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Acteurist Oeuvre-View – Season 2 – Setsuko Hara: The Daughter of the Samurai (1937) & No Regrets For Our Youth (1946)

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

Release Date: 05/02/2020

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...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1946: MISS SUSIE SLAGLE’S and THE BLUE DAHLIA

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

In this Paramount 1946 episode we look at two movies featuring Veronica Lake which otherwise could not be more dissimilar: Miss Susie Slagle's (directed by John Berry), about the trials of pre-WWI Johns Hopkins medical students living in a boarding house presided over by Lillian Gish; and famous Lake/Ladd noir outing, The Blue Dahlia (directed by George Marshall and written by Raymond Chandler). We discuss the potential influence of the leftists involved in making Miss Susie Slagle's on its portrayal of race and gender and debate the amount of...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1945: THE SUSPECT & LADY ON A TRAIN

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

In this Universal 1945 episode of The Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year, we look at a couple of noir-adjacent films, Robert Siodmak's The Suspect, starring Charles Laughton as an abused husband who looks for a way out of his miserable marriage when he meets sweet and lovely Ella Raines, and the comedy/crime film Lady on a Train, which stars Deanna Durbin as an exuberant and resourceful murder mystery addict who gets involved in a real investigation when she witnesses a murder from her train window. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we discuss three short documentaries about...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Lilli Palmer – Part 9: MAIN STREET TO BROADWAY (1953) and FEUERWERK (1954)

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

In this Lilli Palmer Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we discuss Tay Garnett's Main Street to Broadway (1953), a pleasant curiosity with an all-star New York theatre cast, including Palmer and Rex Harrison in a brief sandwich-themed couple cameo, but nearly stolen by Lynchian radio humourist Herb Shriner; and Fireworks (1954), Palmer's first German film, in which she plays a circus performer possessed by the guiding spirit of her clown father, as she expresses in the well-known song "O mein Papa." And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we discuss Douglas Sirk's outlandish yet...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1945: JOHNNY ANGEL & CORNERED

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

For this RKO 1945 episode, two beautifully filmed noirs (by Harry J. Wild), Edwin L. Marin's Johnny Angel, another noir with a femme fatale (Claire Trevor) who loves too much (and gets a very unexpected - and gory - redemption), and Edward Dmytryk's Cornered, in which Dick Powell learns why you shouldn't hunt down Nazis and kill them with your bare hands, but doesn't seem very interested. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, we discuss the 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine, in which James Baldwin talks to the people who were there about the failures...

Valentine’s Special Subject – MARNIE (1964) & LA CAPTIVE (2000)

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

For our Valentine's 2024 episode we looked at two movies about obsession that interrogate the notion of romantic love: Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) and Chantal Akerman's La Captive (2000). If you think an extensive discussion of sexual assault and of what it would mean to be "pressed to death" by your partner's love sounds like essential Valentine's Day content, this episode is for you. And in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto, a very brief discussion of Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, focusing on the wild performances of Robert Stack and Dorothy...

More Episodes

In the inaugural episode of our Setsuko Hara Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, the vagaries of foreign film availability lead to an historically illuminating double feature. First up, the fascist propaganda film that made the teenage Setsuko a star, a Japanese-German co-production, melodrama/mountain film/semi-documentary extravaganza, The Daughter of the Samurai (1937), directed by Arnold Fanck and Mansaku Itami. Followed by Akira Kurosawa's No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), a celebration of the wartime anti-fascist resistance, from the unusual perspective (for both the subject and Kurosawa's subsequent career) of a young bourgeois woman who struggles to find a place for himself within that movement. And in our Bonus section, we discuss David O. Selznick's feminine ideal, disclose tidbits from Jennifer Jones's career, and deem beloved critic David Thomson an assclown, before closing with Elise's reading of her favourite Selznick memo.

Time Codes:

0h 01m 00s: Setsuko Hara intro

0h 09m 30s: Atarashiki Tsuchi [aka The Daughter of the Samurai] (1937; dirs: ‎Arnold Fanc &; Nagamasa Kitaka)

0h 50m 55s: No Regrets For Our Youth (1946; dir: Akira Kurosawa)

1h 29m 36s: Memos From Elise on Memo From David O. Selznick

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* Check out our Complete Upcoming Episode Schedule

* Find Elise’s latest published film piece – “Elaine May’s Male Gaze” – in the Elaine May issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room*

*And Read Elise’s Writing at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cléo, and Bright Lights.*

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Theme Music:

“What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?” – Le Tigre

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