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
Special Subject - Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel Series – LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS (1959); ANTOINE ET COLETTE (1962); BAISERS VOLÉS (1968); DOMICILE CONJUGAL (1970) and L'AMOUR EN FUITE (1979)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For our November 2025 Special Subject we watched the Antoine Doinel films of François Truffaut: The 400 Blows (1959), Antoine et Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979). In addition to the charms of star/auteur avatar Jean-Pierre Léaud, we focus on the films' evolving style and increasing interest in the women in Doinel's life. And in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto section we discuss Paul Leni's horror comedy The Cat and the Canary (1927) and a Hitchcock...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 11: NOT AS A STRANGER (1955) and THE COBWEB (1955)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view continues with two 1955 liberal institutional melodramas: Stanley Kramer's Not as a Stranger, starring Robert Mitchum as a monomaniacally idealistic doctor, Olivia de Havilland as the wife he takes for granted, and Gloria as the Other Woman; and Vincente Minnelli's underrated The Cobweb, starring Richard Widmark as a monomaniacally idealistic psychiatrist, Gloria (in one of her best roles) as the wife he takes for granted, and Lauren Bacall as the Other Woman. The relatively counter-intuitive casting of the latter film is an...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1932: THE OLD DARK HOUSE and THE MUMMY
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We've got a Halloween Hangover on this week's episode, with two Universal 1932 horror movies, James Whale's The Old Dark House (based on a novel by J. B. Priestley) and Karl Freund's The Mummy, starring Karloff. We explore the curious tone, social themes, and stellar cast (including Charles Laughton, Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore, Melvyn Douglas, and the excellent Lilian Bond) of Whale's Gothic oddity and The Mummy's connection to Dracula movie history. Then the hangover continues in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: we discuss our latest theatrical viewing of the...
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Special Subject - Halloween 2025 – Solo Freakouts - HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968) and VAMPIRE’S KISS (1988)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our 2025 Halloween episode is a double feature in the "mentally disintegrating men" genre: in Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, Max von Sydow is beset by some unusual vampires, and in Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss, Nicolas Cage becomes an even more unusual one. If people attempting to bite each other to death without proper vampire fangs is your idea of horror, this is the right Halloween film podcast episode for you. (And if it's not, watch these movies and you may change your mind.) If your idea of horror is desperately needing other people without being able to stand being...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 10: HUMAN DESIRE (1954) and NAKED ALIBI (1954)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
In this week's Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode our heroine reunites with Fritz Lang and Glenn Ford in Human Desire (1954), based on the Zola novel La bête humaine, which was more faithfully filmed by Renoir in 1938. We debate the relative merits of the two adaptations as well as the potential weakness that links them. Then we turn to the quirky little noir Naked Alibi (also 1954, co-starring Sterling Hayden), in which Gloria gets to be the hero against a thoroughly incoherent backdrop to which we apply some scattershot social analysis....
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1932: What Price Hollywood? and The Animal Kingdom
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
In this RKO 1932 Studios Year by Year episode we discuss a couple of trademark Selznick productions: What Price Hollywood?, the first iteration of the A Star Is Born story, starring Constance Bennett as the rising star Mary Evans, "America's pal," and Lowell Sherman as her tormented director mentor; and The Animal Kingdom, based on the Philip Barry play, with Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, and Myrna Loy in a highbrow Pre-Code love triangle. Marriage takes a real beating in these rare movies exploring alternative kinds of loving relationships between women and men....
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 9: PRISONERS OF THE CASBAH (1953) and THE GOOD DIE YOUNG (1954)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
This week's Gloria Grahame episode sees our acteur making some questionable career decisions: a rare headlining role in Columbia's Orientalist stinker Prisoners of the Casbah (1953), displaying a phenomenal lack of chemistry with Turhan Bey; and a micro-role in intriguing British heist noir The Good Die Young (1954) as a pragmatic actress tormenting husband John Ireland with her indifference. We find what there is to like in this quality dip, or, failing that, what there is to mock. Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s: PRISONERS OF THE CASBAH (1953) [dir. Richard...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Fox Film Corporation – 1932: YOUNG AMERICA & PASSPORT TO HELL
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For this 1932 Fox Studios Year by Year episode we watched Frank Borzage's unloved Young America, an idiosyncratic, primitive melodrama starring Spencer Tracy as a wealthy drugstore owner at odds with a disadvantaged delinquent, and Passport to Hell, Fox's surprisingly good take on the Sternberg-Dietrich formula, starring Elissa Landi as a woman of ill repute at odds with the colonial authorities in German West Africa. No rural themes in sight in this episode, just the tribulations and heroism of the underdog. Time Codes: 0h 00m 35s: YOUNG...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 8: MAN ON A TIGHTROPE (1953) and THE BIG HEAT (1953)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
In this week's episode of the Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, our heroine battles an organized crime ring in Fritz Lang's classic noir The Big Heat and the Soviets, or in any case her beleaguered circus capitalist husband, Fredric March, in Elia Kazan's Man on a Tightrope (both 1953). Dave and Elise are somewhat at odds about the effectiveness of Tightrope's anti-censorship message, but united on the effectiveness of Lang's use of the noir genre, and Grahame, to depict heroism in a world familiar with the horrors of fascism. Time Codes: 0h 00m...
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Special Subject - Accents on Olivier – THE 49th PARALLEL (1941) and THE DEMI-PARADISE (1943)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our Special Subject for September 2025 led us to watch a couple of wartime British films starring Laurence Olivier and his amazing accents: Québécois in Powell and Pressburger's The 49th Parallel (1941), which opposes a Platonic Idea of Canada to Nazi ideology, and Russian in Anthony Asquith's The Demi-Paradise (1943), an alarmingly Soviet-friendly use of the romantic comedy genre to promote cross-cultural understanding. The accents may lack technical accuracy (much like the films' depictions of various cultures), but the ideas on display are worth grappling with...
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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