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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers – 1938: THE SISTERS & THE DAWN PATROL

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

Release Date: 12/31/2021

Halloween 2024 Special Subject: With Mad Love from Peter Lorre - M (1931) and MAD LOVE (1935)

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

For our 2024 Halloween Special Subject we watched two films in the German Expressionist tradition starring one of the greatest actors to be relegated to Hollywood character actor status, Peter Lorre: Fritz Lang's masterpiece M (1931), through which Lorre came to international recognition playing a child murderer, and Lorre's first Hollywood film, Karl Freund's Mad Love (1935), to which he also brought his special blend of pathos and perversion. We discuss serial killers, scapegoats, sadism, cyberpunk zombies, love, sex, and other topics certain to terrify. Time...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Paul Robeson – Part 4: BIG FELLA (1937) and KING SOLOMON’S MINES (1937)

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

Things are looking up in this week's Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, for which we watched Big Fella (directed by J. Elder Willis), in which Robeson is a dockworker who becomes involved in the search for a kidnapped rich kid, and King Solomon's Mines (directed by Robert Stevenson), the first film adaptation of the H. Rider Haggard colonial adventure epic. We make our arguments for Big Fella as an anti-Shirley Temple movie that both accomplishes and subverts its genre goals and for King Solomon's Mines' Verhoevening of its reactionary...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM - 1948: SUMMER HOLIDAY and EASTER PARADE

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

Our MGM 1948 Studios Year by Year episode is a Freed Unit double feature: the great Irving Berlin musical Easter Parade, starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, and Summer Holiday, a Mickey Rooney coming-of-age story based on a play by Eugene O'Neill, directed by studio-era "art director" Rouben Mamoulian. We discuss Easter Parade as a vehicle for presenting Judy Garland's "problematic" anti-star star persona and Summer Holiday's envelope-pushing leftist politics and middle-class sexual repression plot, wrapped up in cozy turn-of-the-century nostalgia. Time...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Paul Robeson – Part 3: SHOW BOAT (1936) & SONG OF FREEDOM (1936)

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

In this episode of our Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we consider the ways in which Robeson, as acteur, inscribes himself on James Whale's Show Boat (1936) and J. Elder Wills' Song of Freedom (1936). First, we consider the racial themes of Show Boat, and how both the writing of Robeson's character, and Robeson's playing of him, undermines the stereotype ostensibly being presented; and then we look at the way Song of Freedom struggles to present a progressivism alternative to the racial politics of The Emperor Jones, while we attempt to...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount - 1948: SO EVIL MY LOVE & THE BIG CLOCK

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

In this Paramount 1948 episode we dig deep to get the stories behind the stories of two great film noirs starring Ray Milland: The Big Clock (directed by John Farrow), based on a novel by Depression-era poet and Communist Party fellow traveler Kenneth Fearing, and So Evil My Love (directed by Lewis Allen), a historical noir/Gothic melodrama based on a novel by the prolific and many-pseudonymed Marjorie Bowen. We discuss the ways in which the source authors' viewpoints make for fascinating deviations from standard Hollywood treatment of capitalism and...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Paul Robeson – Part 2: THE EMPEROR JONES (1933) & SANDERS OF THE RIVER (1935)

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

For our second Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we watched The Emperor Jones (1933), a film by Dudley Murphy loosely based on the Eugene O'Neill play, and the Kordas' Sanders of the River (1935), an experience that proved crucial in Robeson's own political education. We discuss the Modernist appropriation of African culture and the figure of the African American, methods of rationalizing British colonialism, and the kinds of protagonist roles available for a Black actor of Paul Robeson's popularity with white audiences in the first half of the 20th...

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...

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...

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...

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...

More Episodes

It's 1938 and Warner Bros. is in its prime, and so is Bette Davis, just now moving into the kind of top-quality romantic melodramas in which she'd excel. No longer the studio of James Cagney, Joan Blondell, gangster heroes and Busby Berkeley spectacles, it's now the studio of Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, glossy melodramas and action-adventure heroes; or at least, these stars and genres are co-existing with Cagney, Robinson, John Garfield, and soon, Humphrey Bogart vehicles. Warners is broadening its range and turning into the greatest of the studios (prove us wrong).

As for this episode: The Sisters (Anatole Litvak) stars Davis and Flynn as ill-matched lovers contending with gender role expectations and Flynn's obscure demons. Then in The Dawn Patrol, Edmund Goulding's anti-war masterpiece, Flynn transfers his affections to David Niven and his piebald pjs. Even though there's not a single woman glimpsed and barely a woman mentioned, Flynn, Niven, Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp, and Donald Crisp's imaginary dog achieve enough emotional intimacy and relationship intensity to satisfy any viewer under Goulding's direction.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s: Warner Brothers Transformation During the Late 1930s

0h 04m 02s: THE SISTERS (dir. Anatole Litvak)

0h 41m 04s: THE DAWN PATROL (dir. Edmund Goulding)

Studio Film Capsules provided The Warner Brothers Story by Clive Hirschhorn

Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler

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* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s

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

* Read Elise’s latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating.

* Check out Dave’s new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!

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