There's Sometimes a Buggy

Our Fox 1942 episode explores two different modes of Betty Grable Fox musical (both choreographed by Astaire collaborator Hermes Pan) that draw on the Hollywood musical modes established in the 1930s:in black and white, the Warneresque backstager Footlight Serenade , shot by Lee Garmes; and the Technicolor farce  Springtime in the Rockies , with comic support by Edward Everett Horton and Carmen Mi...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view, we look at two very different Dorothy McGuire movies from 1946 that share a striking adultness:  Claudia and David  (directed by Walter Lang), a marital comedy that's surprisingly frank about infidelity, and  Till the End of Time  (directed by Edward Dmytryk), a "post-war readjustment" movie that's surprisingly frank about sexuality in general, as well as Amer...

In this very special Warners 1942 episode we discuss two Dave faves, both starring (and romantically pairing) Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan, that push against the restrictions of the Production Code: Sam Wood's  Peyton Place / Twin   Peaks  forerunner,  Kings Row ,   and Curtis Bernhardt's noirish agrarian socialist drama,  Juke Girl . We dive deep into  Kings Row s' Freud-and-Emerson-steeped adv...

In this week's Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view, two very different roles for our subject: in Elia Kazan's first film,  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  (1945), an imperfect mother in a difficult relationship with her protagonist-daughter; and in Robert Siodmak's Gothic noir,  The Spiral Staircase , (1946) a mute girl targeted by a eugenicist killer. We discuss the unique qualities McGuire brings to...

Our Valentine's Day 2023 episode is all about loves from the past who have inconveniently returned. In  My Favorite Wife  (1940), Irene Dunne is newly remarried Cary Grant's presumed dead wife, while in  Kiss Me Goodbye  (1982), James Caan is Sally Field's actually dead, or undead, husband, interfering with her engagement to the (ostensibly) less charismatic Jeff Bridges. We apply Stanley Cavell's...

Our MGM 1942 episode is a problematic Spencer Tracy double feature in which we're treated to the full range of his persona, from smug saint to semi-demon: George Stevens' brilliant but flawed  Woman of the Year , the first Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedy, and Victor Fleming's Tortilla Flat , in which Tracy co-stars with John Garfield, Akim Tamiroff, and Frank Morgan as John Steinbeck's idea of Monte...

Our Dorothy McGuire Acteurist Oeuvre-view begins with  Claudia  (1943) and  The Enchanted Cottage  (1945), in both of which she's paired with Robert Young. We talk about the qualities McGuire imported to the screen from the stage role she made famous, in the 1941 play  Claudia , by Rose Franken, David O. Selznick's marketing of them, and the career vicissitudes that possibly negated this nascent p...

Our January Special Subject is Part 2 of our look at the films of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, for which we watched  Follow the Fleet  (1936),  Shall We Dance  (1937),  Carefree  (1938), and  The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle  (1939). Fred and Ginger's popularity was on the decline in his period, but these movies include some of Dave's favourites. We discuss the ways in which these films adh...

For our Paramount 1942 episode, we hit the road with a comedy with a lot on its mind, Preston Sturges'  Sullivan's Travels , and a comedy without any mind, the Hope/Crosby road movie  Road to Morocco . We debate just how much deep thinking a comedy should do and consider what kind of thinking comedy itself can do without any help from an auteur. We also isolate some of the unusual features of the...

There's Sometimes a Buggy says hello to 2023 and goodbye to Acteur Jean Arthur with three movies by three auteurs (Virginia Van Upp, Billy Wilder, and George Stevens):  The Impatient Years  (1944),  A Foreign Affair  (1948), and  Shane  (1953). Elise decides in real time that  The Impatient Years,  a sour mid-40s comedy of remarriage, is a great comedy because it's not very funny (using another Sh...

For our Universal 1941 Studios Year by Year episode we looked at two films about love and sex by a couple of master filmmakers, Rene Clair's  The Flame of New Orleans , a terrific Bruce Cabot vehicle (Marlene Dietrich is also in it), and Gregory La Cava's  Unfinished Business , a sexually daring romantic drama (with some screwball elements) starring Irene Dunne that manages to seem like a Pre-Code...

The movies we discussed for our 2022 Christmas Special Subject are a little on the dark side, as all great Christmas movies are, but these ones perhaps more obviously than ever. We paired Mitchell Leisen's Remember the Night  (1940), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, with William Dieterle's  I'll Be Seeing You  (1944), two movies about women who've fallen afoul of the law, and whose experience...

