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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

Release Date: 07/11/2025

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 11: NOT AS A STRANGER (1955) and THE COBWEB (1955)

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

Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view continues with two 1955 liberal institutional melodramas: Stanley Kramer's Not as a Stranger, starring Robert Mitchum as a monomaniacally idealistic doctor, Olivia de Havilland as the wife he takes for granted, and Gloria as the Other Woman; and Vincente Minnelli's underrated The Cobweb, starring Richard Widmark as a monomaniacally idealistic psychiatrist, Gloria (in one of her best roles) as the wife he takes for granted, and Lauren Bacall as the Other Woman. The relatively counter-intuitive casting of the latter film is an...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1932: THE OLD DARK HOUSE and THE MUMMY

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

We've got a Halloween Hangover on this week's episode, with two Universal 1932 horror movies, James Whale's The Old Dark House (based on a novel by J. B. Priestley) and Karl Freund's The Mummy, starring Karloff. We explore the curious tone, social themes, and stellar cast (including Charles Laughton, Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore, Melvyn Douglas, and the excellent Lilian Bond) of Whale's Gothic oddity and The Mummy's connection to Dracula movie history. Then the hangover continues in Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto: we discuss our latest theatrical viewing of the...

Special Subject - Halloween 2025 – Solo Freakouts - HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968) and VAMPIRE’S KISS (1988)

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

Our 2025 Halloween episode is a double feature in the "mentally disintegrating men" genre: in Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, Max von Sydow is beset by some unusual vampires, and in Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss, Nicolas Cage becomes an even more unusual one. If people attempting to bite each other to death without proper vampire fangs is your idea of horror, this is the right Halloween film podcast episode for you. (And if it's not, watch these movies and you may change your mind.) If your idea of horror is desperately needing other people without being able to stand being...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 10: HUMAN DESIRE (1954) and NAKED ALIBI (1954)

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

In this week's Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode our heroine reunites with Fritz Lang and Glenn Ford in Human Desire (1954), based on the Zola novel La bête humaine, which was more faithfully filmed by Renoir in 1938. We debate the relative merits of the two adaptations as well as the potential weakness that links them. Then we turn to the quirky little noir Naked Alibi (also 1954, co-starring Sterling Hayden), in which Gloria gets to be the hero against a thoroughly incoherent backdrop to which we apply some scattershot social analysis....

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – RKO – 1932: What Price Hollywood? and The Animal Kingdom

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

In this RKO 1932 Studios Year by Year episode we discuss a couple of trademark Selznick productions: What Price Hollywood?, the first iteration of the A Star Is Born story, starring Constance Bennett as the rising star Mary Evans, "America's pal," and Lowell Sherman as her tormented director mentor; and The Animal Kingdom, based on the Philip Barry play, with Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, and Myrna Loy in a highbrow Pre-Code love triangle. Marriage takes a real beating in these rare movies exploring alternative kinds of loving relationships between women and men....

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 9: PRISONERS OF THE CASBAH (1953) and THE GOOD DIE YOUNG (1954)

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

This week's Gloria Grahame episode sees our acteur making some questionable career decisions: a rare headlining role in Columbia's Orientalist stinker Prisoners of the Casbah (1953), displaying a phenomenal lack of chemistry with Turhan Bey; and a micro-role in intriguing British heist noir The Good Die Young (1954) as a pragmatic actress tormenting husband John Ireland with her indifference. We find what there is to like in this quality dip, or, failing that, what there is to mock. Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s: PRISONERS OF THE CASBAH (1953) [dir. Richard...

Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Fox Film Corporation – 1932: YOUNG AMERICA & PASSPORT TO HELL

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

For this 1932 Fox Studios Year by Year episode we watched Frank Borzage's unloved Young America, an idiosyncratic, primitive melodrama starring Spencer Tracy as a wealthy drugstore owner at odds with a disadvantaged delinquent, and Passport to Hell, Fox's surprisingly good take on the Sternberg-Dietrich formula, starring Elissa Landi as a woman of ill repute at odds with the colonial authorities in German West Africa. No rural themes in sight in this episode, just the tribulations and heroism of the underdog. Time Codes: 0h 00m 35s: YOUNG...

Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 8: MAN ON A TIGHTROPE (1953) and THE BIG HEAT (1953)

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

In this week's episode of the Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view series, our heroine battles an organized crime ring in Fritz Lang's classic noir The Big Heat and the Soviets, or in any case her beleaguered circus capitalist husband, Fredric March, in Elia Kazan's Man on a Tightrope (both 1953). Dave and Elise are somewhat at odds about the effectiveness of Tightrope's anti-censorship message, but united on the effectiveness of Lang's use of the noir genre, and Grahame, to depict heroism in a world familiar with the horrors of fascism. Time Codes: 0h 00m...

Special Subject - Accents on Olivier – THE 49th PARALLEL (1941) and THE DEMI-PARADISE (1943)

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

Our Special Subject for September 2025 led us to watch a couple of wartime British films starring Laurence Olivier and his amazing accents: Québécois in Powell and Pressburger's The 49th Parallel (1941), which opposes a Platonic Idea of Canada to Nazi ideology, and Russian in Anthony Asquith's The Demi-Paradise (1943), an alarmingly Soviet-friendly use of the romantic comedy genre to promote cross-cultural understanding. The accents may lack technical accuracy (much like the films' depictions of various cultures), but the ideas on display are worth grappling with...

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...

More Episodes

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 than just sex-and-crime titillation.

Time Codes:

0h 00m 25s: CIMARRON [dir. Wesley Ruggles]

0h 41m 56s: TRAVELING HUSBANDS [dir. Paul Sloane]

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Studio Film Capsules provided by The RKO Story by Richard B. Jewell & Vernon Harbin

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

Additional 1930 information from: Forgotten Films to Remember by John Springer

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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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