There's Sometimes a Buggy

In Part 2 of our look at The German Sirk, the director discovers "cinematic values" with two unhinged melodramas that place a strong emphasis on music,  Schlußakkord  ( Final Chord / Final Accord ), from 1936, and  La Habanera , from 1937. We dig into a couple of Sirk's complicated "villains" in these movies about extra-marital love triangles, and discuss  La Habanera 's Nazi propaganda overtones...

For this Universal 1940 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at a Vincent Price double feature that also features the same director (Joe May), cinematographer (Milton Krasner), and key screenwriter (Lester Cole, who will become one of the Hollywood Ten): The House of the Seven Gables, an adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, and The Invisible Man Returns , the first sequel to James Whale's...

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view cast, we revisit Frank Capra's  Mr. Deeds Goes to Town  (1936) for thoughts old and (hopefully) new, and then look at two minor screwball comedy variations on genre films from 1936, the RKO murder mystery  The Ex-Mrs. Bradford , co-starring William Powell, and a weird little riff on  Mr. Deeds  combined with a crime thriller,  Adventure in Manhattan...

This week's studio is RKO, 1940, and we have two great movies:  Vigil in the Night , starring Carole Lombard as a saintly nurse and Anne Shirley as her flawed sister in George Stevens' noirish medical drama; and Abe Lincoln in Illinois , based on Robert E. Sherwood's play, with Raymond Massey reprising his stage role of Abraham Lincoln. We discuss the latter as an anti-fascist film and argue for b...

Our Special Subject for August is also our first look at German filmmaking under the Nazis, with two mid-1930s films by left-wing director and future Hollywood auteur Douglas Sirk:  The Girl from the Marsh Croft , based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, and  Pillars of Society , based on the play by Henrik Ibsen. We consider the question of how it was possible to make liberal films under these circu...

In this week's Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at 3 Jean Arthur movies:  The Defense Rests  (1934), an excellent corrupt lawyer drama that we were previously unable to find; and from 1935, two very different romantic comedies featuring real or pretend marriages of convenience,  The Public Menace  and  If You Could Only Cook . The simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic young lawyer, screwba...

For this Fox 1940 episode, we look at a couple of films with the same director (Henry Hathaway), same cinematographer (Arthur Miller), and same nominal star (Tyrone Power), but radically different stories.  Brigham Young  tells the story of the persecution of the Mormons and their journey westward from Illinois to the Great Salt Lake, recasting this American epic as an implicit anti-Nazi tale with...

In this week's Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we look at two more movies from 1935,  Public Hero No. 1  (directed by J. Walter Ruben for MGM) and  Diamond Jim  (directed by A. Edward Sutherland for Universal, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges). In the first, Arthur injects some screwball swagger into a Code-era gangster drama with an FBI agent hero; in the second, she has a dual rol...

Our Special Subject for this month, Duels in Max Ophüls, covers films from all three decades of the itinerant filmmaker's career:  Liebelei  (1933), made in Germany;  Letter from an Unknown Woman  (1948), made in Hollywood; and  Madame de...  (1953), made in France. We consider the proposition that Ophüls' films are about superficially superficial people, and examine the evolution of a certain set...

Our Warner Bros. 1940 episode this time is a Bette Davis double feature in which Bette plays the Other Woman in two melodramas based on real-life sex-and-murder scandals, but the Wronged Woman in only one. We discuss the combination of sexual repression and critique of colonialism in William Wyler's  The Letter  and Anatole Litvak's study of societal constraints and thwarted romance with the very...

In our second Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, Arthur moves into her A-picture period at Columbia with John Ford's curious comedy/crime melodrama,  The Whole Town's Talking , starring Edward G. Robinson in a dual role, and Erle C. Kenton's  Children's Hour -reminiscent  Party Wire . While we see more of the familiar Arthur comedy persona emerge in  The Whole Town's Talking , she gets to...

An odd pairing for this MGM 1940 episode: King Vidor's  Northwest Passage , which is not about finding the Northwest Passage at all but about an attack on an Abenaki village by an independent ranger company attached to the British Army; and Frank Borzage's mystical prison break movie,  Strange Cargo . We make the argument for a  Starship Troopers  reading of  Northwest Passage  before grappling wi...

This Week's Special Subject is a look at the early silent cinema of Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, during the years preceding  The Passion of Joan of Arc . We discuss  Michael  (1924), about the relationship between a famous painter and his male model, and  Master of the House  (1925), a comedy about the taming of a tyrannical patriarch. Subjects include Dreyer's unique take on the visionary p...

