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Valentine’s Day 2023 – KISS ME GOODBYE (1982) and MY FAVORITE WIFE (1940) + FEAR & MOVIEGOING IN TORONTO – TIFF Lightbox - Love Will Tear Us Apart Series

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

Release Date: 02/10/2023

Special Subject – Produced By Sam Goldwyn, The 1940s: THE LITTLE FOXES (1941), THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942), THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946), and MY FOOLISH HEART (1949)

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

This week we have a whopping big episode for you: Part 2 of our look at Samuel Goldwyn Productions, dealing with the 1940s; and, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, brief discussions of three Powell and Pressburgers, kicking off TIFF's May retrospective. For this episode we watched The Little Foxes (directed by William Wyler), The Pride of the Yankees (directed by Sam Wood), The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler again), and My Foolish Heart (directed by Mark Robson). From scheming capitalists to heroic baseball stars to casting a critical eye on...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1946: STEP BY STEP & CRACK-UP

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

In this RKO 1946 episode we discuss Crack-Up (directed by Irving Reis), an eerie noir with a couple of great Expressionist set pieces. Pat O'Brien oozes vulnerability as a WWII vet and populist art critic who has to find out who's trying to make him look, or go, insane; Claire Trevor plays the love interest who's trying to help him (or is she?). Oh yeah, and we also watched Step By Step (directed by Phil Rosen), a goofy spy drama in which Lawrence Tierney gets to play a nice guy for once. Remember this episode when we watch Tierney and Trevor at their nastiest in Born to...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Lilli Palmer – Part 13: THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY (1961) & THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR (1962)

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

This week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode is a George Seaton double feature that once again gives us Lilli the sophisticate and Lilli the saint: in The Pleasure of His Company (1961), she plays the ex-wife of Fred Astaire, an absentee father whose plan to recapture his youth by seducing their daughter into becoming his travelling companion she sets out to foil; while in The Counterfeit Traitor, she's a member of the German anti-Nazi resistance who imparts a conscience to William Holden's reluctant spy. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto we cover our final...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – 20th Century-Fox – 1946: THE DARK CORNER & THE RAZOR’S EDGE

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

This week's Fox 1946 Studios Year by Year episode features the strange bedfellows of Henry Hathaway's The Dark Corner, a curiously feminist film noir in which the tormented protagonist is saved by the persistence of a good woman (played by Lucille Ball), and Edmund Goulding's The Razor's Edge, based on a Somerset Maugham novel about spiritual enlightenment and bourgeois ennui, featuring Gene Tierney's best performance, although Anne Baxter won the Oscar. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, the TIFF Cinematheque Duras retrospective continues with Nathalie Granger, Baxter, Vera Baxter,...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Lilli Palmer – Part 12: BUT NOT FOR ME (1959) and CONSPIRACY OF HEARTS (1960)

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

Our examination of the film career of Lilli Palmer continues with a couple of excellent films that show us Palmer's range when playing "loveable": But Not for Me, in which she gives a comedic performance as the ex-wife of a Broadway producer played by Clark Gable, benevolently interfering in his budding relationship with young actress Carroll Baker; and Conspiracy of Hearts, in which Palmer plays an Italian Mother Superior who persuades her nuns to help Jewish children escape from a concentration camp. Penned by a couple of American blacklistees, Conspiracy of Hearts has a...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers – 1946: DEVOTION & NIGHT AND DAY

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

For this Warner Bros. 1946 episode we watched two fantastical biopics, Devotion (directed by Curtis Bernhardt), starring Ida Lupino and Olivia de Havilland as Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and Night and Day (directed by Michael Curtiz), starring Cary Grant as Cole Porter and Monty Woolley as himself. We found them to be like night and day in terms of their quality, but you'll have to listen to find out which of the two we deemed redeemable. And then for something completely different: in a long Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, tragic love, communism,...

Special Subject – Produced By Sam Goldwyn, The 1930s - THE DARK ANGEL (1935), DODSWORTH (1936), THESE THREE (1936) and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939)

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

In our April Special Subject, Part 1 of our look at the films of Samuel Goldwyn, we discuss Dark Angel (1935), These Three (1936), Dodsworth (1936), and Wuthering Heights (1939), a selection heavy on Dave favourites Merle Oberon, William Wyler, and Gregg Toland. We ask in what sense these are "quality" films, and in what ways they escape our expectations of that category, calling attention to the theme of psychological violence in These Three and Wuthering Heights and the role played by gender double standards in the...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Lilli Palmer – Part 11: LES AMANTS DE MONTPARNASSE (1958) and MADCHEN IN UNIFORM (1958)

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

For this week's Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we watched Jacques Becker's The Lovers of Montparnasse (1958), in which Palmer, playing Modigliani's rejected lover Beatrice Hastings, perfects her persona of brittle dissociation; and Mädchen in Uniform, the 1958 remake of the famous Weimar-era film about a teenager at an all-girls' boarding school who falls in love with her teacher. Our viewings provoke topics from the relationship between art and capitalism to the relationship between gender, sexuality, and militarism. Time Codes: 0h 00m...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – MGM – 1946: TWO SMART PEOPLE and A LETTER FOR EVIE

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

This MGM 1946 Studios Year by Year episode is a Jules Dassin double feature that shows the range of the famed blacklistee even during his most constrained studio period: the noirish romantic drama Two Smart People, about two con artists (Lucille Ball and John Hodiak) and a cop who are all out to con each other; and the remarkable A Letter for Evie (starring Marsha Hunt and Hume Cronyn), a very postmodern (but also hilarious) deconstruction of gender conventions that's also a moving romance. Time Codes: 0h 00m 35s: 1946 at MGM and...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Lilli Palmer – Part 10: TEUFEL IN SEIDE (1956) and LA VIE À DEUX (1958)

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

For this Lilli Palmer episode of our Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, we watched another West German movie, Devil in Silk (directed by Rolf Hansen), and Life Together (directed by Clément Duhour), a tribute to famed French playwright, screenwriter, and film director Sacha Guitry with an all-star cast. We analyze the surprisingly sophisticated structure of Duhour and Guitry's horned-up middlebrow French comedy (warning: one of the comedy sequences discussed is disturbingly racist), while Devil in Silk answers a question it never occurred to us to ask: what...

More Episodes

Our Valentine's Day 2023 episode is all about loves from the past who have inconveniently returned. In My Favorite Wife (1940), Irene Dunne is newly remarried Cary Grant's presumed dead wife, while in Kiss Me Goodbye (1982), James Caan is Sally Field's actually dead, or undead, husband, interfering with her engagement to the (ostensibly) less charismatic Jeff Bridges. We apply Stanley Cavell's concept of the "comedy of remarriage" to these movies and conclude that the comedy of My Favorite Wife really has nothing to do with its premise, whereas Kiss Me Goodbye does perform some interesting twists on comedy of remarriage tropes. In Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, two more movies about love pick up these themes: Stanley Kwan's Rouge (1987) and Dorothy Arzner's Merrily We Go to Hell (1932). Happy Haunted Valentine's Day!

Time Codes:

0h 0m 45s: MY FAVORITE WIFE (1940) [dir. Garson Kanin]

0h 29m 59s: KISS ME GOODBYE (1982) [dir. Robert Mulligan]

0h 49m 58s: FEAR & MOVIEGOING IN TORONTO – ROUGE (1987) by Stanley Kwan & MERRILY WE GO TO HELL (1932) by Dorothy Arzner

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* Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring

* 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 piece on Gangs of New York – “Making America Strange Again”

* Check out Dave’s 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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