help the war,  Song of Russia  (directed by Gregory Ratoff), prompts us to ask the question, "What were all of these Communist writers doing working for Louis B. Mayer?" And then, William Dieterle's  Kismet , starring Ronald Colman as an amoral magician with misguided plans for his daughter's future, proves to have more to recommend it than just the...

In our penultimate Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, another pair of films in which only one of McGuire's "mother roles" affords her a dramatic opportunity. Find out which is which, between Delmer Daves'  Susan Slade  (1961) and Disney's  Summer Magic  (1963). We also discuss stealth soap opera radicalism, compare Disney and Vincente Minnelli's approaches to femininity as a construct,...

Our special subject this month is The Silent Naruse: four of the five extant silent films of Mikio Naruse,  Flunky, Word Hard! , from 1931,  No Blood Relation ,   from 1932, and  Apart from You  and  Every-Night Dreams , from 1933. We discuss these juvenilia as early examples of Naruse's materialist melodrama, and how much "transcendence" that perspective permits. Then, switching moods drastically...

This week's Paramount 1944 films take the studio's talent of this period in unexpected directions: Mitchell Leisen's  Lady in the Dark  makes a Technicolor extravaganza of the fantasy sequences in this psychoanalytical tale of a woman's (Ginger Rogers') ambivalence about glamour, based on a hit Broadway musical; and Alan Ladd and Raymond Chandler (as star and screenwriter) bring a hardboiled note...

In this Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Dorothy McGuire's string of interesting wife roles gets tangled up by two of the most sexist films Elise has ever seen in her life, Delbert Mann's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs  (based on the play by William Inge) and Disney's  The Swiss Family Robinson .  The Dark at the Top of the Stairs  nevertheless gives us a lot to discuss in terms of psychiatric co...

Universal 1943 is a strange one, starting with  The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler , starring Ludwig Donath as a reluctant Nazi collaborator who's forced to impersonate Hitler, and continuing with Robert Siodmak's  Son of Dracula , with Lon Chaney Jr. as a hapless Dracula who falls victim to femme fatale Louise Allbritton. We discuss WWII AU scenarios, the  Twilight Zone scenario of being a soul tr...

July's special subject is a sampler of noirs by 1950s noir auteur Phil Karlson: Kansas City Confidential (1952), 99 River Street (1953), 5 Against the House (1955), and The Phenix City Story (1955). We discuss one-time Fox musicals leading man John Payne's transformation into the ideal shlubby, haunted noir protagonist, Karlson's take on the hysterical male trope, his use of violence, his delineat...

This week's Dorothy McGuire episode continues the trend of unusual wife and mother roles with two family melodramas from 1959, Henry King's tale of an economically and psychologically troubled viticulture dynasty,  This Earth Is Mine , and Delmer Daves' frank, sex-positive look at sexual mores among the respectable middle classes during the late 1950s, A Summer Place , which had contemporary revie...

For our RKO 1943 episode, we look at two films that exemplify the nascent RKO noir style: Richard Wallace's  The Fallen Sparrow , starring John Garfield as a traumatized Spanish Civil War veteran hunted by Nazis and the Val Lewton production  The Seventh Victim , starring Kim Hunter as a sheltered young woman who wants to find out about the sorrows of the world and does not want to be told to drin...

Our Dorothy McGuire episode this week is guaranteed to give you mood whiplash. We begin with Disney classic and Boomer phenomenon  Old Yeller  (1957), the most hellish depiction of the war of all against all in nature we've seen since  King Kong , with a moving central performance by Tommy Kirk as a boy ungracefully slouching toward manhood with the indispensable assistance of a good dog and a ser...

In this extra-special 20th Century Fox 1943 episode, we stare agog at a couple of dazzling musicals:  Stormy Weather , whose all-Black cast is headlined by Bill Robinson and Lena Horne and boasts an embarrassment of geniuses; and Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here , a Technicolor psychedelic extravaganza that's the pinnacle of Fox's signature variety-style musical. We try to sketch out some of t...

Our June Special Subject samples the surviving silent cinema of Dave's favorite director (now revealed!), King Vidor. We tease Vidor's auteur preoccupations out of these four early films— The Sky Pilot  (1921),  Peg o' My Heart  (1922),  Wild Oranges  (1924),  and  La Bohème  (1926)—and find a common focus on the successful, frustrated, or warped self-realization of his heroines. We explore the wa...

We continue last week's theme of Hollywood's attitude toward the Soviet Union as our Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode takes us beyond not only the Popular Front era but just a shade beyond the heyday of McCarthyism. We also find that we spoke too soon about McGuire entering her mom-roles era, as in this episode's movies she embodies an unmarried professional woman with a liberal attit...