Our penultimate Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode features a couple of sexy romantic comedies, George Stevens'  The More the Merrier  and William A. Seiter's  The Lady Takes a Chance  (both 1943), that Arthur made at the height of her stardom and glamour, when she was in her early 40s - at which point she retired from movies. (Though not quite yet, or permanently, as we'll see in the final...

Our RKO 1941 episode turns out to be well-timed, giving us an opportunity to weigh in on the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics' Poll, canon formation, and the uses (if any) of canons. From there we segue into a discussion of Orson Welles'  Citizen Kane  and its place in the cinematic canon, and then into a discussion of the film itself, and especially Kane's relationship with Susan Alexander Kane. Our se...

This episode of our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view provides us with two examples of Hollywood leftism to discuss: a Norman Krasna department store comedy directed by Sam Wood,  The Devil and Miss Jones  (1941), and a comedy of ideas directed by George Stevens,  The Talk of the Town  (1942). We discuss the way  The Devil and Miss Jones  portrays political radicalism and the difficulty of labor o...

Our November Special Subject is Sirk Noir-vember: four noir or noir-adjacent movies directed by Douglas Sirk in the late 1940s/early 50s:  Lured  (1947),  Sleep, My Love  (1948),  Shockproof  (1949), and  Thunder on the Hill  (1951). We discuss to what extent these films can be considered "auteur" works and in what ways they qualify as noirs; Sirk's use of actor personas and his own "acteur" theor...

American involvement in WWII is imminent at the time of these 20th Century Fox selections from late 1941 for this Studios Year by Year episode, producing what may be the first "true" noir,  I Wake Up Screaming  (directed by H. Bruce Humberstone), and a plea for American solidarity with England, war correspondent movie  Confirm or Deny  (directed by Archie Mayo, from a story co-written by Samuel Fu...

This week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is a directed-by-Wesley Ruggles double feature of disparate genres: the bigamy farce  Too Many Husbands  and the epic Western  Arizona  (both 1940). Although the films, both with screenplays by Ruggles' frequent collaborator Claude Binyon, interrogate marriage and gender respectively, one ends with the reassertion of patriarchal authority, whil...

For our Warner Bros. 1941 episode we watched two Raoul Walsh love triangle movies:  Manpower , in which Edward G. Robinson pines for Marlene Dietrich, who pines for George Raft; and one of Dave's all-time faves,  The Strawberry Blonde , in which Olivia de Havilland pines for James Cagney, who pines for Rita Hayworth. We discuss Walsh's treatment of women as desiring subjects; the productive tensio...

Our Halloween 2022 subject is "The Haunted Mizoguchi," for which we looked at two films made by Kenji Mizoguchi toward the end of his life: the supernatural fantasy Ugetsu  (1953) and a film we agree is a candidate for best movie ever made,  Sansho the Bailiff  (1954). We use Mizoguchi's explicit treatment of ghostly themes in  Ugetsu  as a springboard for discussing the haunting qualities of  San...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we arrive at arguably Jean Arthur's biggest year of stardom, 1939, with her appearance opposite Cary Grant in  Only Angels Have Wings , Howard Hawks' ode to male professionalism, and her iconic performance in  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , opposite Jimmy Stewart. We do our best to get at the essences of Hawks and Capra and consider whether Arthur can e...

For this MGM 1941 episode, we again pair a classic with a rarity: Cukor's  A Woman's Face , starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, and Conrad Veidt, and  The Trial of Mary Dugan , directed by Norman Z. McLeod and starring Laraine Day, Robert Young, and Tom Conway (aka "The Nice George Sanders"). We discuss  A Woman's Face  as a proto-Warner Bros. Crawford noir, the persona of Robert Young, the us...

In our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view this week, we look at two of Arthur's best-known comedies,  Easy Living  (1937), directed by Mitchell Leisen, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges, and  You Can't Take It With You  (1938), directed by Frank Capra. Dave explains why Jean Arthur's performance in  Easy Living  is his all-time favourite comedy performance by an actress. (Hint: it involves a pig...

A tonally disparate pair of great films for Paramount 1941: Preston Sturges'  The Lady Eve , starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, one of the greatest movies ever made, according to Elise; and a real rarity, William Wellman's  Reaching for the Sun , starring some important Sturges actors: Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, and Eddie Bracken. We interrogate the strange central relationship in  The Lady...

In this week's entry in our Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we look at Alfred E. Green's comedy  More Than A Secretary  (1936) and Frank Borzage's genre-defying screwball melodrama  History Is Made at Night  (1937), pairing Arthur with up-and-coming romantic lead Charles Boyer. We compare  More Than A Secretary  with Green's better-known film about sexual politics in patriarchal office c...