Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1934: THE BLACK CAT and ONE MORE RIVER
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Release Date: 01/08/2021
Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers – 1934: I AM A THIEF & I’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
On this week's Warner Bros. 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we look at some of the studio's mid-30s B-output: the jazzy, Modernist, montage-ist, telephonic I've Got Your Number, starring Pat O'Brien as an insouciant and sometimes insolent Everyman (in a comedy team-up we never knew we needed with fuming mentor Eugene Pallette) whose redemption arc is sparked by beleaguered working girl Joan Blondell; and I Am a Thief, with Mary Astor and Ricardo Cortez playing hot potato with the title's claim. Do either of these films qualify as "termite art"? Do both? Listen and learn! ...
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The Archers in Black and White – A CANTERBURY TALE (1944); I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945) and THE SMALL BACK ROOM (1949) + 2026 Toronto Silent Film Festival
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our Special Subject for this month is The Archers in Black and White: A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), and The Small Back Room (1949). We discuss Powell and Pressburger's interest in the claims and sins of tradition and modernity, their handling of intense romantic relationships, and their search for transcendence in nature and the past. Then, in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we briefly discuss the films we saw at the 2026 Toronto Silent Film Festival, including the 1926 Beau Geste with Ronald Colman,...
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Acteurist Spotlight – Deborah Kerr – Part 3: TEA AND SYMPATHY (1956) and BELOVED INFIDEL (1959)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We conclude our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight with a couple of her big Hollywood movies after the turning point of From Here to Eternity: Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (1956), in which she appears as Laura Reynolds, a role she originated on Broadway; and Henry King's Beloved Infidel (1959), in which she stars as Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham in an autobiographical account of a fascinating rags-to-modest-wealth-and-influence story intersecting with F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years of alcoholic decline and exile in Hollywood. We discuss Minnelli and...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1934: A WICKED WOMAN & SEQUOIA
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our MGM 1934 episode this week is a Jean Parker (Beth in RKO's 1933 Little Women) double feature. She plays the rebellious daughter in the family melodrama Wicked Woman, which features a fine central performance by noted theatre actress and blacklistee Mady Christians, and a conservationist's daughter who starts an "unlikely animal friends" experiment with a puma cub and a fawn in Sequoia. While the former treads relatively familiar territory with a mixture of pre-Code intensity and wacky domestic humour (supplied by Sterling Holloway and Betty Furness, an odder couple than the...
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Acteurist Spotlight – Deborah Kerr – Part 2: PLEASE BELIEVE ME (1950) and DREAM WIFE (1953)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For the 2nd part of our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight we check in on Kerr's "lost years" at MGM to see what Hollywood was finding for her to do before her breakthrough performance in From Here to Eternity. In Norman Taurog's Please Believe Me (1950) she leads a cast of oddballs, including Robert Walker and Peter Lawford, as a respectable British girl who learns how to be American by first being mistaken for, and then deciding to become, a Stanwyck-type comedy heroine; and in Sidney Sheldon's satirical Dream Wife (1953) she helps the future I Dream of...
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Special Subject - Elise’s Family Freak-Outs – Part 1 - TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) and THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS (2001)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
With this episode we launch the first of Elise's three-part Special Subject, Family Freak-Outs. We start with some musings about how to define this micro-genre, what makes it different from a standard family melodrama and its relationship to horror, and then we move into our first two freak-outs, Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger (1990) and Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenebaums (2001). While the problems these families are dealing with in their very specific milieus of middle-class black South Central LA and upper-middle-class white fairy-tale Manhattan are very...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1934: SEARCH FOR BEAUTY & CRIME WITHOUT PASSION
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For this Paramount 1934 episode we watched Search for Beauty, which pits beauty-as-health (a wasted and almost unrecognizable Ida Lupino and frequently topless, sometimes bottomless, and always witless Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe) against beauty-as-sex in a meta-commentary on pre-Codes released just before the crackdown, and the Hecht-MacArthur-Garmes Crime Without Passion, starring Claude Rains and Margo as a couple destined to destroy each other in a full-blown film noir six years before that "cycle" started. The latter adds to the evidence for Paramount as the...
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Acteurist Spotlight – Deborah Kerr – Part 1: LOVE ON THE DOLE (1941) and PERFECT STRANGERS (1945)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our Deborah Kerr Acteurist Spotlight starts strong with two entertaining progressive WWII-era British films, John Baxter's Love on the Dole (1941), a socialist portrayal of working-class life in Manchester during the Great Depression, and Alexander Korda's Perfect Strangers (aka Vacation from Marriage), a sort of comedy of remarriage that envisions a radically new kind of marriage arising out of wartime upheavals in gender roles and middle-class routine. Elise confesses and recants her previous opinion that Deborah Kerr was a solid but slightly boring choice....
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1933: THE INVISIBLE MAN & COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For this Universal 1933 Studios Year by Year episode we commit the sacrilege of trashing a James Whale movie, The Invisible Man, which is also Claude Rains' first major screen role, albeit mainly as a voice. A ranting, irascible voice in a movie with very little evidence (in our irresponsible opinion) of Whale's voice. But then we turn to a movie bearing a strong directorial imprint, William Wyler's Counsellor at Law, which contains probably John Barrymore's best screen performance. We discuss Wyler's contested status among auteurists and the multiple layers of Elmer Rice's...
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Acteurist Spotlight - Delphine Seyrig – Part 3: JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975) and GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We bid a fond farewell to our Acteurist Spotlight on Delphine Seyrig with the greatest movie of all-time (as of the most recent BFI critics' poll), Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and its "sequel," Golden Eighties (1986), Akerman's retro-80s-while-it's -still-happening musical. We give our latest thoughts on anxiety, oppression, and orgasms in Jeanne Dielman before turning to a very different Jeanne played by Seyrig and a different aspect of Akerman's grappling with her family history. In Golden Eighties, Akerman takes a...
info_outlineA stunning episode of The Studios, Year by Year: a great year for Universal, 1934, gives us The Black Cat, the one big studio success of Edgar G. Ulmer, icon of marginal filmmaking; and James Whale’s under-discussed One More River, based on the novel by John Galsworthy. Elise concocts a reading to justify her early, confused understanding of The Black Cat as being about WWII rather than WWI. Then we continue to weave our auteur theory about Whale’s interest in women’s experience of oppression related to sexual shame. As the Year of the Code continues, two more movies that should never have gotten made: Satan worshipping, flaying old friends alive, virgin sacrifice, marital rape, striking wives with riding crops, and executing demonic cats with knives is what Universal is all about in 1934. And wait for next episode, when we tell you what the original script of Stahl’s Imitation of Life included to trigger Breen!
Time Codes:
0h 01m 00s: The Back Cat [dir. Edgar G. Ulmer]
0h 44m 58s: One More River [dir. James Whale]
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Theme Music:
“What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?” – Le Tigre