In our inaugural Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we join Gladys Georgianna Greene as she signs on at Columbia Pictures, two years before her star-making team-up with Frank Capra. Her first two films for Columbia, Whirlpool  and  The Most Precious Thing in Life , are a couple of curious weepies with missing-parent plots that allow Arthur to play first the daughter, then the mother, but n...

For this 1940 Paramount episode, an Akim Tamiroff (and Muriel Angelus) double feature in which we unlock the secrets of Preston Sturges' inspiration. First, we look at  The Way of All Flesh  (directed by Louis King), a little-known proto-noir Christmas movie that seems to have taken its inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne, as filtered through the sensibilities of top screenwriters Lenore Coffee a...

In our final Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvreview episode, we look at a commercial and critical flop, Rob Marshall's  Nine  (2009), a musical based on Fellini's celebrated semi-autobiographical film  8 1/2 , and a commercial and critical triumph, Steven Spielberg's  Lincoln  (2012), covering the final four months of Abraham Lincoln's life and especially the process of passing the Thirteenth Amend...

Join your hosts as they race the clock to adumbrate the myriad merits of French Golden Age Master, Jacques Becker! We key in on the director's ingenious use of diverse genres to drop diegetic depth charges into the abyss of gendered subjectivity at midcentury. From the nerve-wracking rom-complications of Antoine et Antoinette to the Bert n' Ernie gangster pyjama party of Touchez pas au grisbi , no...

Universal, 1939: we continue the saga of John Stahl's final years with the banker regime with  When Tomorrow Comes , a frankly pro-labour romance, full of eccentric charm, that rewrites the fate of Irene Dunne's  Back Street  character while reuniting the actress with Charles Boyer after their success in  Love Affair . Then we turn to the studio's B mode with Joe May's intermittently audacious, bu...

At last we come to the Daniel Day-Lewis perhaps best known to cinephiles: the over-the-top monstrous patriarchs of Martin Scorsese's  Gangs of New York  (2002) and Paul Thomas Anderson's  There  Will Be Blood  (2007). Working from a couple of the best viewings we've personally had of these movies, we discuss how Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview build upon the Day-Lewis persona, how they radic...

For our RKO 1939 episode, a Directed by Garson Kanin double feature:  Bachelor Mother , starring Ginger Rogers as an unwed department store clerk accused of motherhood; and  The Great Man Votes , starring John Barrymore as an alcoholic intellectual struggling to raise two children, including the most precocious child actor of them all, Virginia Weidler (of  Philadelphia Story  fame). We discuss th...

We return to our Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view with 1996's The Crucible (directed by Nicholas Hytner with a screenplay by Arthur Miller, based on his 1953 play) and 1997's The Boxer, reuniting Day-Lewis with writer-director Jim Sheridan and writer Terry George from In the Name of the Father and returning to the subject of Northern Ireland and the Troubles. We discuss the ways in which The...

This week's Special Subject takes a look at Sex, Satire, and American Culture in Frank Tashlin's  Artists and Models  (1955), starring Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, and Dorothy Malone, and in Billy Wilder's  Kiss Me, Stupid  (1964), starring Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, and Felicia Farr. Tashlin uses comic books to portray American culture as a strangely sexless-yet-sex-obses...

Fox, 1939: the Greater and the Lesser John Ford Fox movies of 1939,  Young Mr. Lincoln , and  Drums Along the Mohawk , both starring Henry Fonda. We argue with  Cahiers du Cinéma  about the politics of  Young Mr. Lincoln  and find continuities between Ford's work with Will Rogers and his presentation of Lincoln, and discuss Edna May Oliver's comic theft of an otherwise pretty standard, racist sett...

In this Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we look at two movies from 1993: Jim Sheridan's  In the Name of the Father , about mid-70s English-Irish relations, anti-terrorist hysteria, and father-son relationships; and  The Age of Innocence , Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel about social mores in New York at the end of the 19th century. We discuss Scorsese's layered...

Warner Brothers, 1939: this is a big one, a double feature of Dave Faves,  The Roaring Twenties , directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney and Priscilla Lane (among others), and  Dust Be My Destiny ,   directed by Lewis Seiler and starring John Garfield and Priscilla Lane again. We take the opportunity to contrast Cagney and Garfield, Warners' characteristic "proletarian" male stars of th...