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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1935: DAVID COPPERFIELD & TALE OF TWO CITIES

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

Release Date: 02/05/2021

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers – 1932: TAXI! & THREE ON A MATCH

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

This Warner Bros. 1932 episode is a double feature of Glasmon-Bright scripts directed by Pre-Code wizards: Mervyn LeRoy's Three on a Match, a tight little melodrama about the cryptic and arbitrary nature of self-destruction with Ann Dvorak as a wealthy housewife beset by ennui; and Roy Del Ruth's Taxi!, in which Loretta Young has to stand up to James Cagney's hot-headed cab driver, although neither his violence nor her self-control is going to help them fight those who have more power under capitalism. At 63 and 69 minutes respectively, they pack a Cagney-style punch--no flab, just...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 7: THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952) and THE GLASS WALL (1953)

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvreview recovers from last week's rough spot with two excellent roles in two excellent films that display her range as a character actress. In Vicente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), for which Gloria won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, she's a sweet but silly Southern belle curiously sacrificed by Kirk Douglas' relentlessly driven movie producer; and in Maxwell Shane's The Glass Wall (1953), she's a fed-up proletarian who rediscovers her humanity by helping Vittorio Gassman's Hungarian refugee. Our conversation moves from the opaque depths of...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1932: BLONDIE OF THE FOLLIES & FAITHLESS

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

This 1932 MGM Studios Year by Year episode is a Robert Montgomery double feature, although the spotlight is on his leading ladies: an incandescent Marion Davies in Blondie of the Follies (directed by Edmund Goulding), and a distraught Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless (directed by Harry Beaumont). We discuss the strengths and incoherencies of Anita Loos' and Frances Marion's screenplay for Blondie of the Follies (spoilers: it may have been tampered with by some guy named Hearst) and then turn to our strong reactions to MGM's intense Depression melodrama, in which Hugh...

Special Subject - Orson Welles and Jeanne Moreau – THE TRIAL (1962); CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965); and THE IMMORTAL STORY (1968)

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

Our August Special Subject is Literature vs. Welles vs. Moreau: we discuss the three finished films that Orson Welles made with Jeanne Moreau, whom he considered "the greatest actress in the world." The Trial (1962) stars Anthony Perkins in an adaptation of the Kafka novel; Chimes at Midnight (1965) stars Welles as Falstaff in an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henriad focused on the Prince Hal/Falstaff relationship; and The Immortal Story (1968) stars Welles and Moreau in an adaptation of a Karen Blixen story. Come for Welles' handling of these immortal stories, stay to...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 6: MACAO (1952) and SUDDEN FEAR (1952)

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

In this episode of our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, our protagonist is rudely shoved into the background of the movies, barely appearing in Josef von Sternberg's Macao (1950) (she would have liked to have appeared in it even less) and playing a rote schemer in David Miller's Sudden Fear (1952). The movies themselves don't make up for her under-use, despite the amiable pairing of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in the former and the great Joan Crawford sobbing her way to an Oscar nomination in the latter. We do our best to articulate what went wrong for...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1932: THE MAN I KILLED aka BROKEN LULLABY & HORSE FEATHERS

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

For this round of Paramount 1932, we watched our first Marx Brothers movie for the podcast (hard as that is to believe), Horse Feathers (directed by Norman Z. MacLeod), alongside Ernst Lubitsch's only sound-era drama, Broken Lullaby. Lubitsch's batshit WWI melodrama, bursting with intensity and unease, claims our attention first, and then we turn to the detached anarchy of the Marx Brothers. Elise probes Dave's obsession with their antics and offers her outsider's take on the poetics of their personas for his contemplation. Time Codes: 0h 00m...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 5: IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) and THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

This week in our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view we watched one of her best-known films, In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring Humphrey Bogart, alongside the unpromising Cecil B. DeMille circus drama The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). This may be the only time you find these two movies discussed together with roughly equal enthusiasm. Ray's portrait of a romance doomed by male violence may have psychological perception and stylish writing, but DeMille's Technicolor spectacle has a clown with a dark secret (played by Jimmy Stewart no...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1931: BAD SISTER & STRICTLY DISHONORABLE

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

For our Universal 1931 Studios Year by Year episode we took in a Sidney Fox double feature, Bad Sister (adapted from a Booth Tarkington novel, with an early role for Bette Davis as the good sister) and Strictly Dishonorable (adapted from Preston Sturges' only successful play and directed by John Stahl). Laemmle Jr.'s protegée uses her ingenue quality to good effect whether she's playing an unsympathetic Alice Adams or a complex early Sturges heroine, and in fact we argue that the latter performance is something of a tour de force, leading us to lament...

Special Subject - Supported By Oscar Levant – the 1950s – AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951); THE I DON’T CARE GIRL (1953) & THE BAND WAGON (1953)

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

Our final Oscar Levant Special Subject episode covers his contribution to two of the greatest MGM musicals, Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) and The Band Wagon (1953), plus a 20th Century Fox curiosity, The I Don't Care Girl (1953) in which Mitzi Gaynor supposedly plays early 20th century vaudeville wild woman Eva Tanguay. Levant reaches new heights as a cinematic presence in An American in Paris, a film that, we argue, forms part of an "art life" Levant trilogy with Rhapsody in Blue and Humoresque, then flaunts some virtuoso...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1931: CIMARRON (dir. Wesley Ruggles) and TRAVELING HUSBANDS (dir. Paul Sloane)

There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film

The movies we viewed for this RKO 1931 Studios Year by Year episode couldn't be more different: the sprawling Cimarron (starring Richard Dix as America's psychotic inner conflict) prompts us to speculate about Edna Ferber as a source auteur and the intertwining of her vision of America with Hollywood across three decades; while the tight, play-like Traveling Husbands (starring Evelyn Brent as a bitter sex worker with noble impulses), demonstrates the pressures capitalism exerts on men and therefore on women. But together, these movies show that the Pre-Code is good for a lot...

More Episodes

MGM, 1935, and two David O. Selznick Dickens adaptations: George Cukor's David Copperfield and Jack Conway's A Tale of Two Cities. Hollywood invents a cinematic language for Dickens, using a mixture of American and British actors, and miraculously pulls it off, in what Dave considers Selznick's finest hour as a producer. (We know he means with the exception of Portrait of Jennie.) We discuss the complex psychology of Copperfield and the simplistic history of Tale of Two Cities.

Also discussed in the episode: Kate Corbelay, head of the story department at MGM.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s: David Copperfield [dir. George Cukor]

1h 00m 015s: A Tale of Two Cities [dir. Jack Conway]

1h 49m 08s: Listener correspondence from Adam

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*Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)

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