Special Subject - Supported By Oscar Levant – the 1950s – AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951); THE I DON’T CARE GIRL (1953) & THE BAND WAGON (1953)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Release Date: 07/18/2025
Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 6: MACAO (1952) and SUDDEN FEAR (1952)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
In this episode of our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, our protagonist is rudely shoved into the background of the movies, barely appearing in Josef von Sternberg's Macao (1950) (she would have liked to have appeared in it even less) and playing a rote schemer in David Miller's Sudden Fear (1952). The movies themselves don't make up for her under-use, despite the amiable pairing of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in the former and the great Joan Crawford sobbing her way to an Oscar nomination in the latter. We do our best to articulate what went wrong for...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Paramount – 1932: THE MAN I KILLED aka BROKEN LULLABY & HORSE FEATHERS
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For this round of Paramount 1932, we watched our first Marx Brothers movie for the podcast (hard as that is to believe), Horse Feathers (directed by Norman Z. MacLeod), alongside Ernst Lubitsch's only sound-era drama, Broken Lullaby. Lubitsch's batshit WWI melodrama, bursting with intensity and unease, claims our attention first, and then we turn to the detached anarchy of the Marx Brothers. Elise probes Dave's obsession with their antics and offers her outsider's take on the poetics of their personas for his contemplation. Time Codes: 0h 00m...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 5: IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) and THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
This week in our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view we watched one of her best-known films, In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring Humphrey Bogart, alongside the unpromising Cecil B. DeMille circus drama The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). This may be the only time you find these two movies discussed together with roughly equal enthusiasm. Ray's portrait of a romance doomed by male violence may have psychological perception and stylish writing, but DeMille's Technicolor spectacle has a clown with a dark secret (played by Jimmy Stewart no...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Universal – 1931: BAD SISTER & STRICTLY DISHONORABLE
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
For our Universal 1931 Studios Year by Year episode we took in a Sidney Fox double feature, Bad Sister (adapted from a Booth Tarkington novel, with an early role for Bette Davis as the good sister) and Strictly Dishonorable (adapted from Preston Sturges' only successful play and directed by John Stahl). Laemmle Jr.'s protegée uses her ingenue quality to good effect whether she's playing an unsympathetic Alice Adams or a complex early Sturges heroine, and in fact we argue that the latter performance is something of a tour de force, leading us to lament...
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Special Subject - Supported By Oscar Levant – the 1950s – AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951); THE I DON’T CARE GIRL (1953) & THE BAND WAGON (1953)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our final Oscar Levant Special Subject episode covers his contribution to two of the greatest MGM musicals, Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) and The Band Wagon (1953), plus a 20th Century Fox curiosity, The I Don't Care Girl (1953) in which Mitzi Gaynor supposedly plays early 20th century vaudeville wild woman Eva Tanguay. Levant reaches new heights as a cinematic presence in An American in Paris, a film that, we argue, forms part of an "art life" Levant trilogy with Rhapsody in Blue and Humoresque, then flaunts some virtuoso...
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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
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...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 4: A WOMAN’S SECRET (1948) and ROUGHSHOD (1949)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
Our Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view continues with A Woman's Secret (1949), an oddball psychological drama with a screenplay by Citizen Kane writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and directed by Grahame's new husband Nicholas Ray; and Roughshod (1949), a consciously feminist Western written by a bunch of leftists. Proving her versatility-within-typecasting yet again, Grahame moves easily from the unlikely comic centre of a noirish vortex to a sympathetic sex worker in a fallen woman melodrama that uses the Western genre to deconstruct masculinity. (And if that makes it...
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Hollywood Studios Year-by-Year – Fox Film Corporation – 1931: A CONNECTICUT YANKEE and SURRENDER
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
A curious pairing for this Fox 1931 Studios Year by Year episode: an unsung WWI drama, but as good as any, William K. Howard's Surrender, starring Warner Baxter, Leila Hyams, and an almost unrecognizable (both his appearance and his performance) Ralph Bellamy; and the Will Rogers version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which mainly seems to exist so that Rogers can lasso a lance from a knight in a joust. Spoiler: modernity proves to be more than either King Arthur's Court or Ralph Bellamy want to handle, and we dig into their discontents. Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s:...
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Special Subject - Farrow vs. Allen – Part 4: ALICE (1990); SHADOWS AND FOG (1991) & HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1992)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
We say farewell to Farrow and Allen (for now, although we'll probably encounter them individually on the podcast again) with this final episode on their cinematic collaboration, covering Alice (1990), Shadows and Fog (1991), and one of their very best, the ill-fated Husbands and Wives (1992). In the first two, two more Allen characters struggle to live the good life in what couldn't be more different settings, and then we join Allen in meditating on all of the different ways that romantic relationships attempting to function at a high level can go wrong. Then,...
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Acteurist Oeuvre-view – Gloria Grahame – Part 3: SONG OF THE THIN MAN (1947) and MERTON OF THE MOVIES (1947)
There's Sometimes a Buggy: Irresponsible Opinions About Classic Film
In this Gloria Grahame Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode we get to see more of what MGM was (not) doing with our acteur's career. Underused in Song of the Thin Man (1947), in which she brings the only real noir energy to the final Thin Man film, she gets a similarly brief but memorable role in the Red Skelton vehicle Merton of the Movies (1947), playing the most innocent nymphomaniac in cinematic history. We uncover the legacy of Harry Leon Wilson's 1922 Merton of the Movies novel and surprise ourselves with our appreciation of Red Skelton's acting. Time Codes: 0h 00m...
info_outlineOur final Oscar Levant Special Subject episode covers his contribution to two of the greatest MGM musicals, Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) and The Band Wagon (1953), plus a 20th Century Fox curiosity, The I Don't Care Girl (1953) in which Mitzi Gaynor supposedly plays early 20th century vaudeville wild woman Eva Tanguay. Levant reaches new heights as a cinematic presence in An American in Paris, a film that, we argue, forms part of an "art life" Levant trilogy with Rhapsody in Blue and Humoresque, then flaunts some virtuoso piano performances in The I Don't Care Girl before succumbing to a heart attack prior to filming The Band Wagon. We give our general impressions of these must-see musicals while also trying to determine what quality Levant brings to An American in Paris, in particular, that it wouldn't have without him (besides self-loathing narcissism). What does Oscar Levant have to tell us about the figure of the artist?
Time Codes:
0h 00m 25s: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951) [dir. Vincente Minnelli]
0h 27m 28s: THE I DON’T CARE GIRL (1953) [dir. Lloyd Bacon]
0h 38m 57s: THE BAND WAGON (1953) [dir. Vincente Minnelli]
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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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