Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – 20th Century Fox – 1947: BOOMERANG & KISS OF DEATH
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Release Date: 08/09/2024
Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Paul Robeson – Part 5: JERICHO (1937) and THE PROUD VALLEY (1940)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For our penultimate Paul Robeson Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we watched Thornton Freeland's Jericho (1937), in which Robeson plays a court-martialed WWI officer who takes up a new life as the leader of a group of Saharan herders and traders, and Pen Tennyson's The Proud Valley (1940), often cited as the film Robeson was proudest of, about the struggles of a community of Welsh miners. As in our last Robeson episode, he really makes his auteur presence felt in these films, although in almost opposite ways, taking centre stage in Jericho and acting as...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Warner Brothers - 1948: THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE & JOHNNY BELINDA
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For this 1948 Warner Bros Studios Year by Year episode, we watched a couple of the studio's most prestigious releases for the year, John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Jean Negulesco's Johnny Belinda. We explore some extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Jane Wyman in these tales of capitalist nihilism and rural prejudice. Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s: THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE [dir. John Huston] 0h 44m 11s: JOHNNY BELINDA [dir. Jean Negulesco] Studio Film Capsules...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
info_outlineThis 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), and Spellbound (1945).
Time Codes:
0h 00m 30s: BOOMERANG! [dir. Elia Kazan]
0h 27m 35s: KISS OF DEATH [dir. Henry Hathaway]
0h 54m 55s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) by Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) by Mike Nichols and Spellbound (1945) by Alfred Hitchcock
Studio Film Capsules provided by The Films of Twentieth Century-Fox by Aubrey Solomon and Tony Thomas
Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joe 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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