Our Warner Brothers 1943 episode is a very special one, a Popular Front anti-Nazi double feature, the Stalinist propaganda film  Mission to Moscow  (directed by Michael Curtiz) and Lewis Milestone's drama about Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation,  Edge of Darkness . We attempt (as complete non-experts!) to lay out the stakes involved in the case made by  Mission to Moscow  and discuss the...

Our Dorothy McGuire movies this week occupy two ends of the mid-50s Hollywood spectrum: a low-budget black-and-white noirish crime thriller for Republic,  Make Haste to Live  (1954), and a vibrantly colorful Cinemascope travelogue romance for Fox,  Three Coins in the Fountain  (1954). We find plenty to recommend in both, from  Make Haste to Live' s stylish cinematography (by John L. Russell of  Mo...

Our Special Subject this month is the films of Jacqueline Audry, a fairly recently rediscovered postwar French director. We watched all of the films we could find with English subtitles:  Gigi  (1949),  Olivia  (1951),  Huis clos / No Exit  (1954), and  Les petits matins / Hitch-Hike  (1962). From literary adaptations of some strong and scandalous material to an unusually gentle New Wave comedy, t...

For our MGM 1943 episode, we look at two films that are highly representative of the Mayer ethos,  The Human Comedy  (directed by Clarence Brown), a portrait of WWII-era American small-town life infused with the beatific sensibility of William Saroyan (who provided the story), with Mickey Rooney in a coming-of-age story that's equal parts Andy Hardy and David Lynch; and the children's classic  Las...

Our two Dorothy McGuire movies for this week are wildly different in tone: Samuel Goldwyn's  I Want You  (1951, directed by Mark Robson), about a family's reaction to the Korean War draft, and, for MGM, the Jamesian melodrama  Invitation  (1952, directed by Gottfried Reinhardt). Dave makes the case for  I Want You  as a complex leftist look at early Cold War America, and then we unpack the Jamesia...

For our Paramount 1943 episode, just a couple of typical comedies, as far as John Douglas Eames is concerned: Preston Sturges'  The Palm Beach Story , starring Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea, a comedy of remarriage in which the screwballs are no longer the central couple, and Mitchell Leisen's cross-class comedy with a number of twists,  No Time For Love , with Colbert and Fred MacMurray. We tr...

In the second part of our Joan Harrison: Producer Special Subject, we look at Harrison's Robert Montgomery years and her final films made before turning to television. which include both known and overlooked gems: Ride the Pink Horse  (1947),  Once More, My Darling  (1949),  Your Witness  (1950), and  Circle of Danger  (1951). We identify the various themes and concerns that unite films within thi...

For our Universal 1942 episode, a very odd pairing: The Mad Doctor of Market Street , a mad scientist/ocean liner comedy/island adventure movie directed by low-budget noir auteur Joseph H. Lewis, and Alfred Hitchcock's first fully American movie, Saboteur , a fugitive-on-the-run thriller. We dissect the depiction of the fictional islanders in  The Mad Doctor of Market Street  and the movie's decon...

For this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched two romantic comedies (sort of),  Mister 880  (1950) and  Callaway Went Thataway  (1951), in which Dorothy McGuire assumes a role we haven't seen from her before: the character through whom we register the pathos that the movies explore via the respective plights of Edmund Gwenn's elderly counterfeiter and Howard Keel's TV cowboy impersonato...

Our 1942 RKO episode is a very special one, with films by two of the studio's outstanding auteurs, writer-producer-director Orson Welles, and B-horror unit producer Val Lewton. First, we look at Orson Welles' mutilated (some even say "emasculated"!) masterpiece,  The Magnificent Ambersons , exploring the movie's extraordinary characters and performances and giving our opinion of the ending imposed...

In this Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, a couple of disparate films: Elia Kazan's anti-semitism exposé drama,  Gentleman's Agreement  (1947), and a marital comedy about the hardships of being a doctor's wife,  Mother Didn't Tell Me  (1950). We discuss the qualities that McGuire brings to her most problematic character yet and that help make the character a possible audience identifi...

[[New Improved edition – with restored Home From the Hill content!]]   It's March Minnelli Madness as we watch three melodramas directed by Vincente Minelli, plus one nightmarish comedy:  The Long, Long Trailer  (1954), starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz;  The Cobweb  (1955), starring Richard Widmark and Lauren Bacall (among other big names);  Some Came Running  (1958), based on the novel by Jam...