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 - Lois Weber Sampler – HYPOCRITES (1915); WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN? (1916); SHOES (1916); and THE BLOT (1921)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We devoted our 2024 September Special Subject to American silent film auteur Lois Weber. We discuss four films, the allegorical Hypocrites (1915), which created a sensation at the time with its full-frontal female nudity, and three films that showcase Weber's progressive Christian social vision, Where Are My Children? (1916), which confusedly tackles the subjects of birth control and abortion, and the masterpieces Shoes (1916) and The Blot (1921), dramas centered on the consciousness of women that deal respectively with working-class and genteel...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1947: TIME OUT OF MIND & THE WEB
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
In this 1947 Universal Studios Year by Year episode, a little Ella Raines never hurt no one: we struggle to understand her role in the intermittently riveting Gothic melodrama Time Out of Mind (stylishly directed by Robert Siodmak), while Edmond O'Brien struggles to understand her role in Vincent Price's life in The Web, a white-collar film noir directed by future blacklistee Michael Gordon. Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s: TIME OUT OF MIND [dir. Robert Siodmak] 0h 20m 07s: THE WEB [dir. Michael Gordon] Studio Film Capsules...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Paul Robeson – Part 1: BODY & SOUL (1925) and BORDERLINE (1930)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
The first episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series has a high context-to-text ratio, as we introduce one of the most important figures in entertainment and political activism of the 20th century. The two movies we look at, Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul (1925) and Kenneth Macpherson's Borderline (1930), by auteurs from radically different backgrounds with radically different aims, provide a fascinating glimpse of the spectrum of possibilities for independent cinema in the late silent era. Time Codes: 0h 00m 30s: Brief...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1947: BORN TO KILL & OUT OF THE PAST
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We've been waiting for this episode, a 1947 RKO noir double bill with two of the all-time greats, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum's cool detective and Jane Greer’s psychopathic moll work at cross purposes in their attempts to escape their shady pasts so that they can be free to love, and Robert Wise's Born to Kill, in which Claire Trevor's morally flexible social climber and Lawrence Tierney's paranoid psychopath just work at cross purposes. Elise agrees with Bosley Crowther that Born to Kill, one of her Top 10 favourite movies, "is not only...
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Special Subject: King Vidor Sampler, the 1930s – STREET SCENE (1931), CYNARA (1932), OUR DAILY BREAD (1934) & STELLA DALLAS (1937)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We went deep for our second King Vidor Special Subject episode, looking at four films from the 1930s: Street Scene (1931), adapted by Elmer Rice from his famous stage play about working-class New Yorkers; the little-known Cynara (1932), starring Ronald Colman as a kindly upper-middle-class man who stumbles into adultery and the abyss; Our Daily Bread (1934), Vidor's eccentric, self-produced response to the Great Depression; and Stella Dallas, one of the great woman's pictures, centered on one of Barbara Stanwyck's greatest performances. Class,...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Lilli Palmer – Part 19: THE HOLCROFT COVENANT (1985) and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (2018)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our final Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is an odd one, with Dave arguing for the value of John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant (1985), a Nazi conspiracy thriller from a novel by Robert Ludlum, and Elise arguing for the value of The Other Side of the Wind (2018), Orson Welles' startling comeback film-that-never-was. Then we give our favourite Lilli Palmer films, with rationales, and respond to some listener communiqués. Time Codes: 0h 00m 30s: THE HOLCROFT COVENANT (1985) [dir. John Frankenheimer] 0h 22m...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – 20th Century Fox – 1947: BOOMERANG & KISS OF DEATH
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
This Fox 1947 Studios Year by Year episode looks at two examples of the docu-noir: Boomerang! (directed by Elia Kazan), starring Dana Andrews as a prosecuting attorney who has to decide between morality and political expedience; and Kiss of Death (directed by Henry Hathaway), in which Victor Mature's sympathetic gangster is menaced by Richard Widmark's psychopathic gangster and the legal system. Then another oddball assortment of movies in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966),...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Lilli Palmer – Part 18: LOTTE IN WEIMAR (1975) and THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our penultimate Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode brings us Lilli as a protagonist again at last, in Lotte in Weimar (1975), based on the Thomas Mann novel, and Lilli Lite in The Boys from Brazil (1978), an outrageous anti-Nazi sci fi story in which Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck wage an epic battle (and also get into a very brutal girl-fight). And this week's Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto is a real smorgasbord: Saturday Night Fever, Coffy, It Happened One Night, and Beverly Hills Cop. From the charm of young John Travolta to screwball...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers – 1947: POSSESSED & DARK PASSAGE
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
This Warner Bros. 1947 Studios Year by Year episode features two gems that put their own particular slant on noir's familiar theme of murderous conflict between women and men: Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed, starring a more-than-usually deranged Joan Crawford, with Van Heflin as the rakish object of her obsession, and Delmer Daves' Dark Passage, starring an unusually passive Humphrey Bogart as a man convicted of killing his wife, with Lauren Bacall as an eccentric socialite who decides to help him. And in our Fear and Moviegoing segment, a real clash of moods: Ridley Scott's terrifying...
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Special Subject – Anna Magnani Sampler, Part 2 - THE ROSE TATTOO (1955), WILD IS THE WIND (1957), THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960) and MAMA ROMA (1962)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our second Anna Magnani Sampler includes three Hollywood films, two with parts written for her by her friend Tennessee Williams, as well as the second film directed by Pasolini: The Rose Tattoo (1955), Wild is the Wind (1957), The Fugitive Kind (1960), and Mamma Roma (1962). Paired with a wacky Burt Lancaster, a bullying Anthony Quinn, a quietly intense Brando, or a nihilistic teenager, Magnani takes on such enemies as the racist South, patriarchy, and the class system with varying results, but always with ferocity and gusto. Time Codes: 0h 00m...
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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